What's New and Updated at The Shining Lamp?

Seating arranged by phone weeks ahead of a concert turned out to be a metal bench on the far side of a barricade, facing away from the stage, with the standing crowd's elbows level with her head, and when a man from the VIP side put his child on it he demanded to know what made her so special, then watched her the rest of the night to see whether dancing or smiling would disqualify her. Her disability moves along a spectrum and shifts with circumstance, which for years brought dismissal from the people she consulted and doubt from relatives, and none of that changes the fact that asking for what removes a barrier does not depend on anyone else's sympathy. Belonging is the starting condition for People with Disabilities, and any gathering that hands it out as a prize has already built the barrier.

People with Disabilities fought for decades to move from state institutions into their communities, securing that right through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the 1999 Olmstead v. Lois Curtis decision — and a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo combined with sweeping Medicaid cuts now threaten to reverse that progress by defunding the home and community based services (HCBS) that cost roughly $70,500 per year, compared with more than $395,000 annually in an institution, leaving People with Disabilities facing the isolation that community living was built to permanently end.

Listen Now: Disability Pride Mid-Michigan

Disability Pride Month traces back to Ed Roberts, who became the first Student with a Disability to attend the University of California Berkeley and founded the first Center for Independent Living, yet one in four American adults has a disability and belonging is still withheld. A Center for Independent Living covering twelve counties in mid Michigan, funded under Title VII of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, moves people out of nursing facilities and into their own homes through peer mentoring and choices the person makes. The Americans with Disabilities Act sets only a minimum, while Universal Design removes barriers at the drawing board with entrances that have no step and restrooms holding an adult changing table. Now the reinterpreted Olmstead integration mandate and Medicaid cuts threaten the home and community based services that keep People with Disabilities out of institutions, which is why the article closes by telling us to get informed, call our legislators, put Universal Design to work, and invite a Person with a Disability into the conversation.

Thirty years after waking up paralyzed from the waist down because of transverse myelitis, a rare neurological condition, a Camarillo woman has built her life around advocating for People with Disabilities, propelling herself up the ramp at her own home, serving as Ms. Wheelchair California in 2024, and filling her garden with cherry tomatoes and the milkweed she planted hoping monarch butterflies would come, a full life she can live because her home was built to carry her, which is the standing question she puts to every gathering we plan, since the setup of a gathering decides who can take part in it long before anyone arrives.

An engineering student at a public university runs a computer independently using a thin retainer worn against the roof of her mouth, which reads the pressure of her tongue, her sip gestures, and the tilt of her head. That device went on public sale this past July after roughly six years of development built around what People with Disabilities said they wanted, and it delivers hands free Bluetooth control of laptops, phones, tablets, and powered wheelchairs. A designer and disability advocate who has no hands and no shoulder sockets now steers a cursor with his head, clicks with his tongue, and works away from his desk for the first time in his life, and the same team is working toward silent speech for People who can move the mouth and tongue but cannot speak aloud. Access on that scale builds careers and social life at once, and it lands as a duty on our communities every time we produce an email, a flyer, or an event handout to make certain it is accessible and follows the International Accessibility Standards.

People with Disabilities are one fifth of the Australian population and almost invisible in the advertising and screen media around them, an absence that quietly sets the limits of what they believe is open to them. Priya Addams Williams, who leads the Shift 20 Initiative at the Dylan Alcott Foundation, argues that a team of well intentioned people carrying no lived experience of disability cannot make work that reaches the audiences it targets, and that goodwill has never been a substitute for expertise. The proof runs through the examples she cites, from an Autistic actor playing an Autistic character in a production where that authenticity carried into the people scripting and making the show, to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) being trusted to speak honestly about every element of a doll's design: when the people making the decisions behind the camera share the experience being portrayed, audiences know it. What that asks of the rest of us is unglamorous and entirely achievable, which is to seek out the expertise we lack, say openly that honest input is wanted, and protect the time real co creation takes instead of squeezing it to hit a deadline.

