In this heartfelt episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Kirk welcomes Cheryl Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of AccessForge, to discuss Belonging by Design, a new initiative aimed at helping faith-based communities and places of worship become genuinely accessible to people with disabilities. Cheryl traces her journey from volunteering as a reader for the late DC accessibility leader Don Galloway in the mid-1990s, through two decades managing federal disability initiatives in government contracting, to becoming a caregiver for her aging mother, an experience that surfaced everyday accessibility gaps in churches, hotels, and airports. Out of those observations, she and longtime collaborator Mark Bartlett (formerly of AbleGamers) launched AccessForge in 2025 to focus on the cultural, hospitality, and faith sectors she saw lagging furthest behind.
The bulk of the conversation centers on Belonging by Design itself, a faith-agnostic training course built to help senior leaders, staff, and volunteer committees operationalize accessibility rather than treat it as a Section 508 checkbox. Cheryl walks through the framework, forming an accessibility committee that includes disabled members, setting SMART goals, and stacking short-term wins (a more accessible website, captioned sermons, accessible parking, emergency planning for disabled congregants) before tackling longer-term capital fixes. Kirk and Cheryl reflect candidly on why faith communities often lag on inclusion despite their stewardship ethos, touching on hidden disabilities, aging congregants, veterans with PTSD, and the sobering reality that a single bad experience can keep a person with a disability from ever coming back. Kirk closes with a memorable personal story of reading the entire 26-volume Braille Bible as an eight-year-old at his United Methodist Sunday school in Silverton, Oregon, anchoring the episode’s larger point that in troubled times, community matters more than ever, and faith-based spaces should be among the most welcoming places anyone can find.
Learn more from Cheryl and AccessForge
Cheryl and her colleagues at AccessForge have built Belonging By Design™, an online leadership training that helps faith community leaders turn accessibility into a retention and trust strategy. The program includes more than four hours of structured video content, downloadable tools, and a peer learning community, all designed for executive decision-makers at congregations, ministries, and denominational organizations.
Preview the first two lessons free, or explore the full program here: https://accessible.faith/dradams.
Disclosure: This is an affiliate link. If you enroll through it, I receive a commission at no additional cost to you. I only partner with organizations whose work I believe advances meaningful inclusion.
TRANSCRIPT:
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Podcast Commentator: Welcome to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams, where we bring you powerful conversations with leading voices in disability rights, employment and inclusion. Our guests share their expertise, experiences and strategies to inspire action and create a more inclusive world. If you’re passionate about social justice or want to make a difference, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in with your host, Doctor Kirk Adams.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Welcome, everybody to another episode of podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. I am that Doctor Kirk Adams in my home office in Seattle, Washington. And today I am talking to a new friend and colleague, Cheryl Mitchell. Cheryl is co-founder and CEO of AccessForge and Access forge has a new initiative called Belonging by Design that is in the world to make faith based communities and places of worship more accessible for people with disabilities. Say say hi, Cheryl.
Cheryl Mitchell: Hi, Kirk. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here, and it’s great to reach your community and talk about this wonderful initiative that we’re this project that we’re working on.
Dr. Kirk Adams: I was introduced to Cheryl by Mark Bartlett, who was formerly the leader at Able Gamers, and he and I had several conversations and and one of them, he said, you really need to get to know Cheryl. So we had one phone conversation, and then we were both at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and sat my wife, Roz was with us and we sat and talked for an hour or so. Learned a lot about belonging by design. And I started to kind of peel back those layers of all that Sheryl’s done in this space and all she’s doing now. So she she is a real champion and leader and pleased to have you here today. And as we as we talked before we started recording, just would really love to hand you the microphone and find out what your journey has been like so far and what’s motivated you to get involved the way you have. Tell us about AccessForge. Tell us about Belonging by Design. And I’ll I’ll reserve the right as the host to pop in with questions as they occur to me. Hopefully they won’t be too random, but looking forward to talking for the next half hour or so. The floor is yours.
Cheryl Mitchell: Sure. Well, how it all started was I was a volunteer through Columbia Lighthouse for the blind in the mid 90s. And so the person who I was assigned to was Don Galloway. So Don had introduced me to this whole world of accessibility. I’m sure you know him because many people knew Don Galloway.
Dr. Kirk Adams: I do, but others might not. So do you want to give us just a little.
