What's New and Updated at The Shining Lamp?

Judy Heumann spent five decades removing barriers that had closed American public life to People with Disabilities, and her standing as the movement's central figure carries the many organizers who died before results arrived. Disabled in Action stopped traffic and blocked buses, and Heumann's 28 day occupation of a federal building in San Francisco in 1977, backed without reservation by the Black Panthers, forced the rules implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and built toward the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. Those protections are being taken back now while officials discourage vaccination and defund medical research, leaving People with Disabilities holding nothing but goodwill. The hand cranked lift that raised Heumann to a museum stage in 2020, in a building with no ramp, proves exclusion is manufactured by planning decisions, so Community Builders should walk the route a wheelchair user would take to the podium and to the seating before booking any gathering.

Manitoba runs a disability service system built on Western clinical assumptions that cannot hold Indigenous identity and disability in the same child, so First Nations children are misread, misdiagnosed, or never identified at all, while families in remote and northern communities are handed a choice between staying home with almost nothing and leaving for a city that costs them kin, teachings and belonging, and a child welfare default has been allowed to stand in which signing a child into care unlocks services otherwise withheld. Culturally grounded services are nearly absent, adult services stop at the reserve boundary, and a federal safeguard the province leans on has been narrowed by tighter eligibility and added paperwork, producing denials and delays for children already pushed toward it. The repair is a coordinated Indigenous informed service framework with priorities set by communities themselves, which means Community Builders must seat the families furthest from services at the table before the next program is designed, not after it has already failed them.

Saba Salman's Double Discrimination examines the twin forces of racism and ableism bearing down on People of Colour who have Learning Disabilities, a group Salman places at the margins of a population that is already marginalised, unseen when people picture disability and unseen when people picture race. Written after the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID 19) pandemic revealed how much higher the risks ran for her sister Raana, the book documents inequality of shocking scale in health, housing, employment and education, then hands its closing section to the defiance found at the grassroots among activists, families, charities and public bodies, and it celebrates what People of Colour with Learning Disabilities do rather than tallying what they lack. Community Builders who treat race and disability as separate pieces of work will keep missing the people who live inside both, so Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities for People with Disabilities depend on planning that holds those two categories together.

Disability activist Nadia Ibrahim Mossburg spent nearly four decades inside eight congregations of the American church, where real friendships and long stretches of genuine belonging sat alongside a persistent pattern of being handled as a project rather than counted as a member, through awkward humor about her power wheelchair, prayers she had not asked for, a theology that blames unanswered prayer on a person's insufficient faith, and meal invitations that arrived and went nowhere. The institutional record matches the personal one, since only one of her eight congregations ran a disability ministry, budgets go overwhelmingly to staff and daily operations, the major bodies surveying congregations ask about party affiliation but nothing about disability, and most seminary leaders report that graduates finish unprepared to bring People with Disabilities into church leadership, with the result that nearly a third of families that include People with Disabilities have left a place of worship over exclusion. Access handed down as generosity at a moment convenient to the giver is not inclusion, and Community Builders answer it by treating inclusion and accessibility as shared responsibilities owned personally by each of us and enacted collectively through decisions made in consultation with People with Disabilities, drawing on the skills and talents People with Disabilities already bring rather than deciding on their behalf.

Neurodivergent students enter classrooms run by adults who do not understand neurodivergence and often do not believe in it, and those students read the rejection accurately, from a teacher speeding past them when calling on the row to a routine cut off with no explanation to fidget tools taken away and dismissed as toys. The consequences are counted in lives: People with Autism die by suicide at close to triple the rate of people who are not Autistic, and among Autistic students harassed by a teacher, 53.8 percent reported suicidality. Children learn exclusion by watching adults practice it, which is why Community Builders working toward Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities treat inclusion as a shared responsibility owned personally by each of us and create a sincere sense of Community Belonging for People with Disabilities when planning any activity or gathering, building the social life of every event around People with Disabilities from the first decision forward, because they belong to their communities by right.

Kenny Fries argues that disability is the one marginalized status any person can enter in a single instant and that every person will enter sooner or later, yet literature almost never treats it that way, and his own work demonstrates what that refusal costs: Japanese gardens read as a model of life in a mortal world, and the theory of natural selection reread through the variation and adaptations disability supplies. During the pandemic the access practices People with Disabilities had long used became standard for the general population and then vanished once the pandemic was pronounced over, while eugenics returned in medical triage and lives were sorted as less worthy, a record now compounded by mockery and untrue claims about disability coming from the highest offices. Writers with Disabilities counter those received ideas, and Community Builders share the obligation to remove what stands in the way and to start by hearing People with Disabilities describe their own lives.

Science centers and museums have largely started setting out items a visitor who is Blind can handle, and Tactile Images asks the obvious next question: what is there to touch at the local aquarium, where the whole exhibit is built on looking through glass? At the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain the company's answer is a lake sturgeon built at full size, 53 inches long and raised clear of the scene behind it, with braille text and labeled buttons beside its tactile displays so a Blind reader opens each subject directly rather than receiving it secondhand, while more than 285 million Blind People and People with Low Vision still meet collections arranged for the eye alone. The same question falls on every slide deck, display board, chart and handout Community Builders design and present, because Community Builders carry the work of removing barriers as a shared responsibility, owned personally by each of us and enacted collectively through decisions made in consultation with People with Disabilities, so ask the Blind People in your community what belongs on the table before you build the next presentation, and let them answer in their own words.

