My experience as an AmeriCorps rookie

By Colin Wilfrid, AmeriCorps KCDC Coordinator for Disability Empowerment Center

Headshot of Colin

My job as the AmeriCorps King County Disability Consortium (KCDC) Coordinator was my first job since I graduated from the University of Oregon (UO) in June of 2024. With this AmeriCorps position, I was given the opportunity to see the state of disability rights in the United States with a new perspective that I did not experience when I was in grade school and college. I was diagnosed with autism when I was three years old, and I was lucky to have parents who cared for me and believed in me. My parents made sure I was surrounded by an amazing team of trusted adults who worked extra hard to help me thrive in the community, even in my college years when I no longer lived with them. They made sure my teachers and professors adhered to my accommodation requests, and if I struggled in a class, they supported my learning with the help of a tutor. After a series of incidents in my middle school years where I had meltdowns and my classmates laughed at me, my parents helped me make a PowerPoint presentation where I explained my disability, giving my classmates tips on how they can help and be my friends. My parents accepted me for who I was, and they made sure the other people in my life accepted me for who I was, too. If that were not the case, I would have probably not graduated from UO.

My whole life, I wondered what my childhood would have looked like if I did not have the resources that led me to graduate from the University of Oregon. By serving an AmeriCorps term with the Disability Empowerment Center, I was given an idea of what that life would have looked like. One aspect that makes the Disability Empowerment Center (DEC) stand out compared to the other disability resources I have interacted with is that their services are free. Appointments with DEC staff members are free, the peer groups DEC offers are free, the events DEC holds are free, and even the resources in the cabinets are free. This is done as a way to make their services more accessible to community members and, as a Center for Independent Living, the Disability Empowerment Center relies on federal funding and grants for support.

In March of 2020, as a response to King County’s initial COVID-19 relief plan not incorporating disability community feedback, the Disability Empowerment Center’s Executive Director, Kimberly Meck, founded KCDC, a group of stakeholders that meets every month to discuss current issues impacting the disability community so lawmakers can take action and impact change on a systemic level. In 2021, KCDC began the Understanding Ableism series of webinars, where people with disabilities and those who worked with them talk about how ableism impacts different aspects of their lives. In 2020 and 2021, KCDC received a lot of attention; their monthly meetings helped people from all over King County understand how the pandemic was impacting the disability community, and people from all over the United States reported learning from their Understanding Ableism webinars. However, in 2022, many people without disabilities began to declare the pandemic, “over.” As a result, KCDC, a coalition that was initially formed to remedy the pandemic’s impact, began to lose viewers. The attendance at KCDC meetings was lower, and the Understanding Ableism series was put on hiatus.

To revitalize the Understanding Ableism series for an era where less people cared about the consequences of COVID-19, DEC partnered with AmeriCorps to create the KCDC Coordinator job. As DEC’s first-ever AmeriCorps KCDC Coordinator, I focused on brainstorming ways to return Understanding Ableism to its early pandemic glory, while the permanent DEC staff members continued to focus on helping Washingtonians with disabilities thrive. To understand more about KCDC and Understanding Ableism, I watched each of the Understanding Ableism webinars that were posted on the DEC YouTube page in 2021. One important detail I found was that all the guest speakers on the 2021 webinars were from King County. Since people from all over the United States have been watching Understanding Ableism webinars, KCDC had the opportunity to start inviting guest speakers from outside of King County so they can embrace Understanding Ableism’s national effect. Luckily, as someone who went to high school in the Bay Area and went to college at the University of Oregon, I knew a lot of disability advocates and allies who live outside of King County who might be interested in speaking on some Understanding Ableism webinars. For instance, one of my friends from the University of Oregon, who is a wheelchair user, was not able to get to some of her classes on time because one of her residence hall’s two elevators broke down, and the University of Oregon did not bother fixing it until multiple months later. Therefore, I decided to invite that friend to the webinar that I scheduled for April, which was about housing discrimination, since she experienced housing discrimination while living in her college dorm.

The first three webinars that I worked on were huge successes. Fellow DEC team members and the public alike were impressed with the performances of the guest speakers I recruited. My goal for every webinar was to recruit three to four guest speakers, and whenever I could not think of enough guest speakers to recruit, DEC staff members helped me by connecting me with people who they thought would be good guest speakers on Understanding Ableism webinars. For instance, I found recruiting for the March webinar to be more difficult, since I did not know of very many people who were experts in how disability intersects with the Legal System. With the help of my colleagues, I was able to recruit four people to speak on the Legal System webinar including two attorneys and a paralegal. After the Legal System webinar, one of my colleagues told me he was impressed, adding that he had never seen three legal workers talk about disability on the same webinar up to that point.