Cheryl Mitchell: Don Don was very active. Don Galloway was very active in the DC community. He was the accessibility coordinator for the DC government responsible for, you know, a lot of the accessibility issues that were happening back then. And I was assigned to him to read to him. I used to volunteer and I would read to him in the evenings. And I worked in marketing and social research. I was working at, I believe, the Institute of Medicine back then over at the National Academy of Sciences. And then I transitioned over to, you know, some.com companies and unfortunately got laid off. And Don would tease me and he’d say, I really could use your experience as a as a consultant and helping me do some work with like the statewide Independent Living Council and all this different stuff in addition to volunteering. But I could actually pay you while you’re looking for work. And so we would joke about it. And then that’s how he introduced me to the world and introduced me to a lot of people. And I ended up I still volunteered for him, but I ended up taking a job in government contracting for an organization that managed a lot of federal contracts that supported people with disabilities.
Cheryl Mitchell: And so I spent the, the next like 20 years managing those federal initiatives from supported employment to some small projects to ticket to work to some of the work at nighter all the heavy hitters, office of disability employment policy employment for stuff like that. So I spent a lot of years advocating for people with disabilities, building partnerships with a lot of the disability organizations and nonprofit organizations that support people and quite really enjoyed it. And then my parents became ill and I was a caregiver, as well as working full time and supporting my family. But I discovered things as they were aging. I was trying to support them as a caregiver, and I was discovering how the systems were failing. And so I definitely wanted to make make a difference and try to improve those systems. So fast forward back in 2025, I really wanted to have my own consulting firm. And I had talked with Mark and we had, we were talking about some ideas.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And how did you and Mark.
Cheryl Mitchell: Mark. Mark and I met many years ago probably in the early 2000 through a former colleague that I used to work with when I was in marketing they worked together and she had mentioned to Mark. Mark was getting ready to start Ablegamers. And she said that he was doing this on the side and he was trying to, when he started the organization, he really was trying to help a family member get access to more resources. And she was like, you two need to meet because Sheryl’s in the disability space and knows everyone from the federal contractors on. So we ended up going to lunch one day in Tysons because we both worked in Tysons Corner, because we both were government contractors. His background is was QA testing and stuff like that. So we ended up meeting and having lunch, and then I started rattling off like all these resources and people he should talk to and, you know, and he was just like, oh my gosh, you’re a wealth. You’re a wealth of knowledge.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, yeah.
Cheryl Mitchell: I’ve worked I’ve worked for all these government contractors. And I, I’m in all these meetings and I, and I manage it just so happened that I was managing this contract called the Interagency Committee on Disability Research. So it was all the agencies that fund or conduct research for people with disabilities. So, you know, that covered everybody. So all these meetings you’d be in, you’d hear of people. And so I started to tell them like, well, there’s stuff here at NSF, there’s opportunities. You really need to connect with these people. So that’s how Mark and I met. So we met over 20 years ago.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. 20 years later, you’re still working together.
Cheryl Mitchell: I know we’re yeah, we’re still we’re still in the field, still advocating just different in a different space now.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So you, you brought us up to 2025 when I interrupted you. Is that when AccessForge started?
Cheryl Mitchell: Yeah, we started AccessForge in 2025. And and it was the reason why I wanted to start was because I knew that there was work that I really wanted to do, that I wanted to specialize in. And since I was older, I really wanted to focus on the work that really had meaning for me. In my experiences, especially as a caregiver for my mom. So I wanted to work more in the cultural institutions, the hospitality side airports as well as faith based organizations, because I saw firsthand the struggles, the struggles of me as a caregiver for my mother, as well as seeing other people with disabilities struggle in those areas. And I really wanted to make some improvements, work with organizations to improve the systems so that they understood how to address people with disabilities because sometimes you’re not, you know, they’re not seen. And so I was just based on experience that I had with my mother. I remember I had an issue at a hotel chain. I’m not going to bring up the name and working through that through corporate office. And I’m thinking to myself, they need training, they need training, but they need training from a holistic level from the front desk to everyone. So that they understand, they understand this and and so based on those experiences, based on experience at the airport, etc., I wanted to make, I wanted to make a difference.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So, so then as we talked about in January at CES, belonging by design is a specific focus in the faith, faith space, space.
