06/15/2026
The Problem Was Never the Silos
There is a sentence I have heard for most of my forty-five years in the disability rights and justice movement: “We have to break down the silos.” It surfaces whenever people feel disconnected — across disabilities, generations, organizations, geographies, and strategies. Wherever people encounter boundaries, someone eventually concludes that the boundaries themselves are the problem.
The impulse is understandable. It is also, I have come to believe, wrong.
The disability rights movement was never supposed to be one thing. In some movements, fragmentation is evidence of weakness; in ours, decentralization was built into the architecture. Centers for Independent Living, Protection and Advocacy systems, developmental disability networks, self-advocacy organizations, direct-action groups, legal advocates, researchers, and service providers each emerged for different reasons, under different laws, through different funding streams, in response to different needs. The diversity was not a bug in the design.
It was the design.
What we keep calling “silos” is often something healthier: specialization. A mature ecosystem develops specialization because different problems demand different forms of expertise. A healthy forest contains trees, fungi, insects, birds, rivers, and soil, and none performs the function of the others. Their strength comes not from sameness but from difference. The movement is no different.
So the problem is not that we have different communities. The problem is that those communities often cannot learn from one another. Across the country, people are winning local victories, building coalitions, collecting data, training leaders, and preserving hard-earned lessons — and much of that knowledge stays trapped inside organizations, states, disability constituencies, and personal networks. A developmental disability advocate in Indiana may have no idea that a blind activist in California solved a similar problem three years ago. A new generation of organizers may spend years rediscovering lessons that earlier generations already learned. Not because anyone is hiding anything, but because there are few durable ways for knowledge, experience, and relationships to travel across the movement.
The knowledge exists. The pathways do not.
From inside any one organization, constituency, state, or strategy, it is nearly impossible to see the movement as a whole. Each of us experiences our own corner of it as the movement itself — not out of arrogance, but because position limits perspective. And so we mistake a connectivity problem for a unity problem. We reach for solutions that look like unity: a charismatic leader, a powerful coalition, a major funder, a national campaign. Sometimes those efforts help for a while. Then the leader retires, the coalition dissolves, the campaign ends, or the grant runs out.
What was missing was not unity. It was infrastructure.
By infrastructure I do not mean a new hierarchy, a command center, or an organization that speaks for everyone. I mean a shared utility — a neutral layer through which information, relationships, opportunities, history, and lessons can travel while communities keep their own leadership, priorities, and independence. The movement does not need another central authority. It needs better connective tissue.
For decades we have compensated for the absence of that tissue with people. The movement’s memory lives inside human beings: the ones who know everybody, remember the history, recall which state fought a battle before, and can point to the lawyer or organizer or lesson that matters. Those people are invaluable. But they are not infrastructure. When we treat advocates and elders as living archives, communication networks, and institutional memory, we should not be surprised that burnout is common, that younger leaders struggle to find what came before them, and that knowledge disappears when someone retires, steps back, or dies. And when information and access flow through a handful of highly visible individuals, visibility itself gets confused with leadership — not because of anyone’s character, but because so few people can see across the whole.
Our current reliance on individual leaders is a testament to our dedication, but it is an unsustainable burden for the long term. The more the movement depends on those individuals, the more vulnerable it becomes to burnout, retirement, illness, conflict, or simple human limitation.
This is not a personal failure. It is a structural one.
Heroic leadership and durable infrastructure solve different problems. A leader can inspire action, mobilize attention, and help a movement see what is possible. Infrastructure does something else: it preserves memory, distributes knowledge, and keeps relationships and lessons accessible long after any particular leader has stepped away. The goal is not to eliminate leadership. It is to ensure that the movement’s capacity does not vanish when leadership changes. A movement should not have to choose between honoring its leaders and preserving what they helped build. It should be able to do both.
None of this requires less diversity. It requires greater capacity to learn from ourselves. A healthy movement lets independent communities stay independent while building enough connectivity that they can coordinate, share resources, preserve history, and recognize themselves as part of something larger than their own surroundings. That connectivity does not happen by accident. It requires pathways.
Think of the electrical grid. Every home keeps its own lights, appliances, and purpose. The grid does not erase those differences; it simply lets energy flow. The disability rights and justice movement is full of energy. The challenge has never been generating it. The challenge is helping it travel.
A movement that can learn from itself can remember. A movement that can remember can build on what earlier generations achieved instead of starting over. A movement that can coordinate across distance, disability, and time becomes more than the sum of its parts.
The problem was never the silos. The problem was that too many of them stood in isolation. And if decentralization was built into the movement’s architecture, then the answer cannot be centralization. The answer is connective tissue — the ability to discover, learn, coordinate, and build across many independent communities. Not one organization, not one leader, not one voice. A movement, at last, capable of learning from itself.
— JW
