Envisioning a Radically Different and Inclusive Future for Disabled Folks

The United States has never fully embraced the humanity, dignity, or liberation of disabled people, but our community’s wisdom and brilliance have shaped the best of this country from the beginning.

Disabled people in this country deserve solidarity and liberation. Instead, the Disability Community (DisCo) faces a modern age of eugenics amid rising fascism in the US—with many of the threats coming from the nation’s highest seat of power.

It started on Donald Trump’s first day in office, with an executive order making cuts to disabled children’s education under the banner of attacks on “wasteful” diversity, equity, and inclusion. It wasn’t long before he signed the largest cut to Medicaid in the history of our nation, threatening healthcare access to the 4.5 million disabled people whose home and community-based services are funded by the medical insurance program. Many of us have since lost that critical care as a result. Just this summer, the administration moved federal responsibility for educating disabled children from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, positioning our community as a thing to be cured rather than included or accommodated, and setting the stage for segregating disabled students from our abled peers.

Add in an attempt to reduce or completely end the Supplemental Security Income benefits of about 400,000 disabled adults living with low-income parents, a push to expand the government’s ability to institutionalize people with mental illnesses or substance use disabilities who are unhoused, sustained attacks on our immigrant neighbors that have led to increased disability and death, and a recent Department of Justice memo challenging disabled people’s right to live in our own communities. From the above examples, it’s clear that the federal government is waging a targeted attack against our community.

Disabled people in this country deserve solidarity and liberation.

Threats to our lives and dignity are not new. From colonization to enslavement, the United States is built on White supremacist, eugenic, disabling violence that continues today. But for us at the Disability Culture Lab (DCL), it is especially concerning to see the current administration echo the history and founding of the United States, even as it tries to sanitize its creation story, while using eugenic rhetoric and policy, institutionalization, tear gas, guns, and violent arrests as part of its strategy to delegitimize, disappear, mass-disable, and kill disabled people—especially multi-marginalized disabled people such as immigrants, trans folks, and Black folks.

As the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we must block and resist the threats infringing upon our liberties, but that’s not enough. We need more than resistance to thrive. To build a better, more accessible and liberatory future in the next 250 years, we need a true north star vision to follow for what justice looks like for disabled people in the United States.

Building Better Through Strength in Numbers

In a country where disabled liberation didn’t exist for its first 250 years, we seek to build something new, and we know we cannot do it alone.

To codesign a truly collective DisCo and Movement North Star for a liberatory future for all disabled people, we brought together a multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational group of nearly 50 disabled advocates. The group includes people who are creatives, organizers, cultural workers, academics, policymakers, and researchers—each nominated by either a grassroots disability justice group, artist, organizer, funder, or uplifted by the greater DCL community. We were lucky to have activist giant Alice Wong join us before she passed away.

While it’s impossible for us to represent the entirety of the disability experience in the United States, we worked to ensure representation from across as many parts of our community as possible, with a focus on multi-marginalized participants whose work sits at the intersections of disability and other social justice movements. Our aim is to better understand how the needs and goals of various subgroups in the DisCo intersect. As a group, our expertise comes from the disability justice and disability rights movements as well as racial, gender, worker, environmental, immigrant, reproductive, queer, and language justice movements.

Our process included a series of virtual discussions. Participants came together for a project kickoff call in October 2025 that pulled back the curtain on the north star visioning process and provided a space for participants to meet each other and start dreaming about the future they would co-create. They then attended one of six two-and-a-half-hour virtual visioning sessions between then and January 2026, each of which included accessibility measures such as Communication Access Realtime Translation, American Sign Language, and others. Because we believe in compensating for all labor, each individual participant received a $500 stipend for their contribution, furnished via the support of Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Freedom of Expression grant.

Once we concluded our discussions—covering everything from the current dominant narratives about disability to what the world will look like when we win—participants in each session selected a community editor to represent them in the editing process. Editors received an additional $1,000 stipend to compensate them for the 10 editing sessions held between February and June 2026.

As the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we must block and resist the threats infringing upon our liberties, but that’s not enough.

Next was the major flags review, where we shared the final vision with everyone who contributed to surface any concerns about language choices or cultural insensitivities that might isolate any part of our community. We took those flags back to our community editors for a final editing session.

The result is the final Disability Community + Movement North Star Memo, signed by 24 organizations and more than 30 disabled leaders whose work and lived experiences bear witness to the vision it outlines.

This memo will be used to ensure that the DisCo has common narrative goals, direction, and language to use for narrative interventions. Whether we’re planning programming and research, painting murals, pitching funders, sitting for interviews, creating protest art, preparing quotes and opinion pieces, or designing streetwear, this memo helps to ensure a cohesive view of the world we want to create and a path for how we’ll get there. The signers make up the new Disability Community of Practice, dedicated to applying what we crafted to shift culture and achieve material improvements for disabled people in the United States.

Visioning the Future

One major takeaway from this visioning project is that diversity alone isn’t enough. To resist rising authoritarianism, we need interdependence. Progressive policies that build interdependence build power, while the ones that pit neighbor against neighbor build our opposition. Interdependence is a foundational principle of disability justice as outlined by Sins Invalid’s principles, such as, “We meet each other’s needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.”

We need interdependent communities, a culture, and policies that promote that interdependence to push back the fascists. But interdependence doesn’t just happen; it must be built intentionally by promoting cultures of radical inclusion over simple accommodation in policy, in organizations, and in neighborhoods.

That need for interdependence shows up in the three priority narratives that the DisCo Community of Practice will advance over the next year:

• Interdependence builds joyful communities resilient to hate and fear. Disabled people are great caregivers, and we have equal value whether we are giving or receiving care. Interdependence and the radical inclusion that comes with it are critical to making our communities strong.
• Disabled people are worthy of dignity, solidarity, and respect just as we are. We deserve everything we need to survive, thrive, lead, and contribute meaningfully—whether or not we contribute to capitalism.
• The US government is pushing a eugenic agenda disguised as a “health movement” but designed to kill and institutionalize disabled people and mass-disable even more people they deem undesirable.

Perhaps the most unexpected outcome of the north star visioning process was the creation of a new model of disability that we’re calling “The US Political Model of Disability.” Readers may be familiar with previously established models, including the Medical Model (which treats disability as an “impairment” of the body or mind to be healed or fixed), the Social Model (which says that built environments is what disable us, not our bodies or minds), the Civil Rights Model (defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act), the Charity Model (which positions disability as a tragedy), and the Affirmation Model (which focuses on the positive aspects of personal identification and community).

In contrast, the new “The US Political Model of Disability” makes clear that all forms of oppression are disabling; asserts that while disability itself is simply an identity, disabling another person for profit, convenience, or hate by policy is an act of harm; and makes clear that governments and their billionaire friends make policy choices that decide who is and is not disabled through systems of power, violence, and plunder.

Into the Future

Our ultimate goal is to develop a shared collective vision of what winning looks like for the US disability community that we can all organize, create, and build around together. But a north star vision is only as powerful as the action that it inspires.

Over the next year, we will roll out briefings, convenings, literary, and visual art to help people inside and outside the DisCo not only imagine this vision but feel and live into it. We hope you’ll join us.