On Jan. 7, 2026 the Disability Rising Fellows along with Jesenia (@NeuroSpicyNetworking) as the Access support for the Fellows, were invited to Disability Culture Lab’s sixth session on Disability Community and Movement North Star Visioning. 

The conversation started with the desire to dream about a world where we have WON the fight to make accessibility and inclusion part of our social everyday reality.  What does that world look like?  It was a hard question to answer because many of us have been fighting ableism so long we are burned out and isolated by it.  Many people offered suggestions of ways to get to this reality, but not the vision of the reality itself, because it is so hard to imagine at this moment.  Many were struggling with the process of how such a reality comes to be that we couldn’t even dream of it being possible.  

Some suggestions included, access was so commonplace that we didn’t think twice about when people ask for their needs to be met. Meaning it is so commonplace that access needs are centered, that when something doesn’t meet a need, anyone and everyone can ask for it to be met and it is immediately worked to a solution, not questioned as to why you need it or why you can’t just “make due”.  Another suggestion was ableism is taught as part of our curriculum.  This one was hard to imagine because for that to be possible we as a society would need to reconcile with the history and source of ableism, eugenics and racism. Other ideas shared were focusing on the needs of disabled people by actually asking them what they need instead of assuming their needs, supporting intersectional identities as part of that analysis, and allowing for a world where our joy and celebration is not attacked or demonized by society. 

This vision session was a practice of collective grief.  Even in dreaming it is a radical act of allowing us to feel safe enough to even dream, something that feels foreign and can be retraumatizing.  We are still living and dying through the fight for our basic human rights to be recognized, for our lives to be honored and cared for, for our wholeness to be acknowledged. As we are seeing the violence unfolding in DC, LA, Minnesota, Memphis, there is real danger of me posting this. We could be targeted, and we are already not safe. But if we don’t speak up then who? We the most marginalized are always the canaries. When will we be safe to speak up if those with more privilege won’t?

With all this we are already winning. Every day that more people are activated to speak out and fight back, is another day that we use our voices, our communities, and our collective power to say NO to the disregard for human life.  We dream, we gather, and we speak about our needs to continue to build a world where we honor each other’s existence, not perpetuate systems of violence that normalized-ableism inevitably recreates. 

I look forward to seeing what the outcomes are of this dreaming session and the resulting stories can do to support us.  We tell our stories to capture not only the moment we find ourselves in, but the lessons our society needs to learn to not repeat this ever again.