Inclusion Now is a safe space espousing a philosophy of inclusion that advocates for the dignity, value, and humanity all people.
Inclusion Now, as a foundationally parent and professional endeavor, recognizes that a truly just and inclusive world for our children will listen closely to them and allow them to guide interactions, programming, and policy that impacts them directly. Self-determination is a critical piece to any human’s development toward full potential and well-being. Our children deserve this, just as you and I do.
Inclusion Now believes it is essential to address OUR challenges as parents, advocates, educators, supporters, and influencers in positions of power.
Specifically, we must understand how our inherited values, biases, and fears dictate, more than any diagnostic contribution, our inability to include people with physical, emotional, cognitive, sensory, and/or mental health contributions across and within our neighborhoods, education systems, businesses, public spaces, spiritual communities, and larger society.
Inclusion means inclusion without exceptions or conditions, and moving forward means shining a light on OUR inability to include and accept diversity rather than any individual’s ability or desire to comply and assimilate.
We endeavor to advocate, educate and ultimately impact social change in the direction of inclusion without limits, neither on behalf of neurodivergent and/or unconventionally appearing or bodied people, which is paternalizing and patronizing, nor as the voices or masters of ableist impacted communities, which is oppressing and marginalizing. Rather, our goal, starting with the person in the mirror and emanating out like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond, is a revolutionary shift in mainstream society and power culture that sheds the mantle of ableism and seeks personal change for the sake of a more inclusive world.
That is, we strive to change ourselves. Not others.
But along the way, particularly when we actively listen with a spirit of inclusion, everybody advances toward self-determined enlightenment and happiness.
