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HomeMy WebLinkAbout06-24-26 Correspondence - Disability Rights Montana - Growth Rings - What If Belonging Was Infrastructure_From:Disability Rights Montana - Growth Rings To:Bozeman Public Comment Subject:[EXTERNAL]What If Belonging Was Infrastructure? Date:Wednesday, June 24, 2026 8:04:51 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Every paid subscription supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is nowhere near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! What If Belonging WasInfrastructure? US DOJ's recent rejection of long standing disability rights is a reminderthat disabled people are merely tolerated, not accepted, and it is time webuild the infrastructure of belonging. READ IN APP Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice released an internal memo rejecting decades of disability civil rights enforcement and the legal principles. Specifically, it attacked the same “integration mandate” that Montana Austin Knudsen is attacking in the lawsuit he is waging down in Lubbock, Texas. The legal principle of the integration mandate has helped millions of disabled Americans live in their own homes and communities instead of institutions. The DOJ memo specifically JUN 24 challenges several long-standing interpretations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504, and the Supreme Court’s landmark Olmstead decision. The disability community’s reaction was swift. People are angry. People are scared. People are exhausted. These are absolutely all reasonable reactions. I certainly felt all these things, and it has taken me some time to process those feelings and combine them with my thoughts in order to come up with something coherent, if not actually constructive, for all of you. So here it goes… Over the last year, we’ve seen repeated attacks on protections that many disabled Americans assumed were long settled. We have watched community living, home and community-based services, accessibility protections, and disability education and civil rights become political targets when the disability community’s issues and our rights have long had strong bipartisan support. Now this DOJ memo signals that the federal government has stepped away from its historic role in protecting the right of disabled people to live in the community. The memo itself does not change existing law. Courts that upheld the right to live in the community for decades are still bound by statutes and case law that remain in place. But the message matters and the retreat from using DOJ resources to enforce the law matters. The memo exposes the way some powerful people think about disability, belonging, and our place in society and the amount of resources they are willing to put into protecting our right to be included (which is none). And that’s why I don’t want to talk only about the memo. I don’t care that We are under attack powerful people don’t care about me and my community. I don’t care that powerful people aren’t coming to protect me and my community. Honestly no administration, legislature, court, DOJ office, or any other big government actor has ever completely had our back. No bill or regulation’s passage or legal interpretation or enforcement action has ever actually been enough. The crass rejection of the disability community last week simply highlighted a track record of being let down by the public servants that are supposed to serve us. So, instead of trotting out a litany of examples the disability community has been failed by the half measures of the last half century… …I want to talk about the future. The disability rights movement has spent decades fighting individual battles. A lawsuit here. A regulation there. A waiver program. A budget fight. A housing program. A transportation service. A special education dispute. Those fights mattered then and they still matter. They always will. But moments like this force us to confront a larger question: Why is our freedom always one budget cut, one lawsuit, one election, or The Problem Is Bigger Than One Memo one memo away from being lost? The answer is uncomfortable, but it is undeniable. It is because the systems Americans depend on in our day to day lives like roads, schools, workplaces, housing stock, city planning, etc. were never designed to include our disabled bodies and minds. We were and still are an afterthought. Our freedom is dependent on someone opening the door and letting us in the room, it isn’t truly provided as a matter of right. It is always contingent on the charity, dare I say pity, of others. We have spent generations fighting for access to systems built by and for other people. And despite tremendous victories, access remains fragile when our belonging was never really the goal. At best these accommodations, modifications, and special programs are designed for us to be tolerated, but they don’t impact our actual belonging one iota. The real question isn’t whether disabled people should have a right to live in the community. I think the answer is “of course, 100%, no debating it, we absolutely have the right to live in the community, full stop.” And if you disagree with me, I don’t want to have a conversation with you anyway. The real question is why communities aren’t built to expect us in the first place. Think about what happens when a town needs roads. We build roads. Roads that work for motorcycles, cars, pickups, buses, and tractor trailers. When a town needs schools. We build schools. Schools that work for rich kids, middle-class kids, poor kids, kids that live across the street from the school and kids that live 10 miles down the The Conversation We Should BeHaving road without any of those people having to ask for it to work for them. When a town needs water systems. We build water systems. Water systems that service industrial plants, small business, apartment buildings, and single-family homes, for people who take 3 minute showers or 20 minute showers. Nobody argues endlessly about whether transportation, education, or clean water are realistic. No one expects the intended users of these systems to rebuild the systems in one off iterations every time someone new descried to use them. We simply recognize them as essential infrastructure. Then we figure out how to make them happen. And not just for one narrow use model, but for all readily conceivable uses people will need. Why are disabled Montanans not in the mix as anticipated users of these systems? When disabled people