Gary Wunder argues that the familiar rule of treating others as you would wish to be treated reaches its limit the moment a sighted person pictures blindness from the outside and acts on that picture, grabbing an arm, ordering a meal, or keeping back information a Blind person should have had. The rule he offers alongside it, treating people the way they say they wish to be treated, calls for asking rather than presuming, and it matters far beyond courtesy, because schools that spare Blind students the work classmates receive, employers who read blindness as incapacity, agencies that leave Blind People reliant on them, and companies that ship products no Blind person can operate all cause real damage while believing themselves reasonable. Wunder's answer is that Blind People belong at the center of every decision about their own lives, and Community Builders meet that obligation by treating inclusion and accessibility as shared responsibilities carried out in consultation with People with Disabilities rather than delivered to them.

The alien at the center of E.T. The Extraterrestrial was brought to life on set by three performers who could physically occupy the costume: Tamara De Treaux and Pat Bilon, both Little People, and Matthew De Meritt, who was 12 and had been born with no legs and who has moved on his hands his whole life. What is usually presented as a disadvantage he carries turned out to be the exact answer the filmmakers required to put the alien on camera for real, which shows that the barrier has never been his way of moving but the assumptions built around it. Matthew De Meritt is 56 years old today and this is only now reaching a wide audience, which leaves Community Builders with the work of naming and crediting the People with Disabilities whose contributions we already admire.

Federal officials are dismantling the supports that allow People with Disabilities to live among their neighbors instead of inside institutions, while a senior federal health official publicly declared that nonspeaking People with autism would never hold jobs or pay taxes, even as Scripture demands that believers tear down structures built on oppression and act rather than merely feel, and even as thin, dated figures show families walking away from congregations and children shut out or made to feel unwanted. Nobody has to resolve every question before acting, because inclusion and accessibility are shared responsibilities owned personally by each of us and enacted collectively through decisions made in consultation with People with Disabilities, an obligation Community Builders carry from planning through ongoing improvement, and it can begin with a single family and a single conversation.

A new history shows that disability and citizenship were intertwined from the founding of the United States, and that the harmful linking of race and disability was constructed over time as differences once seen as situational were recast as fixed and biological conditions; a falsified 1840 population count branded free Black Americans as disabled to deny their freedom and citizenship and was never corrected, some white advocacy pursued inclusion that shut out Black Deaf People, and recognition flowed to mostly white veterans while other Americans with Disabilities were denied, a history that calls every Community Builder to treat inclusion for People with Disabilities as a shared responsibility rather than a privilege reserved for a few.

David Turner's new history argues that although public attitudes toward People with Disabilities in Britain have barely improved across centuries, People with Disabilities themselves have repeatedly won progress through their own organized efforts, from a Deaf aristocrat who turned period prejudice about deafness into public fame, to a suffrage campaigner who drove her hand operated tricycle into police lines, to a 1960s campaigner who fought for a disability payment granted on the basis of disability alone, recovering figures whose resistance has too often been erased.

A new exhibition called "The Life I Choose," opening July 11 at C-Art Gallery in Springfield through a collaboration between Abilities First and artist Randy Bacon, gathers black and white portraits, short films, and first person accounts that keep People with Disabilities at the center of their own story rather than letting a diagnosis or outside assumption define them. Maggie Rollwagen of Abilities First and Bacon both describe participants as leaders, neighbors, and contributors whose everyday choices and relationships shape their lives, and the exhibition asks visitors and Community Builders alike to move past quick judgments and truly attend to each person they meet.

Vilissa Thompson built the Ramp Your Voice! Conference 2026 to create the dedicated space that never existed for Black People with Disabilities to commune, belong, and be celebrated for their full humanity rather than reduced to deficit, deliberately centering Black women, femmes, and marginalized gender persons with Disabilities whose erasure leaves disability storytelling incomplete and liberation out of reach. Art, cultural expression, and storytelling form the foundation of the event, treated as survival and recordkeeping that build a living archive of Black Disabled brilliance for future generations, while Thompson calls a new generation into a pipeline of leadership the community builds together. Inclusion and accessibility for People with Disabilities are a shared responsibility owned by each of us and enacted collectively, and this conference stands as a working model of that obligation in practice.

The most credible guide to what artificial intelligence (AI) means for Blind People is the testimony of Blind People themselves, who have invented and adopted transformative tools, from the typewriter to print reading machines, long before the wider world caught up. Today AI is tearing down barriers to the visual world that Blind People have faced for years, describing photographs, reading mail, and narrating what stands in front of someone wearing smart glasses, while Blind People are also writing their own software through a practice called vibe coding, only to be swarmed online for using AI and to inherit the same neglect of Blind users that human developers long treated as acceptable. The way forward is for Blind People to sit at the center of how these systems are trained and governed, not at the edges, because Blind People creating solutions for Blind People is the surest path to technology that serves rather than sidelines the people it claims to help.

Access technology transformed school for Soraya Martin, a ninth grader with dyslexia who had felt shut out, yet a fast moving national push to ban screens threatens that same access technology for the more than eight million Students with Disabilities who rely on it to read, write, and take notes, even as the federal office defending their rights is hollowed out and they are shut out of the very decisions that will determine whether they can take part in their own education.