Why a School Comes First

When I wrote about the gap nobody’s building for, I had almost 50 people in my communities and no idea if anyone else saw what I saw.

Someone did.

A blind learning designer named Jacob Wood read it. He’d dropped out four times too. He was already building the kind of learning platform I’d described. He emailed me and said, essentially, I’m building your vision. Let’s talk.

We’re working together now. We have a Slack workspace where the early shape of MultAbilities Academy is taking form. We have a vision document grounded in 17 principles. We have something real starting.

So here’s the question I keep getting, and the one I want to answer now: why a school? Why not just build an organization for multiply disabled people and get to work?

I understand the question. It seems like an extra step. Build the org, do the advocacy, change the systems. Skip the school part.

But I’ve spent 34 years in educational systems that were designed to sort me, not teach me. And I’ve spent the last several months running communities for multiply disabled people. And what I see, over and over, is this: people who want to contribute and don’t believe they can.

Not because they lack ability. Because the systems they passed through taught them they were incapable.

Every program that measured competence on terms they couldn’t meet. Every institution that welcomed them as recipients, not builders. Every classroom that assumed one disability at a time and called the rest a failure to adapt. Every team that sorted them without asking them. Every space that treated their fatigue as laziness, their processing speed as ignorance, their need for flexibility as noncompliance.

That doesn’t go away when you invite someone to join an organization. You can’t hand someone a role and expect the doubt to dissolve. The doubt was installed by decades of being told, in a thousand ways, that they couldn’t.

So the school comes first. Not because education is the only thing multiply disabled people need. Because belief is.

A learning program designed for multiply disabled people from the start. One that doesn’t measure them against standards built for single-disability learners. One that lets them pause when their bodies demand it and return without shame. One that treats their understanding as real regardless of how they demonstrate it. That program doesn’t just teach skills. It rebuilds something that was taken before they knew they had it: the conviction that they have something to contribute.

Once that conviction exists, the organization becomes possible. Not before.

This isn’t theoretical for me. I tried college five times. I learned to build an NVDA add-on in two days, but I couldn’t pass a participation-graded discussion board. I learned to write well enough that 15,000 people read my work every month, but timed assessments told me I was slow. The system measured everything I couldn’t do and missed everything I could.

If someone had built a learning program for me, one that saw how my disabilities stack instead of treating them one at a time, I might have believed I could contribute years earlier. I didn’t get that. Most of us didn’t.

What Exists Now #

MultAbilities has communities on Slack, Discord, GroupMe, Groups.io, and Facebook. The Slack is where the building happens. Jacob and I are there, developing the Academy and the learning platform that will support it. The other platforms are for peer connection. The kind where you can say “I’m having a hard day” and someone actually understands what that means when your disabilities stack.

I also lead two related groups. One on Groups.io about online education for disabled students. One on GroupMe for Christians with disabilities. Both are open to anyone who fits.

And you can book time with me directly. A collaboration call if you want to work together. A community chat if you just want to talk. No pressure, no obligation, no requirement to be anyone other than who you are on the day you show up.

What I’m Asking #

If you’re multiply disabled and you’ve ever wanted to help build something but didn’t believe you could, you’re who I’m talking to. Not because I think you need fixing. Because I know what took your confidence, and I know it wasn’t you.

If you’re an ally with skills to offer, we need you too. Accessibility testing, curriculum design, legal structure, fundraising, communications. The work is real and we can’t do it alone.

If you just want to be around people who get it, without any obligation to build anything, that’s enough. Some of the most important things that will happen in these communities will happen because someone felt safe enough to say what they actually think.

You don’t have to commit. You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to prove you belong here.

Come as you are. Come at the level that makes sense for your life, your energy, your body, your brain. The ramp is still being built, but it’s open.

Every link you need is at lanie.work/connect. Email me at [email protected] if that’s easier. Book a call if you want to talk. Join a community if you want to listen. Show up however makes sense for you.