Access is not optional

By nae vallejo, access designer and experiential archivist

The poem is not an indictment but an invitation. It calls nonprofits and creative institutions to reimagine access not as a logistical hurdle but as a foundation for justice.

we arrive,
hands full of labor, stories,
ideas that shimmer against your grant spreadsheets. 

you ask us to join,
to “contribute”
without the scaffolding
that lets us exist fully in our work. 

our needs are not extras
to be tacked on later,
our time is not a favor,
our breath is not yours to measure. 

we bring translation,
caption, quiet space,
so that your programs
might finally hold all of us. 

pay us upfront.
pay us for the ways we survive
in rooms not built for our bodies,
pay us for the wisdom
we carry in every synapse, every tendon, every story. 

if you want justice,
start here:
our access is not optional,
our labor is not invisible,
our presence is not free. 

Artist Statement for Access Is Not Optional 

Access Is Not Optional is a poem shaped by my lived experience as a Black-Native, trans, disabled creator navigating nonprofit and creative spaces that often claim inclusion but do not practice it. The poem speaks from a body that has carried labor, wisdom, and survival into rooms that were not built with us in mind. It examines the tension between being invited into a space and being meaningfully supported within it, naming the gap between nonprofit ideals and nonprofit behaviors. 

The poem’s central assertion is simple: access and compensation are not add-ons, and disabled labor is not incidental. In many professional and creative environments, access needs are treated as logistical inconveniences rather than structural responsibilities. They are delayed, minimized, underfunded, or framed as an individual burden, something the disabled person must negotiate, justify, or apologize for. At the same time, our contributions are celebrated rhetorically while undervalued materially. The poem pushes against that contradiction. 

Through repetition and pared-down imagery, the poem refuses the idea that access is secondary. Each stanza moves from invitation (“you ask us to join”) to the reality beneath that invitation: that “joining” often requires disabled people to do the emotional, cultural, and logistical translation work that makes the space function in the first place. We bring the captions, the quiet corners, the pacing adjustments, the relational scaffolding, the practices that allow programs to actually include the communities they claim to serve. In this poem, naming those forms of labor is itself an act of reclamation. 

This piece speaks directly to nonprofit leaders, program directors, funders, and collaborators, the people who shape accessibility culture whether they realize it or not. It asks them to consider how access is governed in their institutions: who funds it, who delays it, who is harmed when it is absent, and who is asked to bear the cost. It also speaks to disabled and neurodivergent creatives who will recognize the exhaustion behind the language, and the quiet power of insisting on what we need without apology. 

The poem is not an indictment but an invitation. It calls nonprofits and creative institutions to reimagine access not as a logistical hurdle but as a foundation for justice. It asks them to understand that payment, access, and respect are inseparable, that honoring disabled presence means resourcing disabled survival from the start, not after harm or oversight. 

Access Is Not Optional emerges from the belief that true equity requires both acknowledgment and action. The poem names what many of us have lived, and hopes to shift how institutions listen, prepare, and respond, not later, not conditionally, but now.