Dr. Kirk Adams, 140 Lakeside Avenue, Suite A, Seattle, WA (2026)

08/28/2026

Braille Is Beautiful, and Braille Is Literacy | By Dr. Kirk Adams | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://drkirkadams.com/braille-is-beautiful-braille-is-literacy/

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams makes the case that braille is not an enrichment activity or a nostalgic craft, but literacy itself. He begins in his own first-grade classroom at the Oregon State School for the Blind, where a teacher named Mrs. Summers taught him to read and write braille after his retinas detached in kindergarten, and where the code became privacy, independence, and a lifeline through long hospital stays. From there he draws a distinction the field often blurs: speech can tell a reader what a sentence says, but braille lets them examine how it is written, the spelling, the punctuation, the whole architecture of the language. Sighted children are not told that audiobooks make print unnecessary, and blind children should not be told that synthetic speech makes braille optional. The right principle, he argues, is not braille or technology but braille and technology, chosen to fit the task and the person.

He then does something advocates rarely do, which is fact-check his own side. The familiar claim that only 10 percent of blind people read braille turns out to rest on a 1979 National Library Service report and American Printing House Federal Quota data, neither of which was designed to measure braille literacy across the whole blind population. He holds the often-quoted 90 percent employment figure to the same standard, noting that it came from a 1996 study of 74 adults and showed an association rather than a cause. Better evidence is finally arriving, through the ICEVI and World Blind Union 2026-2027 Global Braille Literacy Campaign and a 2024 workplace study in which 66.1 percent of 304 employed blind participants used braille on the job. Adams closes by pointing readers toward the places braille is actually grown, the NFB BELL Academy, Braille Institute's Braille Challenge, and free adult instruction from Hadley and others, and toward the documentary BRAILLED IT, touring nationally this September, where he will join the panel discussion after the Seattle screening on September 20.

08/28/2026

This Is Our Season: Join Us September 1st When We Launch, Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity & Inclusion | By Dr. Kirk Adams | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://drkirkadams.com/this-is-our-season-join-september-1-2026-launch-ccsdi/

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams invites readers to the free virtual launch of the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion on Tuesday, September 1st, 11:00 a.m. to noon Pacific / 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern. Writing as Executive Director of The Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion, he opens on the turning of the season and uses it to name a harder truth: across workplaces, schools, nonprofits, government agencies and communities, champions of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, belonging and human dignity are watching programs dismantled, funding disappear and language censored, and are doing that work feeling like the only one in the room. That isolation, he argues, is not merely painful but strategically costly, because the forces working against inclusion win when advocates are exhausted, fragmented and afraid. The Coalition is his answer: a place to move from reactive, isolated survival to strategic, sustainable, collective power, offering practical resources, peer-learning and mentoring circles, subject-matter experts and organized collective action, grounded in the conviction that expertise comes from lived experience as much as from titles, degrees or institutions.

The second half turns from diagnosis to invitation. Adams frames the launch as a "joyous rebellion" against isolation, division, hopelessness and the lie that expanding opportunity for one group must diminish another, and promises not another webinar but an Ask Us Anything conversation with ISDI board members and community advisors, where the audience's own questions, frustrations and ideas drive the hour. He asks readers to do three concrete things: register, bring someone with them, and support the Coalition's GoFundMe campaign at any level from $10 upward, or share it if they cannot give. The piece closes on its refrain, RESIST fear, division, isolation and hate, and on the line that gives it its title: this is our moment, this is our community, this is our season.

08/28/2026

My Book, 'Living Chronic: Conversations That Changed Me, Lessons That Saved Me', is Officially Available | By Brandy Schantz | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-op
https://www.koehlerbooks.com/book/living-chronic-conversations-that-changed-me-lessons-that-saved-me/

My book, Living Chronic: Conversations That Changed Me, Lessons That Saved Me, is officially available.

The book grew from a severe reaction to a medication prescribed for Crohn’s disease and the 19 months I spent searching for answers. During that time, I experienced debilitating pain, neurological symptoms, profound fatigue, serious mood changes, and, briefly, the loss of my ability to walk.

But Living Chronic is not simply a book about illness. It is about what happens when life and work are interrupted without warning — and how we begin rebuilding when recovery is uncertain.