Cheryl Mitchell: Right? AccessForge. Yet one of the areas that we focus on at AccessForge is the faith based sector. Because we noticed that faith organizations are probably one of the last groups that really aren’t addressing accessibility. They have the best intentions in terms of belonging and inclusion, but a lot of them don’t really understand the friction points between like their digital front door or their physical, physical access of the buildings. And so as I was a caregiver for my mother, my mother was a former minister before she transitioned. And we used to talk and I used to bring her to church and I would notice issues at her church and I would bring them up and I would we would talk about them. And I wanted to really have the church understand how there’s just small changes they could make that were low cost, that didn’t cost a lot, but they just more of a training that they were more embracive and empathetic and understanding to everyone. And so based on the conversations, observations that I had, I had other friends that mentioned to me in passing that had disabilities, that they were having issues in their church. And they’d asked me, since I had an accessibility background, would I talk to their church? I ended up talking to a church, you know, a couple of different churches and explaining how they could, you know, their senior leadership. I go, these are changes that can happen. It’s not looking at the individual. There’s probably more people in your church that have visual impairments or different issues.
Cheryl Mitchell: They have hidden disabilities, not just physical disabilities. And there’s better ways of addressing and making sure that you’re being truly inclusive. So we kind of went through a lot of this information and I realized I’m like, I need to package this in a way where it can be training. So that I can actually package it and be able to share it with as many faith based organizations. So Mark and I were talking. We developed this framework with all the different modules, and we wanted to make it in a way where there were resources and tools. We talked about, you know, funding opportunities in the event that churches wanted to do long term fixes. We wanted to provide them with short term wins so that if they were, you know, if they couldn’t afford to do anything right now, they could look at their website, make some changes, reach out to their congregation, ask some questions, ask how they can better support them. You know, talk to young parents with children with disabilities. Talk to the aging, the aging worshippers, because there are things that can be done. And we wanted to make sure that we kind of packaged in a way that made sense. So we created this course called Belonging by Design, which helps faith leaders operationalize accessibility, because a lot of them think that accessibility is like section 508 compliance. It’s very technical, and we’re looking at this from the whole list of are you treating people? Is everybody experiencing the same thing, regardless of their disability.
Cheryl Mitchell: So when they’re at church, are they able to follow along? Are your, you know, sermons caption is there. You know what I mean? So there’s little things that we are trying to talk about or is everything has captions or if they have if they’re just being inclusive in their whole training, holistic training from the greeters, people meeting you from the front door or parking, is there accessible parking? How much parking is there? Visitor parking, etc.. What happens if there’s an emergency? How would you how would you handle that? If there are people with disabilities that aren’t familiar with your setup or your organization? So we really kind of went through some topics and came up with a very robust, robust framework and training. And we wanted to make sure that it was faith agnostic because we recognize that people with disabilities belong to all faiths all over the world, and we knew that we were not trying to interfere with the ministry of the church. We were giving them the foundation for them to do the training, to be able to train volunteers, to be able to identify a project plan and how they can work through tackling some of these issues. And so we didn’t want any faith to be offended because it’s like, you can still continue with your teaching, teachings and doctrine, but this is just a holistic approach of how you can operationalize faith. Accessibility within your organization.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. So, so I was thinking, of course, prior to getting into this conversation with you about a couple of things. You know, I know during the civil rights era, there were statements made talking about black Americans and white Americans at the most segregated hour of the week is 11 to noon on Sundays, because that’s when people were at church. It was not a great, great segregation voluntary at churches. But then you know, I was at a Seattle Cultural access consortium all day deep dive into access of the arts. And one of the speakers was indigenous, Native American from a tribe in this area here in the Seattle area. And they were talking about at our powwows, you see people in wheelchairs and you see walkers. And it’s because we we don’t leave auntie at home. When the family goes, everybody goes. And then I was thinking about that and then I was thinking about, you know, we we know something like 70% of disabilities are non-apparent. But if you if you look at disabilities, depending on as you know, you used to work for the government.
Dr. Kirk Adams: But there’s different statistics that tell different stories. But you know, something around 20%, you would think of the population as some sort of a disability. So that would mean something like 20% of the people attending a worship service or a faith, faith based place of worship, you would think something like 15, 20% of the people in that room would be people with disabilities. But I’m guessing we’re not seeing that demographic representation in most congregations. So I just wondered what your reflections would be on any of that, on the intersectionality of disability and, and other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.. Right. And I guess, I guess my cynical self would, I don’t, yeah, I guess cynical self would say, well, the church should be the most inclusive place. You should see the greatest percentage of people with disabilities. You know, at, at, at a worship service. So just, just your thoughts, any of that, any of this cultural, any of this rooted in other social psychosocial dynamics. What do you think about that? What do you think about this stuff?
