Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Days ahead of the Winter Paralympics—when athletes with disabilities will take center stage at the Milan Cortina Games—a choir from northern Italy performed a pop music concert inside Milan’s Sant’Antonio church, calling for harmony and inclusion—particularly of those with disabilities. The article’s core conflict is that visibility at major events does not automatically translate into belonging; People with Disabilities are still too often treated as an “add-on” audience instead of equal community members whose access and participation must be built into public life.
The Archdiocese of Milan describes inclusion as a deliberate choice that must resist the harmful habit of separating People with Disabilities from everyone else. Milan’s Catholic Church created in 2021 a special branch focused on raising awareness of inclusion through local parishes and communities, and it directly warns that organizing things only for people with disabilities risks segregation. The harm here is structural: when institutions default to separate programming, they maintain barriers and isolation rather than redesigning community life so disabled and non-disabled people truly belong together.
The article then shows how those barriers play out in everyday settings that shape young people’s lives: oratories, the parish spaces where children and teenagers gather after school for sports and recreation. In these spaces, training to involve people with disabilities and discussions of Paralympic-connected values are happening, paired with testimonies from athletes, including Paralympians. The standard the article sets is explicit—“The real challenge is to change the game so everyone can play well and participate”—which is a call to redesign activities so People with Disabilities are not forced to adapt to exclusionary systems.
The concert also demonstrates how inclusive community can be practiced across difference, not just talked about: around 70 teenagers and adults traveled from Abbiategrasso for a performance titled “Like Yeast in the Dough,” and the repertoire spanned Italian, English, and a Congolese samba to diversify and convey Olympic-spirit values. The choir welcomes participants from all backgrounds and encourages children to sing with people in their 70s, and it has previously addressed themes such as peace and opposition to violence against women. For Community Builders, the point is practical and urgent: real inclusion is measured by whether communities redesign participation so marginalized people are centered in shared spaces—rather than praised in speeches while still kept at the margins.
Read the Full Article: Milan church concert strikes a chord for inclusion ahead of Winter Paralympics.
By: María Teresa Hernández
