From Access to Inclusion to Belonging
A practical, real-world blueprint for an Upper Valley where every body, mind, and voice is expected, respected, and celebrated.
1. Access: Opening the Door
Access is the first promise: “You can get in.”
Picture a downtown café with a smooth, level entrance, a lever handle you can nudge with an elbow, and menus printed in Braille and large type. Picture a municipal website whose alt-text paints each photo for screen-reader users as vividly as a sighted visitor sees it. Access is the ramp, the caption button, the service-dog welcome sign. It is the literal doorway through which everyone—wheelchair rider, elder with a cane, Deaf teenager reading lips—can cross the threshold.
Access asks two simple questions: Can you enter the space? and Can you reach the content?
2. Inclusion: Inviting People All the Way In
Inclusion goes further and asks: “Now that you’re inside, are you truly welcomed and supported?”
Return to that same café on poetry night. A barista greets each guest by name and guides them to a front-row table set aside for wheelchairs and walkers. The emcee checks the microphone level and the caption monitor before introducing the first poet. When a customer orders a blended drink, the barista walks out from behind the counter and hands over a touch-screen tablet at lap height; nobody has to crane a neck or raise a voice.
Inclusion is the PTA meeting that provides ASL interpreters because someone might need them, not because someone had to ask. It is the HR packet that begins with, “Here’s how to request accommodations,” rather than tucking that line into the fine print.
Inclusion signals that your presence was anticipated, your participation was planned, and your needs were part of the budget.
3. Belonging: Making the Space Theirs and Ours
Belonging transforms a welcome into a home. It states: “This place was designed with you in mind, and it will keep evolving because you are here.”
Belonging feels like walking into work on Monday and leaving the social mask at the door. The autistic graphic designer no longer rehearses small talk; fluorescent bulbs have been swapped for warm LEDs, and brainstorming happens in shared documents so quiet thinkers are heard. The project manager who uses a wheelchair rolls down hallways where tables were spaced with intention, not shoved aside at the last moment. A colleague with chronic fatigue schedules camera-off breaks without apology. In this office, performance reviews celebrate problem-solving rather than endurance of discomfort.
Belonging sounds like the gentle hum of early-morning grocery aisles during Sensory-Friendly Sunday. Overhead music stays low, the PA system keeps quiet, and checkout scanners chirp instead of beep. A neurodiverse father shops with his twins, one stimming happily in the cart, the other following a visual map offered at the entrance. No one stares; the environment already assumes their arrival.
Belonging looks like a community-theater poster where the wheelchair icon and signing-hands symbol appear right beside the show dates. It looks like public hearings with live CART captions and Spanish interpretation streaming through headsets. It looks like boardrooms where disabled leaders chair committees rather than merely consult.
Belonging means masking is never required—whether the mask hides disability, culture, sexuality, or mental health. It means the community delights in each person’s unfiltered self.
Belonging reminds us: You are not an accommodation. You are a co-architect.
Kendra LaRoche, Executive Director
June 2025
