Living Fully: February 2026
The Foundations of Inclusion
I read a book early in my career called “We Come Bearing Gifts” by Janet Klees. I was also lucky enough to meet Janet and many of the individuals she wrote about in her first book and its sequel “Our Presence Has Roots.” Janet is a strong advocate for community inclusion for adults with disabilities, and has a great deal of experience with organizing families of people with disabilities to dream big regarding their futures. “We Come Bearing Gifts” helped me internalize the reality that everyone has something to contribute and that a community will be stronger for mobilizing the strengths of each member.
In the book, Janet also talks about normalization, an approach first promoted in North America by Wolf Wolfensburger in the 1970’s stating that people with disabilities should be able to experience the same sorts of life experiences and opportunities as their non-disabled peers. While this concept might seem obvious today, it was novel at the time and countered the practice where people with disabilities were congregated and segregated from the rest of the community and engaged in limited or no meaningful or productive life activities. Normalization advocated bringing folks out of these settings and into community life, housing and commerce. This concept was powerful, but also often misunderstood and oversimplified.
Wolfensburger further advanced normalization with his own concept, which he called social role valorisation. He felt that to advance normalization, individuals must also be given the opportunity to participate in society in valuable social roles. Through much of the 20th century, people with disabilities were not seen as valuable members of society, and instead were viewed as objects of pity and charity, problems to be erased or eternal children to be treated as such. Roles like neighbor, classmate, sibling, grandchild, employee or volunteer were unavailable to them. In order to make those roles available to children with disabilities, they need to have access to the same education and socialization as their non-disabled peers, and as adults they need opportunities for employment, housing and spaces (“third places”) where individuals can find a sense of belonging, like the coffee shop on Friends or the bar in Cheers.
My emotions are stirred up as I write this because I feel we are losing sight of the values of normalization and social role valorization in today’s fervor to reduce the cost of human services. We’re regressing to a time when keeping people alive (safe and healthy) was managed, but no care or attention was given to the quality of that life. When we lose access to the roles or environments that are meaningful, we take away the things that make life worth living. When we take away the meaning of life and the activities and relationships that enriched it, your whole world crashes down around you. Depression, grief, anxiety, dysregulation, self-injurious and aggressive behavior can all show up as unhealthy and potentially harmful replacements.
If done well, the outcome of inclusive policies and practices is valuable social roles for people with disabilities, and the success of human services programs should be measured by our ability to give individuals opportunities to access that. Not only because it is the ethical thing to do, but because holding valued social roles ensures the most efficient use of governmental resources. Individuals with robust lives filled with meaningful activity and relationships are far less likely to have a crisis requiring additional support and far more likely to have people to spend time with who don’t expect to be paid. I am proud of the work that the LOV Inc. Bridge Builder team does to create engaging community opportunities and the skills to access them for the individuals we support, a holistic approach that can create lasting impact more efficiently than the siloed approaches that our human services systems are currently promoting.
It’s important to note that neither of these concepts – normalization or social role valorisation – espoused curing disability or denying its impact on an individual’s life. Rather, it promotes the idea that disability is just one part of a person’s identity and should not be determinative of the opportunities and access they have in society. All of us deserve a full and enriching life that enables us to pursue our goals and interests, build genuine relationships, and be valued and contributing members of our communities.
– Stefanie Primm, Executive Director
