The self-advocacy movement is people with disabilities speaking for themselves, in their own words, about their own lives. Its clearest edge is people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, who for generations were spoken for by staff, guardians, professionals and well-meaning relatives. Groups that named themselves People First insisted on the reverse order. Minnesota has its own long-running self-advocacy organizations led by disabled people, and they know how a state process lands in a kitchen better than any of us do from a conference room.
Two practical claims come out of that movement and out of disability justice, and both are usable at a state agency. The first is nothing about us without us: decisions about disabled people are made with disabled people present, early enough to change the outcome. The second is interdependence: nobody is independent, and the point of support is participation, not self-sufficiency. Staff rely on colleagues, systems, rides, child care and each other every day; a person who relies on a support worker or a communication device is doing the same ordinary thing with a different arrangement.
Access follows from interdependence. If access is a favor, someone has to ask, prove a need and wait. If access is a shared design task — materials early and in usable formats, captions on by default, plain language, a pace that allows processing time, a room and a route that work — then most people never have to ask, and the ones who do are asking about a remaining gap rather than about permission to be there.