Then, on April 28, while I was in the middle of my break from work for a meeting with my fellowship over Zoom, my supervisor called me to tell me that the federal government pulled funding from all AmeriCorps programs, forcing me to go on administrative leave. While it was a pain to see my fear of funding cuts forcing me to stop doing my job get confirmed at first, the month and a half off allowed me to reflect on why I applied for the KCDC Coordinator job in the first place in a way that would not have been possible if my AmeriCorps term ran its course. If an AmeriCorps member completes 1,700 hours of service by the end of their term, they receive a Segal Education Award that is worth $7,395.00. Before the funding freeze, I worked extra hours as well as on weekends so I could try and make up the hours I missed for some of my occasional daytime commitments, such as meetings with my fellowship and meetings with my therapist. I also wanted to make up hours for two weeklong vacations that I took with my extended family. One of which was for Christmas week at my parents’ beach house in Santa Cruz, California. The other was for an overseas trip to Norway from late June to early July. Since the funding freeze meant that I could not work whether it was at the Disability Empowerment Center or at home, and no matter what time it took place at, I realized that working after hours and on weekends took a toll on my mental health. I made more time to take walks around my neighborhood, chat with my friends and go on more fun outings.

While I have learned a lot from my tumultuous first year as an AmeriCorps member, the social aspect of my only AmeriCorps term so far has left a lot to be desired. I was one of three AmeriCorps members that the Disability Empowerment Center contracted to serve with them from mid-October 2024 to late-August 2025. Among them, I was the only member of Generation Z; the other two AmeriCorps members who served alongside me are much older. I went to a few orientation sessions on Zoom for members of Washington Service Corps, AmeriCorps’ Washington State-run branch, and at those meetings, there were more people who were my age. Christine Dodson, my co-AmeriCorps member, also wrote a blog post about what it was like to serve as an AmeriCorps member this year. In that blog post, she reveals that when she joined AmeriCorps in 2014, she was sent to an in-person retreat where she participated in team-building exercises. While I understand that AmeriCorps’ decision to switch to virtual orientation was done to save money and increase accessibility, I did not make any connections with other AmeriCorps volunteers in the virtual format that the orientation for my first AmeriCorps term was conducted in. If my AmeriCorps orientation was done in-person, then I would have been more likely to exchange contact information with other AmeriCorps members and keep in touch with them.

As the first person to occupy the AmeriCorps KCDC Coordinator role at Disability Empowerment Center, I have noticed one more limitation that Disability Empowerment Center has as a federally funded nonprofit that I acknowledge is beyond their control. Since DEC was looking to expand their outreach and educate more people about the importance of Centers for Independent Living, they needed more people to join their team. Therefore, they partnered with AmeriCorps to create three different job openings for the 2024-2025 AmeriCorps cycle, including the AmeriCorps role that I took on. With the money to pay me for this job coming from a program run by the federal government, it was up to the government how much money I was paid. This was why my pay is part of a stipend that does not reflect my contribution to DEC, as well as why I could not work from when the federal government defunded AmeriCorps to when a judge reversed that decision. To be paid a fair wage by DEC themselves, I suggested that they find grant money from a local government agency, since the values of the Washington, King County and Seattle governments differ from that of the United States government. However, since the federal government’s finance decisions have some sort of impact on all statewide and regional economies, money became tight in Washington, King County and Seattle, making grant money to pay me for as long as possible less likely.

Also, since my AmeriCorps role is part of a contract where I need to work full time, and I got the hang of doing what DEC wanted me to do quickly, there were some days where I needed to figure out what I could do on my own. Since I was on a temporary AmeriCorps contract, my invitations for people to speak on Understanding Ableism webinars were not sent through my email address, but instead by DEC’s Outreach and Education Coordinator, Mariel Woodley, who supervised me while I worked on Understanding Ableism’s webinars. Since Mariel oversees outreach for the whole organization, she had other duties that were more urgent than emailing my messages to the people I had in mind to speak on Understanding Ableism webinars. When my email messages were sent, the potential speakers I recruited often took a while to write back to my invitations. With time, availability and stipulations on my AmeriCorps contract playing major factors to how I invited potential guest speakers to talk on Understanding Ableism webinars, there was less time for me to spend on updating my data based on who can and cannot speak on Understanding Ableism’s webinars. For those reasons, I believe the KCDC Coordinator role made more sense as a part-time job than as a full-time job. Although, the reason why that is not the case is once again due to limited money; it financially made the most sense for the Disability Empowerment Center’s budget to contract me through AmeriCorps instead of their using their own money.

The limits to how the Disability Empowerment Center was able to welcome me on their team is a perfect reminder of how much unfinished business the disability community needs to focus on. Section 504, the ADA, IDEA and Olmstead may have given the disability community more say in the United States’ policies now than decades ago, but there is still a lot of work to do to make sure people with disabilities have equal rights with people without disabilities. We need to educate people who have never been in our shoes about just how much privilege they have compared to us and how treating us with compassion could benefit all people, regardless of their ability. Unfortunately, people who do not believe that the disability community matters have enough money to amplify their preachings of ableism in ways that convince the young and impressionable to adhere to social norms. Even though ableism is against the law, the reason why it often gets unchecked is because enough people believe disability is a bad thing.

Rather than continuing to assume that people with disabilities are not capable of doing the same things as them, people without disabilities should realize that people with disabilities have ambitions that are as big as those of people without disabilities. While the process of making people with disabilities’ dreams come true will probably look different from what people without disabilities are used to, it will unite people with and without disabilities rather than divide them. I have long wanted to have a job where I did not have to worry about somebody believing my work does not matter, just like people without disabilities take for granted. However, since enough people do not believe the disability community should have basic rights, my first year in AmeriCorps was impacted by changes in our political climate that do not empower people with disabilities, despite the name of the site I served at.