need personal care attendants, housing, transportation, peer support, interpreters, mental health services, accessible technology, or community supports, policy and budget writers and governmental bureaucrats suddenly act as though these questions are impossibly complex. They aren’t. They’re basic infrastructure design questions. The issue has never been whether we know how to build systems. The issue has been whether society considers disabled people worth including in the design process as intended end users, not as an afterthought to be tolerated if they speak up and ask for the system to include them. For a long time, disability advocacy has necessarily been defensive. We were fighting exclusion. A Bigger Vision Fighting institutionalization. Fighting segregation. Fighting abuse. Fighting discrimination. And guess what. No matter how many times we have won these fights, the systems we win agist revert to their exclusionary tendencies. Not usually out of malice but simple laziness because that’s how they were designed. It takes affirmative work to keep a door open when it is designed to swing shut automatically. So, we will continue these fights whenever necessary. But eventually every movement faces a new challenge. It has to answer not only what it opposes. It has to answer what it intends to build. How it intends to replace what is broken with what will actually work. Not in one off instances, once in a while when the right lawyer or advocate shows up to push back against the inertia of the bemouth government bureaucracy disabled people face. How do we actually replace that dysfunctional system with a functional one that does what is needed as the default because it was simply designed to work properly for everyone, including disabled people, form the start. What does a Montana look like where disabled people are expected? What does a community look like when disability isn’t treated as an exception? What happens when belonging becomes infrastructure? Imagine a state where accessible housing exists in every community because communities are expected to include disabled residents. Not one or two houses or apartments here or there, but everywhere, at every price point, in every town and neighborhood. Imagine transportation systems designed around the reality that not everyone drives. 100 years ago, designing a town and assuming everyone drives made no sense, now getting your basic human needs met without driving is unimaginable. There was a time not too long ago when the world looked different, which means there could be a time not to far in the future where our communities work in ways that are unimaginable now. Imagine schools built from the beginning to educate every child who walks through the door. We all know some people learn well with more experiential opportunities, some learn well from reading, or lecture, but we don’t take the broad spectrum of learning strengths into account when we build our one size fits all instructional modules. Imagine in home caregiving professions treated with the same seriousness we bring to teaching, nursing, law enforcement, or engineering. Status and respect given to those people serving their neighbors in the most intimate and important ways. Imagine communities that don’t tell people, “Move somewhere else.” And instead say, “We’re glad you’re here. Let’s build what you need.” Imagine a community that thinks as hard about making itself welcoming and hospitable to its current disabled residents as it does to out of state business possibilities like how they can attract a Chick-Fil-A (I mean I’ve been following the rumors about one coming to Helena since before I moved here nearly three years ago). Those conversations may sound ambitious today. But so did curb cuts. So did independent living. So did the ADA. So did Olmstead. The people pushing ideas like those found in this DOJ memo often begin from the What They Get Wrong assumption that disabled people are a burden to be managed. Services delivered to them begrudgingly offered simply to get disabled people out of sight and out of mind. The disability rights movement begins from a fundamentally different assumption. We believe disabled people belong. We are: Neighbors. Workers. Students. Parents. Artists. Taxpayers. Volunteers. Leaders. Community members. Human beings whose presence makes our communities stronger. And if that’s true—and I believe it is—then the question changes completely. The question is no longer: “How little can we spend on disabled people?” The question becomes: “What must we build so everyone can participate?” That’s a very different conversation. And frankly, it’s a much more exciting one. We should and will absolutely resist attacks on disability rights. We should and will defend the progress previous generations fought so hard to achieve. But defense alone is not enough. The future of disability advocacy cannot be limited to preserving yesterday’s victories. We need a vision big enough to inspire people who have never thought about disability policy before. A vision big enough to unite families, workers, faith communities, educators, housing advocates, transportation advocates, labor groups, civil rights organizations, and local communities. A vision centered not on services, but on belonging. Not on programs, but on participation. Not on accommodation, but on expectation. The last fifty years of disability advocacy were about proving that disabled people have rights. The next fifty years may be about proving that disabled people belong. And if recent events have taught us anything, it’s that belonging is too important to leave to pity, charity, and compliance with some words on a piece of paper. It’s time to start building something stronger. It’s time to start building a new infrastructure that promoted freedom and belonging. — Over the coming months, this newsletter will explore what that future could look like in Montana. From housing and transportation to education, caregiving, economic security, and community design, we have a lot of places to redesign. If we’re serious about belonging, then it’s time to start imagining the systems that could make it real. Please reach out to me individually if you have thoughts you The Next Chapter would like to share with me or the Growth Rings readers on any of the systems we need to transform. David David Carlson, J.D. Executive Director Disability Rights Montana You’re currently a free subscriber to Life Beyond Compliance. 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