Cheryl Mitchell: Yeah, it’s interesting because I was at a church and disability conference that was held in, in the DC area last week. So I was interested to hear their conversations of churches, some organizations, some ministries that are wanting churches wanting to do better. But what I found interesting was that with the church, it’s in the church. And if and if it’s a Christian based church, they are using the Bible as reference. So there’s stories of people with disabilities all throughout the Bible. Just saying. And what I find interesting is like you said, There are people that are attending services, and I think a lot of churches aren’t asking the question of, you know, who’s who’s in the congregation, how best they can support. And you would think that a church where they’re based on stewardship wanting to serve the community that they would be already pro, you know, pro reactive in making sure that our doors are welcoming, they’re open, they’re inclusive, we understand or we’re making attempts to understand how best to serve our community. And like you said, Kirk many churches, they think they’re doing something, but they don’t realize that they are until somebody actually brings it up. And what I heard at the conference, some parents that have children with disabilities that have more of the hidden disabilities, they’re not comfortable talking with senior leadership. But there were pastors and senior leadership people at the conference. And even through the research that we did before we created the course that there are, there are many that are interested.
Cheryl Mitchell: And let’s face it, at this point in 2026, you know, somebody who has a disability, who’s aged into a disability or has a temporary disability due to having surgery, having, you know, knee replacement, hip replacement, or, you know, like my mother having she acquired some disabilities later on in life. There’s, there’s dementia, there’s Alzheimer’s, there’s all of these things, there’s all different types of people who are walking through veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. A lot of, a lot of trauma has happened in people’s lives and they go to church for comfort. But what’s ironic is a lot of times people with disabilities, they may go, but if they have a bad experience, They don’t. They no longer attend. They won’t attend again to that church and they may just stay home. And this is a form of community involvement. And you would think the church would be really behind this, which many like I said, some are changing, but as a whole, a lot of faith based organizations are behind. And that’s why this was something kind of, of since I was a caregiver for my mother, I worked in the field. I wanted something, a product where any faith based organization could use. We didn’t want to interfere with their ministry. Right. You know, but you need you need to address, you need to address these concerns.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So the Belonging by design course that you’ve created that will help senior leaders, administrators to understand better how to create an environment where people would be Encouraged would be comfortable and self disclosing that, you know, this is the impairment, whether it’s visual hearing, cognitive mobility. And I would have a better, better experience. If you knew about this, if you took this into account, if you made this small change. So as part of it, just to open the listening you know, I would, I would think a lot of people in leadership positions and faith based communities are volunteers. They may not have experience in, in these spaces like, like you and I do. So just really curious about the content of the course and the learning outcomes and who’s, who’s the, who’s the intended audience, what, what are, what are the changes you hope to be making by offering? Well.
Cheryl Mitchell: The goal, like we, we broke it into different modules. So module one the goal is that either a faith based leader or a faith delegate staff, or even if they delegate some volunteers because, as you know, most churches operate on volunteers. That’s why we when we were setting this up, we wanted to make sure that there were resources and tools because we noticed that there was a lot of a lot of, or like the work that we saw. They were talking about the why, but they weren’t talking about how like how to implement what to do. And we wanted them to have a strong foundation of building spaces where access leads to belonging and belonging leads to engagement and engagement fuels growth. So we wanted to make sure that, like the first two lessons that they can unlock for free, anybody who goes to our website, it’s accessibility dot faith, where they can see the belonging by design, all the different chapters of the training. We talk about the learning objectives, things like that for each section and how long it is. And then of course, how many resource tools and handouts are associated with each section. So for example, if a if a pastor is not, say he doesn’t have a accessibility volunteer committee and has no idea what to do we wrote out like step by step in terms of what to do, like how to make a request, you know, over, you know, over your weekend service or through your newsletter or whatever, and then how you would motivate and empower the volunteers.
