Remember. Reconnect. Reimagine.
Every July, we celebrate the Americans with Disabilities Act as one of the most significant civil rights laws in our nation’s history. We often remember it through the ramps, curb cuts, accessible buses, interpreters, and other visible changes that reshaped our communities. But those changes reflected something much deeper: the belief that people with disabilities belong—in schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and every part of community life.
Accessibility was never the destination. It was the means to something much greater: a foundation for bigger dreams and higher expectations.
Remember.
Recently I rewatched Crip Camp, the documentary that traces the roots of the disability rights movement. What stayed with me wasn’t simply the history. It was the reminder that before there was a law, there was a movement. And before there was a movement, there was a belief. Judith Heumann and countless others refused to accept the story society had written for them. They challenged the idea that exclusion was inevitable and imagined a different future. The law came later. First came the courage to believe that a different future was possible.
That is what I find myself thinking about as the Americans with Disabilities Act turns 36 this month.
The ADA answered one question brilliantly: people with disabilities belong in American life. It opened schools, workplaces, public transportation, and communities in ways that transformed this country. That question was settled with remarkable moral clarity.
But thirty-six years later, another question remains largely unanswered. What does it mean to belong in the economy?
Belonging to a place and belonging to an economy are two very different things. You can enter a building and still be locked out of the capital to build one. The ADA opened doors. It did not guarantee ownership, investment, or wealth. Those questions were left for the generations that followed.
Reconnect.
This summer I watched Angad present LetMeDoIt — his decision autonomy and financial inclusion platform — to a room full of venture capitalists. I watched him share a closing plenary at a national conference alongside other entrepreneurs. He is the only person with Down syndrome on those stages.
Those moments didn’t happen because of one family or one organization. They happened because thousands of people over decades believed that people with disabilities belonged, and they acted on that belief. The ADA created the legal floor. The movement created the expectation. And somewhere in the space between expectation and reality, Angad found room to build something.
That is what this anniversary asks us to reconnect with — not the law itself, but the original conviction behind it. The one that said exclusion is not inevitable. The one that refused to accept the story as written.
Reimagine.
Every generation inherits unfinished work. The generation before us reimagined education, transportation, employment, and community life. They refused to accept segregation and exclusion as inevitable, and because they did, the next generation entered a world with possibilities that would once have seemed unimaginable.
Today, some of those hard-won assumptions are being questioned. Across the country, long-settled ideas about disability rights, inclusion, education, and equal opportunity are being reinterpreted and, in some cases, challenged. Some argue that the work is finished. Others suggest it has gone too far.
History tells us something different. Civil rights move forward because people refuse to forget what they have already witnessed.
And over the last thirty-six years, we have witnessed something extraordinary.
We have watched people with disabilities graduate from universities, lead organizations, raise families, invent technology, create art, and reshape their communities. We have watched entrepreneurs with disabilities launch companies, employ others, attract investment, and solve problems the marketplace overlooked. We have watched people who were once expected to be lifelong recipients become creators, employers, innovators, and owners.
Something irreversible has happened.
Once you have watched someone with Down syndrome build a company, once you have seen autistic founders raise investment, once you have watched entrepreneurs with disabilities create jobs for others, the old assumptions no longer make sense. The genie is out of the bottle.
You can’t put possibility back inside.
You can’t unsee what’s possible.
That is why the work continues—not simply to defend the rights that previous generations fought so hard to secure, urgent as that work remains, but to fulfill their promise. The next frontier is not simply employment. It is ownership. Ownership of businesses. Ownership of homes. Ownership of ideas. Ownership of wealth. Ownership of the future itself.
For me, the work of Synergies Work and the Synergies Seed Fund is an act of resistance and an act of hope. It is a belief that economic citizenship is the natural next chapter of the disability rights movement. A future where Angad’s answer to, “So…what do you do?” is not the name of an employer, but the name of something he imagined, built, and owns.
— Aarti