Disability inclusion entered my journalism career through a story about a student struggling to secure a 504 Plan for life-threatening food allergies. Reporting on the student's experience introduced me to the Teal Pumpkin Project and the much larger reality of how people with disabilities navigate cities, programs, events, and services. Writing human-centered stories that featured people living with disabilities led me to write more about compliance, policy, procedures, and institutions' responsibility to make the systems they operate work for the people who depend on them.

While pursuing a Master of Social Work at the University of Michigan, I began my career pivot into ADA compliance work. While completing the program, I worked as a Program Development and Policy Analyst Intern at Food Gatherers in Ann Arbor, conducting a client needs assessment focused on accessibility and access across 170 community food program partnerships. My work at Food Gatherers became the foundation for LogiXLearn.

Over the past eight years, my work has continued to move toward the intersection of ADA compliance, policy, risk, safety, and organizational systems. I have worked with higher education, healthcare, public safety, workplaces, and community organizations, examining how legal requirements translate into policies, procedures, training, physical environments, and everyday operations.

Eight years in ADA compliance have taught me to look beyond the barrier in front of me and examine the system that produced it. My work spans individual accommodations, policy, procedures, training, the built environment, emergency preparedness, and organizational operations. I look for where access breaks down, why it breaks down, and what needs to change so the same problem does not keep surfacing.

I bring a risk lens to that work. An inaccessible environment, program, service, or process is not only an access problem. It can create legal exposure, financial costs, operational failures, safety concerns, and reputational risk. I connect those consequences to the policies, decisions, environments, and systems behind them.

Systems Thinking, Universal Design (UD), and Universal Design Experience (UDX) have expanded how I approach those problems. Rather than relying only on individual accommodations after a barrier appears, I look for opportunities to anticipate access needs, strengthen compliance systems, and design more accessibility into policies, environments, programs, and everyday operations.

I am moving into the next phase of my career: municipal- and state-level ADA leadership. The shift brings together the areas that have become increasingly central to my practice: ADA compliance, public policy, the built environment, emergency preparedness, risk, and organizational systems.

At the municipal and state levels, I will focus on how disability access is integrated across employment, public spaces, programs, services, events, infrastructure, and emergency planning. I will continue to expand beyond compliance by applying Systems Thinking, Universal Design (UD), and Universal DesiDX), with greategn Experience (Ur emphasis on anticipating accessibility risks and addressing the legal, financial, operational, and reputational consequences of inaccessible environments, policies, programs, and services.

My work in ADA accessibility has taught me to look beyond the regulation itself and pay attention to how requirements are implemented. Across accessibility compliance standards, policies, procedures, and organizational practices, I have addressed how inconsistencies in training, knowledge, and implementation can affect facilities, programs, services, employment, communications, and digital environments. 

I address the gaps between a requirement and the experience of the person navigating them. Often this means examining a policy, reviewing a process, assessing an environment, investigating a concern, developing guidance, or helping employees understand what an accessibility requirement means for their work. My goals in ADA compliance are practical: understand the requirement, identify the barrier, and determine what needs to change.

My understanding of autism is both personal and professional. I worked directly with autistic children and young adults as a behavioral technician in ABA therapy. In another role as a care management coordinator, I managed a caseload that included autistic clients. Over the past eight years in ADA compliance and consulting, my focus has expanded to the policies, programs, services, transportation, and physical spaces that shape access at the organizational and community levels. My direct work with autistic people and my ADA compliance and consulting work shaped how I understand the sensory and environmental barriers that can affect access and participation.

The Learning Series I am currently developing, called the Autism-Inclusive Travel Economy (AITE): First Steps for Municipal Leaders,  grew from applying my background in autism and ADA compliance to tourism and municipal planning as part of my broader consulting practice. Module 3 in the series was purposely designed around a specific travel setting, an airport, so learners could examine how sensory barriers can affect autistic travelers and consider the supports and planning strategies that can make air travel more accessible and inclusive.