A report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa (ACLU of Iowa) reviewing 78 districts found Black students referred to law enforcement at twice the rate of their peers and arrested at 3.7 times that rate, while Students with Disabilities were referred and arrested at 2.3 times the rate of students without disabilities, though national research shows neither group misbehaves more than anyone else. School Resource Officers (SROs) were most often called in over vaping, along with shoving, rumors, and students judged disrespectful, matters teachers and other school staff have always settled, and not one district kept a complaint process specific to those officers. The report asked districts to end these programs, as Des Moines and Ames have, and where they continue, to require training in calming tense situations, bias prevention, students' civil rights, adolescent development, mental health, and disability sensitivity, after finding 27 districts with no training policy at all. Removing barriers begins with preparing the people we count on, and Iowa shows us what happens when we skip that step.

A plan to cut a joint city and county access advisory board from 32 members to 7 voting members was drafted without input from the People with Disabilities who serve on it, then delivered days before the hearing. The gap showed itself immediately: a proposed evening session sounded fair until the board chair rolled her power wheelchair to the microphone to point out that paratransit does not run at night and lift equipped vans leave the road after 7:30 p.m. Every operational failure named as grounds for shrinking the board traces back to the appointing authorities, from seats left empty for over two years, to absent members reappointed anyway, to abandoned minute taking, to a July meeting cancelled for lack of technology support. Disability covers a wide span of distinct barriers, and a governing voice in the rooms where their access is decided is the only arrangement that surfaces the barriers the decision makers never have to cross.

A video watched ten million times showed a wheelchair user reaching a major rail station to find the lift broken, the stairlift out of service and the portable equipment too narrow for her chair, and when she climbed the steps herself the public argument turned to whether her disability was real rather than to the access that had failed. Her mobility moves from one day to the next, as it does for many People with Disabilities, and being seen on an easier day is treated as proof that the harder days were invented. That doubt is then widened into a claim that diagnosis has lost its meaning and that disability is a route to advantage, spending the credibility of every person with a hidden disability to make the point. We can answer it by taking the justification out of our own registration forms, seating, quiet rooms and transport arrangements, offering access on request without explanation so that People with Disabilities are planned for on their hardest days.

Amy Pohl, a disability rights advocate who uses a power wheelchair full time, is not disabled inside her own home and becomes so the moment she goes outside, where stepped entrances stop her because People with Disabilities are left until last when buildings and new infrastructure are planned. She points to the Coliseum, opened to People who use wheelchairs, and asks what excuse remains for anyone else. She says having a community matters and built hers online, where four million strangers learned what stops her while her own surroundings never asked, which is why removing barriers across the ordinary life of a community is what builds Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities for People with Disabilities.

At the 2026 banquet of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in Austin, Texas, President Mark A. Riccobono used music as his framework to reject the centuries old idea that blindness is one tragic quality defining an entire person, tracing how Blind People awaken belief in one another and how a movement organized in 1940 turned isolation into collective force built on the differences among its members rather than on sameness. He catalogued how inventively Blind People solve problems and how inventively discrimination answers back, from strangers redirecting a Blind professional at her own workplace entrance to Blind diners handed lidded foam cups while sighted diners received glasses, and he called for more voices to carry the movement's theme forward. Community Builders can act on that this week by asking Blind People what would remove the barriers in an event or program before it is finalized, because planning ahead rather than reacting is how we remove the barriers that keep Blind People out of community life and build Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities.

Nearly five decades ago People with Disabilities occupied federal buildings until officials wrote the rules putting Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 into force. Phamaly Theatre Company now opens its world premiere of "504: The Musical" in Denver while three states press to undo the promise that People with Disabilities receive services where they live rather than inside institutions. The company has spent more than 37 years making professional theater with casts drawn entirely from Performers with Disabilities, shaping rehearsals around the artists present rather than asking them to bend to an industry constructed without them. Its writers recall songs welcomed onto New York stages the performer had no route to reach. The show refuses a flattened celebration and follows a character who is Black, Korean and a Person with a Disability, carrying identities that each single her out. For anyone planning gatherings, programs or services the instruction is concrete. Whether a Person with a Disability takes part is settled by our planning and never by their disability, so plan the access before you set the date, ask on the invitation what each person requires, and invite People with Disabilities to shape the program while it can still change. That is how Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities for People with Disabilities get built.

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 26 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.

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.