The Heart of Authenticity: Why Disability Pride Month matters beyond July in mid-Michigan

Disability Pride Month arrives every July carrying the history that made it necessary. Ed Roberts became paralyzed from the neck down by polio at fourteen and went on to be the first Student with a Disability to attend the University of California Berkeley, where he founded the first Center for Independent Living alongside others. That history is why July matters. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that one in four adults in the United States has a disability and that one in three families includes someone who does. A single accident or illness can bring anyone into the disability community at any moment, which makes it unlike any other marginalized group in the country. Yet in 2026 People with Disabilities are still denied belonging, acceptance, value, and a quality of life equal to that of people without disabilities, and the work on access, education, housing, transportation, and employment is nowhere near finished.

Disability Pride Month arrives every July carrying the history that made it necessary. Ed Roberts became paralyzed from the neck down by polio at fourteen and went on to be the first Student with a Disability to attend the University of California Berkeley, where he founded the first Center for Independent Living alongside others. That history is why July matters. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that one in four adults in the United States has a disability and that one in three families includes someone who does. A single accident or illness can bring anyone into the disability community at any moment, which makes it unlike any other marginalized group in the country. Yet in 2026 People with Disabilities are still denied belonging, acceptance, value, and a quality of life equal to that of people without disabilities, and the work on access, education, housing, transportation, and employment is nowhere near finished.

One organization carrying that work is a Center for Independent Living (CIL) covering twelve counties in mid Michigan, one of fifteen such centers in the state. Under Title VII of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 every state receives federal money for independent living services and for the centers that deliver them. Walk into the hallway and a large portrait of Ed Roberts greets you, his story set out in print and in Braille, and further along the corridor other advocates who gave their working lives to civil rights for People with Disabilities. A timeline runs the length of the movement, from the asylums of the 1800s through the Capitol Crawl and the sit in, the Rehabilitation Act, educational reform, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The culture inside is directed by the person: each individual makes their own choices and the services follow those choices, across peer mentoring, empowerment classes, education across the community, advocacy, and coordination of services. One of the most consequential things the center does is move people out of nursing facilities and back into homes of their own.

Ongoing gaps in access and incomplete implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act keep barriers standing. Physical access and transportation have improved over time, but the Act sets a minimum, and many spaces aim no higher than that legal requirement to remove barriers and provide access for People with Disabilities. Universal Design asks more. It shapes objects, structures, and surroundings at the drawing board so that people across the full span of ages and abilities can use them, reaching past minimum code so that nothing has to be adapted later. Newer buildings show what this produces: entrances without a single step, halls and doorways built wide, lever handles, and inclusive restrooms with room for an adult changing table. Barriers removed at the drawing board never have to be removed twice.

Progress left undefended does not stay won. Policy shifts and funding cuts now threaten the ground People with Disabilities gained, and two areas are moving at once. The Department of Justice has reinterpreted the Olmstead integration mandate and no longer enforces the requirement that states provide home and community based services, a change that could force people currently living in the community into institutions and set independent living back by years. Medicaid cuts and the Medicaid Work and Community Engagement Rules threaten health care benefits at the same time, and although statutory exemptions currently exist for people who are medically frail or have disabilities, recipients will still have to prove through complex paperwork that they are unable to work. Weakened policy means lost services, and lost services mean People with Disabilities cannot stay in their own homes. The standard we hold ourselves to is that whatever we produce should be usable by People with Disabilities and by Older People, and that standard holds, but this article shows the friction underneath it, because materials designed well still reach nobody when the services that let a person live in the community are the very thing being cut.

Progress holds only where we keep showing up for it, in the plans we make and in the calls we place.

Read the Full Article: The Heart of Authenticity: Why Disability Pride Month matters beyond July in mid-Michigan.
By: Trisha Fenby