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What Disability Advocates and Parents Are Still Refusing to See I’ve been thinking about what happens when both parents die. One young man in our community has, like so many before him, is dealing with this reality after both parents were killed in an accident. What follows is what will turn this horrifying scenario into something good. I hope it resonates with you. Have you filled out the COMPLIANCE COMPASS yet? Systems rarely collapse without warning. First come the small f

Hello Community, This summer, I asked one of our interns to examine a simple but important question: Where has disability advocacy produced real, measurable change across the country—even in today’s deeply challenging environment? The findings are encouraging. Advocates have stopped harmful cuts, restored services, protected self-direction, reversed unlawful decisions, and forced systems to respond. Those victories were not accidental. They came from many of the same strateg

Dear Community, At every genuine moment of possibility for self-determination, authentic hope begins with an honest accounting. If self-determination and authentic person-centeredness are to become more than slogans—if they are to be woven into the reality of daily life—we must be willing to hold success and failure together. Gratitude and grievance. Progress and critique. That means speaking not only about what sustains us, but also about what has failed us—because both belo

In my previous “You Can’t Change It Until You Name It” series, I laid out the history of eugenics: who they came for first—always disabled people—how people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were objectified as “not quite human,” and how ordinary people convinced themselves, It could never happen here. It is way past time to wake up. It is happening here. Now. SUGARCOATING WHAT IS HAPPENING IS COMPLIANCE. Four days before its 27th birthday, the Trump regime tri

Dear Fellow Advocates, I would like to offer a few thoughts that arise from years spent among people whose suffering was hidden in plain sight, and whose hopes depended on being seen clearly by the wider world. I offer them as a reflection, not a rebuke. Every community that labors for justice must ask itself whether it is being sustained by wisdom or comforted by habit. As some of you know, I began my career in women's and children's services. I directed a crisis center that

Advocates, There comes a moment in every movement when learning is no longer enough. There comes a moment when reading another report, attending another meeting, sharing another article, or shaking our heads at another injustice becomes a way of standing still. History rarely remembers the people who knew what was wrong. It remembers the people who decided they could no longer leave the work for someone else. Otto and Elise Hampel were not famous. They were not leaders. They

The Times article below makes plain what many in the disability community have long understood in their bones: the slow violence of attrition, the quiet undoing that comes not with a single blow but with a thousand small, carefully administered cuts. For those who depend on the moral seriousness of public institutions, this kind of erosion is not abstract. It is lived, daily, as fear, exhaustion, and vigilance. We appear to be living through a moment of profound social unmaki