It explores the importance of trusting your own voice, advocating for answers, accepting help, finding strength in human connection, and creating a meaningful life when the future no longer follows the path you expected.

I wrote this book for patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, employers, and anyone who has ever felt dismissed, misunderstood, or forced to reinvent themselves after a life-changing experience.

I am deeply grateful to everyone whose conversations changed me and whose lessons helped save me. I hope this book can now do the same for someone else.

Order your copy here: https://www.koehlerbooks.com/book/living-chronic-conversations-that-changed-me-lessons-that-saved-me/.

08/28/2026

🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #104: Ask Advocate Donna | Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
https://donnajodhan.com/rwc-08-02-2026/

Here Donna Jodhan steps into what she calls her Ask Advocate Donna shoes for her second solo episode of August, presenting stories of advocacy and inviting listeners to send in their own. She opens with a quote she came across and likes: speak in such a way that others love to listen to you, and listen in such a way that others love to speak to you. Then she runs her favourite word game, offering two pairs of words that advocates meet constantly. Action or conversation: action means getting involved, getting your hands dirty and your feet wet, the hardcore end of advocacy, while conversation means sitting down to listen and discuss, which is more passive. Intention or ex*****on is the opposite pairing: intention is being ready and willing to get something done, ex*****on is having actually done it. Donna is careful to say there is nothing wrong with either side of either pair, and that it depends on the advocate and where they want to go.

She then works through three stories sent in by listeners, applying the same frame to each one: what is advocacy here, who gets involved, why is it necessary, how do you get involved, and when. A parent, Isabel, is handed a single plate at a fundraising dinner for a dance troupe and told to share it with her daughter Dania, until the two raise their voices in unison, politely and effectively, and the host backs off and provides a second plate. A caregiver asks a patient's daughter, who is vision impaired, to pay extra for the meals she is served, and Donna lays out the options for how the daughter might respond, from asking exactly what she is being charged for to simply saying it is out of the question. And a senior named Harry, standing first in line, is waved to the back by a dismissive ticket agent with no explanation, which leaves Donna asking what she would do in his place. She wants listeners' feedback on these, and asks them to write to her at [email protected].

08/28/2026

🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #103: Entity or Customer | Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
https://donnajodhan.com/rwc-08-01-2026/

Here Donna Jodhan opens the month of August with a solo commentary she frames as entity versus customer, and she puts her opinion on the table straight away. When a form is inaccessible and the customer agent tells a blind or vision-impaired customer to go and find someone else to help them, whose responsibility is that really? Donna argues it belongs to the company and its agent, not to the customer: the form comes from the company, it does not come from her, and it is up to the agent to find a solution rather than to send someone elsewhere. She recounts what happened a few months ago with ServiceOntario, where an agent told her she had to find someone to assist her and she refused, in the most courteous way she could, then phoned again and again until she reached genuinely helpful, supportive agents who helped her complete and submit the form to renew her company's business. She asks whether what is really at work is a lack of work ethic or an unwillingness to look for a solution, and puts herself out on a limb to say the duty sits with the customer agent.

She closes with a story sent in by a listener who had been scammed. Being scammed hurts anyone, Donna says, but when you have a disability and a really terrible scammer finds you, it hurts even more. The listener wrote to tell her that while facing the homework of getting their money back, they used the hints and tips from her Mental Stretch to steady themselves, sitting down and meditating on the senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight. It helped them stabilise their minds, their actions, and their decisions about what to do next. Donna says she has been preaching for years that the Mental Stretch can be used in many ways to handle very unexpected and horrible circumstances, and that she is simply happy it continues to help people. She invites listeners to write to her at [email protected].

08/27/2026

When Speaking Up Feels Dangerous: We Need Community More Than Ever | By Dr. Kirk Adams | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://drkirkadams.com/when-speaking-up-feels-dangerous/

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams, Executive Director of the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion, argues that many people working for diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, belonging and human rights have stopped asking whether their organizations are moving fast enough and started asking whether it is safe to speak up at all. Pointing to a federal terrorism case arising from a July 2025 protest in Texas and to criminal charges now facing the Southern Poverty Law Center, he is careful to add that whatever our individual political perspectives on those particular cases, what they illuminate is larger: the perceived cost of advocacy is rising, and different people carry different levels of risk.