Cheryl Mitchell: We talked about the roles, why it’s important that they see your support from the very beginning, and they see how you’re going to be supporting this, even if you’re delegating it to a small group of committee, you’ll identify a leader, and then there will be additional people that will be a part of that, and how you need to have people make sure there’s representative people that have disabilities within the within that group so that you get that feedback. And then of course, how they would check in, how they would check in with the pastor because the pastor is always busy. You know, the senior pastor is busy, so he can’t be involved in everything, but he still has a responsibility to check in to make sure that things are moving forward. And we’re teaching the, the staff, the volunteer staff how to stay focused. What are Smart goals? You know, focus on the project. Don’t get out of scope. And we teach them basic project management tools within the resources so that they can have successful wins and actually have little wins and be able to work on work on projects, smart goals that can be done in 30 days. So the short term goals versus long term goals.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So you mentioned you mentioned the website where people can go. I’m going to put a link in the show notes of this podcast that people can use, and please do. So I’m guessing if someone is listening who is part of a faith based community or has a family member who has a disability, who would like to be more involved, they can take this information to the leadership of their congregation and urge them to click on that link and download those first free two lessons and hopefully take it all the way through as.
Cheryl Mitchell: They can listen. They can unlock the first two lessons with their email address so they can listen. And then of course, we encourage, we encourage, you know, family members, you know, if you belong to a faith based organization. Yeah, there are eight minutes a piece, the two lessons that you can unlock. Okay. But at least this way you’re hearing this and there’s a lot of information, and then you can bring this to your faith based organization and share it with them because they’re able to purchase it or, or anyone can purchase this training. They can purchase it and and get all the resources and tools. And the other benefit is that when someone, when someone does sign up, there’s access to the online community for a year. So we also, in addition to all of this, we have special guests that speak. So there might be somebody that speaks on Alzheimer’s or whatever. It’s all based on we, we, we provide different programming, but we also want to hear from, from everyone who’s part of this part of the community because we want to make sure that we’re serving the community.
Dr. Kirk Adams: I just had a flashback. I was probably eight years old, and my parents would take us and drop us off at Sunday school. They didn’t attend church, but I think they appreciated the. Some time away from their children on a Sunday mid-morning. But it was the United Methodist Church in Silverton, Oregon. Okay. I later became the part of United Methodist Youth and was part of the Bell Choir to middle school, which was awesome. But the, the, the congregation gifted me a Braille copy of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, 26 Braille volumes. Cheryl, which took up a whole shelf in our entryway of our home. And being, being a blind kid, living out in the country with often not a lot to do and a little access to all the Braille I wanted. I read that, I read the I read it old testament, new testament. And I know sometimes I had mentioned people would mention, do you read the Bible? And I’d say, well, I read it. They say the whole thing. I said, yeah, I guess the whole thing when I was eight years old, I think. But how long did it take? Do you.
Cheryl Mitchell: Remember how long it took.
Dr. Kirk Adams: You? A whole summer, for sure. Probably longer than that. I remember yeah. Dug. Dug. Right in. But this is tremendous. I think not to get political, but in these troubled times, we need community more than ever. People need to be able to find places of support and solace and hope and faith based communities provide all that and more. So what you’re doing is, is really important. And again, let people know one more time how they can get involved with belonging by design.
Cheryl Mitchell: Sure. They can go to our website. They can either go to https://accessforge.com. That’s the name of the company. But we normally use access access access https://accessible.faith you can go directly to. Yeah https://accessible.faith. You can go directly to https://belongingbydesign.com. And we have we have videos. We have we have a lot of information about the framework. And like I said, you can view the whole course outline and it talks about the learning objectives for each one.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And we’re making it easy, easy for you. There’s a link in the show notes of this podcast. So go. Go for it. Check it out. Refer people to it. Bring it to your faith based community. Encourage people to get involved with making your communities more accessible for everybody. And with that, thank you so much, Cheryl. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, my website is https://DrKirkAdams.com, and you can sign up for my email newsletter there. You can reach out to me the contact form. I’m happy. I’m happy to talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere without making the world a more accessible place for people with disabilities and more inclusive place for everybody. So thank you, Cheryl. So let’s talk again and we’ll check on your progress. A few months down the road.
Cheryl Mitchell: Yes. Thank you so much.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Thanks, everyone.
Podcast Commentator: Thank you for listening to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. We hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Don’t forget to subscribe, share or leave a review at https://www.DrKirkAdams.com. Together we can amplify these voices and create positive change. Until next time, keep listening, keep learning, and keep making an impact.
” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “
Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation
Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI)
Executive Director
Strengthening individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.
Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here
American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.
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