Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
David Parker profiles Darby Lee Young and Level Playing Field (LPF), tracing how a one-person consultancy “doing audits around Calgary” became “a team working across Canada and into the United States (U.S.).” The work is rooted in Young’s lived exclusion—“born with mild cerebral palsy and needing an electric scooter to get around,” unable to find “a place where she could meet with friends,” which was “frustrating and isolating.” LPF exists to remove barriers so People with Disabilities are not shut out of everyday life.
Parker shows Young converting service into public accountability: she volunteered widely, then joined the City of Calgary’s advisory committee on accessibility, becoming chair, and pressing decision-makers to go beyond the minimum instead of normalizing exclusion through “minimum” design and procurement habits.
The piece lists concrete, scalable work: “a three-year campus-wide audit of every building” at the University of Manitoba that went “past code to pay attention to how people actually move”; prime accessibility consulting for Queens Quay East – Waterfront in Toronto; and “accessibility design standards” for McMaster University—along with projects in Steinbach and Nunavut—evidence of embedded accessibility guidelines rather than one-off fixes.
Parker’s conclusion is explicit: every space “should work for everyone regardless of age, ability, mobility or circumstance.” That standard demands rejecting code-minimum complacency that keeps barriers in place and naming how “anti=ableisms” is required to end patterns that segregate People with Disabilities. Community Builders should organize enforcement, integrate accessibility from concept to completion, and elevate leadership by People with Disabilities so projects deliver dignity and independent use.
Read the Full Article: Parker: Level Playing Field grows into international force tearing down barriers for people with disabilities · By David Parker
