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Disability Inclusion · Practitioner
Work with disabled people and disability-led organizations as paid partners whose expertise changes decisions, and build the loop that shows them it did.
45–55 minutes · 4 lessons · Voluntary learning
Understand the levels of participation, why timing decides whether advice can matter, and what disability-led organizations bring that individual advisors cannot.
Treat lived experience as expertise with a rate, and solve the practical barriers that keep public agencies from paying disabled advisors on time and safely.
Learn the specific habits that turn partnership into performance, and the change that corrects each one.
Write down how the partnership works before it starts, and build the loop that shows advisors what happened to their advice.
Identify one decision your program will make in the next quarter that affects disabled people. Decide the level of partnership it warrants, budget for paid advisors, and draft the charter sections that decision needs.
The disability rights movement has a phrase for how decisions should be made: nothing about us without us. Inside a public agency, living up to it takes more than an invitation. It takes partnership that begins before the design is fixed, payment that treats lived experience as expertise, protection against the quiet habits of tokenism and extraction, and a loop that carries recommendations back to the people who made them with an honest account of what happened. This course teaches those four things and ends with a charter for a paid advisory panel you can adapt for your own program.
Bring people in while the questions are open. Pay them. Tell them what happened. Show them the change.
Check a planned engagement with disabled people or disability-led organizations before it starts, and keep the promises a partnership makes.
Draft the charter with paid disabled advisors before you recruit the panel.
Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
Federal policy office promoting disability inclusion in employment, including guidance that centers disabled people’s participation in policy and program design.
Guidance on involving people with disabilities early and throughout design and evaluation, applicable beyond web projects.
State council on disability policy and access, and a starting point for identifying Minnesota disability organizations and advisory practices.
Minnesota’s commitments to integration and person-centered practice, which depend on the participation of people with disabilities in planning.
Public health framing of disability inclusion as participation supported by policies and practices, including involving disabled people in program design.
ADA information and training resources, including material on effective communication and accessible meetings that advisory panels rely on.