His answer is community, not bravado: courage should not require recklessness. The Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion, now being built, intends to provide legal literacy and risk-aware advocacy strategies. He promises no one safety, only that nobody should have to navigate this moment alone. Readers are invited to the free livestreamed launch on September 1, 2026, and to ISDI's GoFundMe campaign for the community infrastructure behind it.

08/27/2026

🎙️ Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Jeremy Grandstaff, Executive Director, The Inspiration Foundation | By Dr. Kirk Adams | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-by-dr-kirk-adams-08-11-2026/

In this candid episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Kirk welcomes Jeremy Grandstaff, six months into a newly created role as executive director of the Inspiration Foundation, the nonprofit founded by Cleanlogic co-CEO Isaac Shapiro in honour of his blind mother, Bea. Kirk, who introduced the two, traces their friendship from a bench at a National Federation of the Blind conference through Jeremy's consulting work at the American Foundation for the Blind. Jeremy tells his own story: a county assessor who advised institutionalising him at age two and the father who gave the man two minutes to leave the property; school for the blind through fifth grade; a 12-year-old cold-calling publishers for accessible books in 1988; Bowling Green State University, IBM, and a master's in organization development. He is frank about two employers who told him he would never be as competent as a sighted person, and that he could always "just go on disability", the moment that made him say yes to this job.

The conversation then turns practical. Jeremy lays out the Foundation's two-sided strategy, grants that strengthen the pipeline of candidates, and the emerging Inspiration Seal that builds a pipeline of employers ready to hire and promote them, alongside a goal of raising the disability employment rate by 10% in five years. Kirk raises the contested ground of disability simulation, recalling the "hand gr***de" a proposed dining-in-the-dark event threw into an AFB staff meeting and the research that resolved it, and Jeremy explains how the Foundation has rebuilt the format as a Dining in the Dark and Executive Roundtable with education on both sides of the meal. They close on executive presence, Jeremy insisting on walking to the podium with his cane rather than being escorted, because the walk is the argument.

08/27/2026

🎙️ Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Mindy Kolin, Director of Development & Industry Partnerships at Teach Access, and Kate Sonka, Executive Director
https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-by-dr-kirk-adams-08-06-2026/

In this warm anniversary episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Kirk opens from a smoke-covered Seattle with wishes for friends in eastern Washington, then welcomes Kate Sonka, executive director of Teach Access, and Mindy Kolin, who leads its fundraising, partnerships and communications. Kirk traces his own first encounter with the organization: a visit to Yahoo's accessibility team early in his AFB tenure, where Darren Burton and Mike Shebanek showed him a whiteboard tally of how many incoming computer science graduates had ever heard of accessibility, a lopsided count that became the case for Teach Access. Kate, who grew up at the Wisconsin School for the Blind where both her parents taught, recounts the April 2016 kickoff at Yahoo with Shebanek, Larry Goldberg and Jeff Wieland; Mindy recalls starting her career at the New York employment agency Eleanor Roosevelt and Orin Lehman founded, and finding Teach Access on Indeed 25 years later.

The heart of the conversation is strategy. Teach Access concentrates on educators rather than students directly, the multiplier being that one trained faculty member reaches 50 to 100 students a semester, and on "small teaching": folding accessibility into classes people already teach rather than fighting the years-long approval path for a new course. Kate walks through the Fellowship, the four-week Summer Institute, and the openly licensed Curriculum Repository; Mindy reports the headline result, a goal set in 2020 to reach 1 million students by 2030 that passed 1.5 million in 2025, five years early. They close on funding, on contract work with industry partners that keeps educator resources free, and on Teach Access Europe, where enforcement of the European Accessibility Act has made this a promising moment to expand.

08/27/2026

RESIST! We Have Inherited a Legacy. Now It Is Our Turn. | By Dr. Kirk Adams | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://drkirkadams.com/resist-we-have-inherited-a-legacy/

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams invites readers to the free livestreamed launch of the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, from 11:00 a.m. to noon Pacific (2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern), and argues that the Coalition is inheriting a legacy rather than inventing one. Writing from a visit to Oakland in the Black Panther Party's sixtieth anniversary year, he looks past the iconography to the Party's Community Survival Programs, the free breakfasts, health clinics, sickle-cell testing, legal services and support for seniors and disabled people, and draws out the line that anchors the piece: resistance isn't only about what we stand against, it is about what we build together.

