Episode Summary

In this episode of Reimagining Disabled Futures, DAWN Canada concludes a three-part series sharing insights from focus group participants involved in the Feminist Economic Recovery Project, part of Mapping Our Future: A 10-Year Vision for Change for Women with Disabilities. Thisepisode centres the lived experiences of women and gender-diverse people with disabilities as they define what it means to live well, navigate barriers to essential services, and imagine what feminist recovery could look like in practice.

Participants reflect on how disability, chronic illness, caregiving responsibilities, and systemic exclusion shape daily life. The conversation highlights the cumulative impact of inaccessible healthcare, housing insecurity, punitive financial support systems, and excessive paperwork. Throughout the episode, participants emphasize that recovery must move beyond individual resilience and instead address the structural conditions that undermine dignity, safety, and wellbeing.

Participants: Focus group participants from DAWN Canada’s Feminist Economic Recovery Project, representing diverse disabilities, genders, regions, and lived experiences.

Key Topics Covered:

Defining "Living Well" with Disability

• Participants describe living well as deeply contextual and shaped by access, energy, and safety.
• Living well may involve small, meaningful acts such as accessing fresh air, maintaining online relationships, or contributing through volunteer work.
• Housebound and immunocompromised participants emphasize safety, masking, and access to virtual spaces.

Access to Essential ServicesParticipants identify multiple barriers across systems:

• Healthcare: inaccessible, unsafe, and often dismissive of chronic illness, neurodivergence, and trauma.
• Transportation: unreliable, car-centric, and inaccessible public transit systems.
• Food access: food banks and grocery systems that are inaccessible for people who are housebound, fatigued, or immunocompromised.
• Home care: irregular, difficult to access, and reliant on constantly re-explaining needs.

Community, Care and Disillusionment The episode explores both the promise and limits of community care.

• Disabled communities, particularly online, are described as life-saving spaces for mutual aid, information-sharing, and survival.
• Participants express grief and disillusionment with broader notions of community that fail to show up during crisis.
• Care is often provided by those with the fewest resources, highlighting systemic injustice.

What Feminist Recovery Could Look Like

• Participants imagine recovery rooted in equity and collective care.
• Universal Basic Income and adequate disability supports indexed to real costs of living.
• Reduced paperwork, less surveillance, and trust in disabled people.
• Accessible healthcare, housing, and education systems.
• Recognition that COVID-19 is ongoing and continues to disable people.
• A shift away from neoliberal individualism toward collective responsibility and care.

Reflections:

This episode underscores that feminist recovery must be grounded in disability justice and lived experience. Participants make clear that recovery is not about returning to pre-pandemic norms, but about transforming systems that continue to produce harm. Living well requires dignity, autonomy, safety, and community — conditions that cannot be achieved without structural change.Download the transcript

Parenting, caregiving,and isolation significantly shape experiences of wellbeing.