10 minutes
One person, many stories See how disability combines with trauma, race, poverty, language, gender identity and age, and why a single story about any of them leads a service astray.
What you’ll be able to do Describe how at least three factors combine in one person’s experience of a service and identify the single-story assumption that would hide that combination. Compare the responses to this question and explain your choice: What is the most useful next step? Document a next step for One person, many stories: Pick one person you served this week and list every factor, beyond the presenting need, that shaped what the encounter cost them. Factors combine; they do not queue A service encounter is never about disability alone. The person across the counter is also a parent or not, a renter or not, a speaker of one language or three, a person with a history with this agency or with agencies like it. Each of these shapes what our process costs them. When we plan for one factor at a time, we build a system that works for people who have only one.
Consider a common combination: a Black man in his fifties with a traumatic brain injury after a work accident, now on a waiver, with a school-age daughter and a job that does not allow calls during a shift. A ten-minute scheduling phone call during business hours is, for him, a lost hour of wages, a cognitive load he manages with notes, and a reminder of past encounters in which his slowness to answer was read as evasion. None of those facts is unusual. Together they decide whether he calls back.
The intersectional habit from Level 1 becomes practical here. Ask, within the group of people this process affects, who is affected most, and design for them. That usually means offering more than one channel, more than one time, more than one language, and a format the person can keep and return to.
Factors that commonly compound with disability Trauma history, including trauma caused by services, hospitals, schools or police.
Racism and its effects on trust, on how behavior is interpreted and on who is believed.
Poverty: transportation, phone minutes, printing, time off work, a stable address.
Language access: written and spoken language, literacy in either, sign language, need for an interpreter.
Gender identity and sexuality, especially where forms, staff or providers have been unsafe before.
Age: an older adult with a new disability and a young adult leaving school services face different systems and different assumptions.
Compounding factor, single-story assumption or practice adjustment? The applicant works a shift job with no phone access until evening.
Choose a category Compounding factor Single-story assumption Practice adjustment People with schizophrenia will not keep appointments.
Choose a category Compounding factor Single-story assumption Practice adjustment Offer the appointment by phone, video or in person, with an evening slot.
Choose a category Compounding factor Single-story assumption Practice adjustment The family’s first language is Karen and the daughter interprets at home.
Choose a category Compounding factor Single-story assumption Practice adjustment Hmong families take care of their own, so they will not want home care.
Choose a category Compounding factor Single-story assumption Practice adjustment Book a professional interpreter and send the notice in the family’s language.
Choose a category Compounding factor Single-story assumption Practice adjustment Check matches Reset Replace the label with the facts What you can change You control whether a case note records a judgment (“not engaged,” “resistant,” “noncompliant”) or the observable facts and what the process assumed.
What to watch for Do not let “did not respond to two notices” become “not interested in services.” Ask what language, format and channel the notices used.
Your next step Before you write a judgment word in a note this week, write the three facts it rests on. If you cannot, ask the person.
Terms that keep the thinking honest Single story
One narrative about a group, used to predict an individual. It feels like knowledge and works like a blindfold. The antidote is a question the person can answer.
Compounding barrier
A barrier whose cost multiplies when it meets another: a paper-only notice plus low vision plus a second language plus no printer.
Intersectional check
Within the people this process affects, who is affected most? Design the process for them, and it will work for everyone else.
About one in four
The CDC’s estimate of adults in the United States with a disability. Disability is present in every caseload, every team and every community meeting, whether or not anyone has said so.
Cost of the encounter
Everything a person spends to reach us: wages, transportation, childcare, privacy, energy, and the emotional cost of a place that has let them down before.
Carry this forward The CDC estimates that about one in four adults in the United States has a disability; disability is not a separate population but a thread running through every community we serve.
Barriers compound: a paper form is a small barrier for one person and a closed door for someone who is blind, reads in Hmong and works two jobs.
A single story about disability, race or diagnosis makes the worker confident and the assessment wrong.
A completed sort of compounding factors, single-story assumptions and practice adjustments, and a knowledge check.
Pick one person you served this week and list every factor, beyond the presenting need, that shaped what the encounter cost them.
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Course overview Next lesson 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.