The history he traces is deliberately intersectional. When disability activists occupied a San Francisco federal building for 26 days in 1977 demanding enforcement of Section 504, they could not have held it alone, and Brad Lomax, a Black activist with multiple sclerosis and a Panther himself, opened the channel through which the Party delivered a hot meal every day. Adams then brings it home to Seattle, where his grandchildren are seen at the last surviving Panther-founded clinic and the new Interpretive Center has reassembled the Panthers' required reading list so visitors can read what the Panthers read, which becomes his case for study as a form of resistance. Marking Black August and National Black Business Month, he closes on what anyone can do, sign up, give, spend deliberately, bring somebody with you, and promises not another webinar but an Ask Us Anything conversation.

08/27/2026

National Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion Launches September 1 | EINPresswire.com | By Dr. Kirk Adams | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://www.einpresswire.com/article/935867745/national-coalition-for-sustainable-diversity-and-inclusion-launches-september-1

A national alliance for inclusion practitioners opens to the public in a free online event on September 1, and opens Founding Membership the same day.

SEATTLE, WA, UNITED STATES, August 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A national coalition created to support people working in diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility and belonging will hold its public launch on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, in a free online event hosted by the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion.

The Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion opens to the public at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time, 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, in a one-hour session built around an open question-and-answer conversation with the Institute's leaders and community advisors. The session is hosted as a LinkedIn Live event, and registration is free.

The Coalition came out of a strategic planning process the Institute ran in the summer of 2025 with more than 60 leaders working across diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, belonging, human rights and social justice. According to Kirk Adams, PhD, the Institute's Executive Director, the participants came from different sectors and different backgrounds but reported the same conditions: professionals feeling isolated, programs under pressure, and people fighting the same battles separately.

"Programs are being dismantled, funding is disappearing, and professionals are feeling isolated," said Adams. "The answer is not retreat. The answer is community."

The Coalition is positioned as an operating structure rather than a symbolic affiliation. Its stated purpose is to help members move from reactive, isolated survival mode to strategic, sustainable, collective power. The Institute has named four functions for it: rapid response to misinformation and attacks on inclusion work, shared tools, resources and referral networks, stronger storytelling and outreach to the next generation of leaders, and collaboration across sectors.

It is built as a national online community on the Circle platform, intended as a working home for practitioners, community leaders, educators, advocates, allies and people directly affected by the rollback of inclusion programs. Among its first named deliverables is legal literacy and risk-aware advocacy strategy, developed on the Institute's stated reasoning that different people carry different levels of professional and personal risk.

"The answer to fear is not telling people to be brave and then sending them into difficult situations alone," said Adams. "That is not courage. That can be recklessness. A coalition has to account for the fact that different people carry different levels of risk."

The September 1 session also opens Founding Membership in the Coalition. Founding Members help shape the Coalition's structure and priorities from the beginning and receive access to its network, resources, learning opportunities and collaborative initiatives.

The launch conversation features nine participants: Adams; Joseph Marth, the Institute's board chair; board members Barbara Deane, Effenus Henderson, Amelia Ransom and Constance Engelstad; and community advisors Jacob Davidson, Alexandra Matthiesen and Terry Loving. Their backgrounds span corporate leadership, nonprofit management, disability inclusion, racial equity, accessibility and public policy.

The Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion is a Seattle-area nonprofit incorporated in 2015 to institutionalize the Northwest Diversity Learning Series, a corporate education program that has run continuously since 1998 and completed its 27th year in 2025. The Institute reports reaching more than 350 participants annually, engaging more than 300 leaders through coalition and special events, and supporting more than 60 practitioners through leadership cohorts, including its first six-month cohort for practitioners. The Institute uses the DEIAB framework, which adds accessibility and belonging to the standard terms.

Adams, who has been blind since age five, was previously President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Foundation for the Blind and of The Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc. in Seattle. He is the author of The Disability Dividend and serves as Managing Director of Innovative Impact, LLC.

Registration for the September 1 launch is free. The Institute is also raising funds to underwrite the Coalition's first year on its community platform.

About the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion

The Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion is a nonprofit organization founded in 2015 to strengthen individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces. It operates the Northwest Diversity Learning Series, a practitioner learning cohort, consulting services and special events, and is the founding organization of the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion.

Dr. Kirk Adams

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