As part of our ongoing Equity Series, today, as Disa we hear from from Nicole O’Brien who speaks from the perspective of someone who lives with cerebral palsy.—J.S.

Nicole O’Brien: I am proud of being an American, particularly when you speak of the disability movement. Most people don’t realize this, but in America, it’s people with disabilities who led what was at the time the longest peaceful occupation of a federal building in U.S. history, in 1977, to force passage of disability regulations and eventually the Americans with Disabilities Act itself. The sit-in was nearly a month long, and when you have a disability, that is an enormous task. You have to figure a way to coordinate all your medical supplies and daily living supports. And all of it.

So that is probably the movement that makes me the proudest, the most proud to be an American. However we have so much further to go. The ADA is not the end. The ADA is the basic standard of what should be in place.

My disability is such that I need help with everything from eating to opening doors, to getting a Kleenex. Pretty much everything you can think of that requires using your hands because my disability affects my hands. I need help getting out of bed and taking a shower and everything. My assistant has to help me—my assistant is my brother. When I was at Ferris State University for three years getting my bachelors degree in social work, I was able to go to college because my brother was my one-on-one aid. So he helped me.

A lot of the programs I use are possible because of Medicaid, and my brother is able to help me because I receive home and community-based services from my local Community Mental Health service, and that allows my brother to be with me because it allows him to be paid to work for me. Otherwise he’d have to get a job somewhere else, but then I’d be stuck without someone to take care of me. So those programs are amazing, and help a lot of people, but being disabled, you have to work your behind off for every resource you get.

So because of the current federal administration and what’s been going on, I have to fight even more tooth and nail to stay on those services. They want to change my service and give me far less community hours, which is what pays for my brother’s time. So a reduction in that time would really take away my independence and my own self-determination.

Community Living Supports is the program that helps support and pay the people who work with me and allows me to go out into the community and do anything I want to do. And across the country the federal administration is trying to slash the medicaid programs that allow people like me to live independent lives. And it’s really, really sad.

I would really like to see an expansion of Medicaid and the services provided through it, rather than services being cut. I don’t know if you know this, but the current administration cut a trillion dollars in Medicaid funding in the Big Beautiful Bill over the next decade.

One of the most important things I’d like to see changed is that, in the current system, you get services through your county. And if you move from your county, a new county won’t necessarily pay for your Medicaid.

So what this means is a person with disabilities can be stuck in their current county, and it’s much more difficult for them to expand their lives. It should be that once you are approved for Medicaid, the service and the fees you get just go with you wherever you are. Then people with disabilities could much more easily make their lives anything they want. What we have now is just stupid.

Another example, I recently got my social work degree. Something I’m running into with my disability is that I need help typing, and because of my speech, the automatic transcription doesn’t record what I’m saying correctly. So when I apply for jobs, most places don’t want to hire me because my brother would have to do the typing, and the state says, in my kind of work, the person with the degree has to be doing the typing. It’s another annoying thing, a battle I have to fight every day.

I earned a degree in social work because I want to help people. And for most of my life I viewed my disability as a platform for good. I looked at it as nothing else. So that really is what motivates me to do everything I do.

I don’t see my disability as something to stop me, I see it as something to overcome. By overcoming things, I can help other people to also overcome, that is what motivates me. So I see my disability as a platform rather than something to be sad about or for other people to pity me for.

I was five when years old when I first had that thought. I was in kindergarten and my mother, she never said that exact thing to me, but she had this attitude that said it, that said, you may not be able to do things physically, but never stop sharing your voice. Never stop sharing who you are, because there are more people who need it. And through that you can help a lot of people. You don’t need to be able to do it physically, but just through your existence and speaking you can help more people than you think.

When I was a child, I was in special education classes. This was primarily because my mom didn’t think any other setting would be able to have one-on-one aides. I was in a program called POHI—Physically or Otherwise Health Impaired. A lot of the kids in the class had mental disabilities where they couldn’t speak or used augmented communication devices. So it ended up that in a lot of those instances I had the highest functioning cognitive and speaking abilities, and I could communicate best to the non-disabled community. So I was often placed in leading roles. Eventually I got out of that program when I was in 6th grade and went to regular ed. I graduated with a general education diploma and had a 3.65 grade point average.

I have always felt like I have a gift and a responsibility to speak on behalf of people with disabilities. I tell myself, Nicole, you may be the only disabled person that another person has ever met. What you share with them and how you act can have lasting impacts on how someone else views the disabled community.

The disability movement at large was extraordinary, but we have a long way to go and unfortunately the current administration is trying to cut these statutes that were instituted.

There’s something called the Olmstead decision, a ruling by the Supreme Court in 1999 that communities and states should make every effort to integrate people with disabilities in normal society rather than being institutionalized. Well, in June 2026 the Department of Justice put out a letter saying that the federal government will no longer enforce that. And if states want to they can cut funding and services that enable people to live in the community and instead put people in institutions. That is just one way that the current administration is trying to infringe on the rights and independence of people with disabilities.

In the same way, the administration is also rolling back rights that come from the 504 section of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This required all businesses, private or public, to accommodate people with disabilities and provide things like ramps and everything that we needed to have equal opportunity. A main thing this could affect is education because this could lead to weakening the enforcement of the Individuals’s Education Act [IDEA].The IDEA is separate from the 504, but IDEA builds on the 504 provisions. What IDEA says is that students who have disabilities deserve to be in a position where they can succeed in their environment, and you can adapt their education to their needs. Whatever their least restrictive environment is with regards to education is where they should be placed. The DOJ is trying to remove that, and what that does is slowly takes away Individual Education Plans that allow students with disabilities to have a successful education. So if you take away IEPs, you are basically saying that these individuals don’t deserve to be educated.