Dr. Kirk Adams Posts

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams introduces Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT), a framework that grew out of the work of Jean Baker Miller and her colleagues at Wellesley College’s Stone Center, and explains how it has deepened his thinking about inclusion. Relationships were central to his Antioch University dissertation on blind adults successfully employed in American corporations, but he did not encounter RCT until after earning his PhD, when he heard Dr. Harriet Schwartz present on it with Dr. Elizabeth Holloway, one of his professors in the Leadership and Change program. RCT holds that people grow through and toward connection, and that systems of power such as racism and ableism shape who is heard, believed, and welcomed. Dr. Adams focuses on the RCT concept of “condemned isolation,” arguing that for people with disabilities this isolation is often socially manufactured by inaccessible workplaces, low expectations, and exclusion from informal networks. The answer, he writes, is not to “fix” the isolated individual but to transform the relationships, cultures, and systems that produce the isolation.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams reflects on launching the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion on September 1, in a span of days that also brought the deaths of Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, and Gloria Steinem. He writes candidly about his discomfort at honoring three white figures in a piece about a coalition devoted to diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging, and he insists that the long struggle for freedom has been led, sustained, and repeatedly rescued by Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, immigrants, workers, and countless others whose names never reach a history book. What he draws from each of the three is a lesson in using one’s gifts in service to others: Parton’s Imagination Library, whose Braille Tales partnership with the American Printing House for the Blind fills his own bookshelf with print-and-braille titles his two-year-old granddaughter brings him with the words “Grandpa, read book with your hands!”; Berry’s insistence that community is a daily practice rather than an abstract idea, the conviction behind Adams’s own philosophy of brightening the corner where you are; and Steinem’s advice to young women to listen to themselves rather than to her, together with her understanding that movements require infrastructure and not merely admired personalities.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams shares the full recording of the September 1, 2026 public launch of the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion, the national membership community created by the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion to help people working in diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility and belonging move from reactive, isolated survival mode to strategic, sustainable, collective power.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams announces that the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion went live on September 1, 2026, opened not with a webinar or a panel but with an “Ask Us Anything” hour of questions, frustrations, ideas and lived experience. He explains what the Coalition actually is: a way for members to move from reactive, isolated survival mode to strategic, sustainable, collective power, built on four words, Connect, Learn, Act, Together. He is direct about who it is for, which is everybody, and equally direct that disability inclusion and accessibility are not a side room in it but a dedicated space by design. Inside, he describes three things above all others: BELONG, the peer circles where saying “I am overwhelmed” is met with practical help rather than judgment; CLARITY, a trusted translation layer of plain-language briefings and expert-guided sessions; and POWER, the shared tools, cross-sector strategy and coalition-backed influence that turn isolated effort into coordinated action. In practice that means Ask the Experts office hours, a Member Lounge and Directory, a growing Resource Library, a Rapid Response Hub for the moments that will not wait, legislative and legal updates, podcasts featuring DEIAB voices, and a shared calendar of events worth your time.