ADAPT is an activist organization dedicated to tackling issues that impact the disability community, among them reforming the long-term care system, establishing a national home and community services and supports program, expanding services and supports at the state and local levels, and advocating for the freedom of people with disabilities from institutions.
With a flexible, informal structure, ADAPT operates through a national network of local groups that share information, strategies, and support. Local ADAPT groups shape their own structure and approach, focusing on both community-specific and broader national issues, such as Medicaid and housing, that impact the rights of disabled folks to live in their own homes. The national organization also offers training in organizing and advocacy, which is strongly encouraged for new groups.
Mike Oxford is co-founder of the Kansas ADAPT Chapter and a national ADAPT organizer. A leader in the disability rights movement for 35 years, Mike served as Executive Director of the Topeka Independent Living Resource Center for 25 years and as President of the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) from 2001 to 2005. Mike was the first recipient of the NCIL Max Starkloff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018 and is widely recognized for his work at the national and state levels. Mike currently serves on the Board of the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies and consults with the Community Living Policy Center.
In this Q&A, Mike talks with ADA Watch about ADAPT’s priorities for the coming year, threats facing the disability community, and how the disability rights community can come together to defend the rights of all people.
ADA Watch: ADAPT is designed around action, activism, and civil disobedience. What are ADAPT’s priorities for the upcoming year?
Mike Oxford: This year, we’re kicking off a new campaign, “Keys to Community Living – Services, Wages and Housing.” In the immediate, we need to protect the status quo against proposed devastating funding cuts. In-progress cuts to major federal agency personnel and related program operations are already causing serious harm. Navigating Social Security is becoming increasingly difficult as folks wait for long periods on the phone and go unassisted, and wait in lines at offices. For another example, the waiting list for SSDI fair hearings is already at 2.8 million people and growing quickly. New administrative law judges are not being hired and open positions are left unfilled. The Administration for Community Living, which supports the needs of aging and disability populations, is being dismantled to be replaced by what? We don’t know. The need to organize has never been greater. We need to protest, but not just protest. We need to mobilize, but not just mobilize. Organize. We need to organize in local communities.
ADAPT is hosting a Mother’s Day Rally on May 11, 2025, at Upper Senate Park at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to officially kick off our “Keys” campaign. The event will feature speakers from worker, housing, and disability organizations, music, grassroots activists, and more. After the rally, we will offer a follow-up orientation and training for anyone interested in joining.
ADAPT’s three-day national action, beginning Monday, May 12, will follow the rally. We will pursue various theatrical and activist strategies to address issues of our “Keys” campaign. Our national rally and action are meant to be a springboard to increased state and local organizing—this is where the responsibility for the outcomes of budget and program cuts will land, and this is where the impacted people live.
ADAW: ADAPT focuses on Congressional priorities as well. Can you share those?
MO: National ADAPT priorities over the past couple of Congresses have been the Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) Access Act and Better Care/Better Jobs Act and the comprehensive Build Back Better proposal. ADAPT seeks an adequately funded mandatory long-term services package. Good programs exist, but they do not have enough resources. The law resulting from the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision requires HCBS alternatives to institutions, but the relevant services and housing needs have never been adequately funded. The funding issue is now more acute than ever.
ADAW: How would you characterize the threats to disability rights and justice that have occurred at the start of the second Trump Administration—in particular, attacks on DEIA initiatives and programs, potential cuts to Medicaid, and crackdowns on protest groups?
MO: It is horrible. It is scary and threatening. It’s heartbreaking. It’s infuriating. Severe threats and violence against all marginalized people seem to increase every day. First People, Latinx, Black and other people of color have never been less secure and more at risk of hassle and harm. The LGBTQ community is also literally under attack. Trying to completely erase DEI, even the very term itself, is abhorrent, especially considering that the current political climate proves it’s needed more than ever. Without DEIA, disparities will continue and worsen in health, long-term services, and other social and economic indicators of equality of life. The rendition, in the cruelest ways imaginable, of folks to gulags out of the country and prisons within and threatening the same to “homegrowns,” deporting unaccompanied minor children, some of whom have been terribly mistreated and abused, and on and on… The growing racial, religious, and nativist bigotry is glaring.
The reality is that we rely on immigrants and women of color generally to meet so many basic needs: 32% of home care workers are immigrants, an increase of 10% over the past 10 years or so, and there will be a need for close to 10 million jobs in the general, direct care workforce by 2030. A crackdown on immigration is a crackdown on the disability community.
In the meantime, States are cutting back on prior commitments to Medicaid HCBS, housing, health, nutrition, and more. They’re realigning social and health programs in anticipation of coming scarcity. In this political and economic calculus, the number of people deemed “deserving” will be minimized, while the number of people deemed “undeserving,” and therefore dispossessed, will grow and be targeted as scapegoats by political operatives as a diversion to the destruction and looting of publicly owned services and facilities. I am afraid it’s all in the name of greed.
Some of us are able to speak up more than others. For example, it is clearly much more dangerous and threatening than ever before for members of the trans community, for folks in immigrant communities, and for people of color, generally. Federal funding is being used as a bully stick to silence dissent. Fear is an effective tactic.
Those who can speak up have a responsibility because it is too risky for some of our neighbors to do so. Solidarity is the way out of this nightmare.
ADAW: How has your organization and the broader disability rights community responded to these threats so far? Given all that’s at stake, why is collaborating across the disability community so vital right now?
MO: We’ve seen mobilizing, networking, information-sharing, and nonstop lobbying and activism. With so much happening so fast, it can be overwhelming. ADAPT members and many others have been engaged in protests all over. Over time, we must work to gel these diffuse efforts into concrete policy and political demands and ultimately inform the next election cycle(s).
The threats are so big and far-reaching that we must work together to solve them. The consequences are too devastating not to band together.
There will be and already have been efforts to divide and conquer. Who is deserving? Who is politically popular? Which business models have the most clout? We need to coalesce around shared values and goals and embrace the fact that different groups use different methods to advocate. We all have a critical role to play. I have friends who aren’t activists, but they volunteer at the LINK kitchen to feed hungry people. Folks are expressing themselves through art and writing. Mutual aid and grassroots social networks are strengthening. It’s all good. It’s all needed.
ADAW: What action or actions can advocates and allies take to advance ADAPT’s work right now? As the year unfolds?
MO: Come to our Mother’s Day rally. Join local efforts of ADAPT and other groups. Stay active and support each other’s efforts. Ultimately, we will need to demand our state and local governments step up their responsibilities as the federal government abandons and diverts its former functions to state and local governmental (and private, profit-driven) entities. Protest. Go to town halls. Write letters to the editor. Visit congressional offices. File lawsuits. Hold press events. Protest some more. Hold rallies. Print t-shirts. Meet with your Governor and State Legislators. Love your neighbor.
Visit the ADAPT website to get involved, start a local chapter, download The ADAPT Activist Handbook, and donate.
Read the companion article — A Visual History of ADAPT’s Fight for Justice: The Work of Photographer Tom Olin, Disability Rights Documentarian