Reframing Community Strategy and Tactics on Disability Inclusion
The Minneapolis Jewish community has long struggled to meet the needs of community members with disabilities. Three organizations have expertise and decades of on-the-ground expertise with disability inclusion, but lacked the ability to work collaboratively. All three also felt that no matter what they did, the problem would remain.
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If the community was to make progress, we needed to change both the relationships and the nature of the conversations.
Variables affecting design
The main players in this process represented three organizations with deep expertise and history in disability inclusion. I approached the design by considering these critical variables
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Previous attempts at dialogue were colored by history and bad blood
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All three partners needed to feel they were making meaningful contributions without surrendering any autonomy
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There was a 20-year history of attempts to solve this issue with scant resources and varying degrees of success
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Disability inclusion touches every area of community life, creating unavoidable complexity
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This effort had no associated budget – we needed to find a cost-efficient way forward
