Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Alice Wong is remembered as a disability rights activist, a writer, and an organizer whose community work shaped policy conversations and culture. The remembrance traces how she built the Disability Visibility Project to share disability culture and storytelling, how she organized with others to identify and remove barriers, and how her approach—grounded in community care and shared responsibility—made room for People with Disabilities to participate in public life on equal terms.
The article situates Wong’s leadership in the first months of COVID-19 through practices already common in disability communities—“working from home” and “live streaming public events and concerts.” It emphasizes that these practices were part of how communities planned together, not last-minute add-ons, and shows her insisting that access be built in so participation does not depend on individual fixes.
Drawing from her 2022 radio essay, the piece documents the specificity of her care and community support after major health crises: time in intensive care; a tracheostomy, ventilator, and G-J tube; and the network that kept her connected at home. It details pressures after hospitalization—discharge toward a subacute facility under Medi-Cal, difficulty hiring caregivers, and low home-care wage rates cited in San Francisco at $18.75 per hour—while underscoring the role of friends who launched a fundraiser to meet daily care costs described at about $600 per day. This is presented alongside her call for communities organized around interdependence, so People with Disabilities are not pushed toward institutions or left without support.
The remembrance also carries forward Wong’s direction for the future: a “care infrastructure” led and designed by People with Disabilities; treating care as part of ordinary life; public funding commensurate with requirements; and priorities that include self-direction, bodily autonomy, and dignity of risk. She closes by asserting that transformation requires personal and collective will, and the piece frames that as a community responsibility rather than an individual effort.
Read the Full Article: ‘I Know We Can Transform the World’: Remembering Disability Rights Activist Alice Wong (Ericka Cruz Guevarra).