A travel experience includes many individual environments, services, and decisions. Accessibility can be affected long before someone arrives at a destination and continues through every part of the trip: finding information, parking, transportation, entering a business, navigating unfamiliar spaces, managing sensory conditions, understanding what to expect, and participating in activities. An accessibility review can identify whether a feature exists. Conducting a walkthrough and experience scan can reveal what it is actually like to use it. I lead communities and businesses to examine these experiences through environment scans, accessibility walkthroughs, experience mapping, and partnerships with local businesses and community organizations. 

The objective of the AITE Learning Series is to identify barriers, understand the experience behind them, and find changes that make a destination easier to navigate and more welcoming to a broader range of travelers.

An accessible feature does not guarantee access. A building may meet accessibility standards, yet parking, transportation, signage, or the route to the entrance may still pose difficulties. A program may be designed for broad participation, but registration or communication may make participation difficult. A website may contain the right information but make finding or using it frustrating. Training may cover the required material without preparing employees to apply it.

I examine what happens from the moment someone tries to reach, enter, understand, use, or participate in something. Each point can determine whether the access provided through policy, planning, or design is actually available to the person who needs it.

My background across physical environments, programs, services, digital accessibility, communication, training, and policy allows me to identify where access breaks down and determine what can be changed.

Places shape how people experience their communities. Creative placemaking brings together public space, culture, events, local businesses, programming, and community identity to create places that people want to use, visit, and return to. Accessibility belongs in that planning from the beginning. A beautiful public space can still create barriers. 

An engaging event can still exclude people through its physical environment, communication, transportation, or design. A successful destination can still overlook people who experience the environment differently. I bring accessibility and systems thinking into conversations about place, participation, and experience, helping organizations consider how people will actually use and move through the spaces they create.

Complex information becomes useful only when people can understand and apply it. I develop training, instructional materials, e-learning, presentations, guides, and other learning experiences that translate complicated policies, regulations, procedures, and concepts into information people can use. Training and communication should account for how people receive information, navigate materials, and apply what they have learned. 

My background in technical writing, journalism, creative writing, instructional design, and organizational training also brings a strong storytelling component to the work. Strategic storytelling can make complex subjects easier to understand, give people a reason to care, and move an audience toward action.

My interest in municipal accessibility grew from seeing how closely access is tied to the physical environment, transportation, housing, public services, and safety. Across cities, towns, and built environments, municipal leaders and citizens can come together to ensure access across public right-of-way, parking, paratransit, housing, public facilities, events, emergency preparedness, and community services. I use environmental scans, walkthroughs, research, policy review, and conversations with the people involved to understand how a place or service works in practice.  Risk management adds another layer to my work. 

Accessibility barriers can create operational, legal, and reputational risks, along with safety concerns, especially when risks remain unidentified or are addressed only after someone raises an ADA- and access-related complaint. I am to identify access concerns early, understand the conditions behind them, and develop practical recommendations that improve access while reducing risk.

A problem in one place often has causes elsewhere. Systems thinking helps examine those connections by looking at the policies, processes, environments, resources, technology, expectations, and people that shape how a system actually works. Human performance improvement (HPI) adds another layer: What conditions are affecting performance? A process may repeatedly break down because of its design. Employees may struggle to apply a policy because the expectations, tools, or training are unclear. A service may create unnecessary barriers even when the underlying policy appears reasonable. 

I use research, analysis, observation, interviews, process review, and evaluation to understand what is happening and where a change could make the greatest difference. The goal is to look beyond the individual problem and examine the conditions surrounding it, so the solution addresses what is actually getting in the way. Look at the system. Find the disconnect. Change what is getting in the way.

Good design does not wait for someone to encounter a barrier before asking how it could have been avoided. Universal Design Experience (UDX) asks organizations to design environments, programs, products, services, and experiences for a wider range of people from the start, rather than relying on individual accommodations or retrofitting later. For organizations, that means looking beyond whether something is technically accessible and asking whether it is usable, understandable, flexible, and welcoming in practice. 

Universal Design can inform everything from public spaces and events to programs, services, communications, and planning. It can also help municipal leaders and program managers identify barriers that may be easy to overlook when design decisions are made around an assumed typical user. One of my favorite tasks in Universal Design training is guiding organizations and teams to bring UDX principles into their work through training, planning, assessment, and practical application. The key is to recognize barriers, think differently about design decisions, and build access into built environments and programming from the beginning.