Disability-inclusive grassroots disaster response is the set of community-based practices through which disabled people, attendants, peer networks, and local organizations sustain life under emergency conditions when formal systems are inaccessible, absent, or too slow. Within emergent disaster response, this literature matters because it shows that disabled people are not only a vulnerable population to be managed. They are also participants in the community infrastructures that make response possible [@engelman2022; @kennedy2021].
Community-based infrastructure
Alina Engelman and coauthors argue that community-based organizations in Puerto Rico are critically important for emergency preparedness and response for people with disabilities and older adults because the archipelago faces recurring disasters under severe constraints on government capacity [@engelman2022]. Their study places these organizations at the forefront of emergency work before, during, and after disaster rather than at the margins of response [@engelman2022].
That finding aligns with this school’s broader emphasis on non-state capacity. In Puerto Rico, the issue is not simply that community-based organizations are helpful supplements. It is that they often become the practical infrastructure of response where colonial dependence, austerity, privatization, and recurring disaster have narrowed the state’s ability to respond equitably [@engelman2022].
Independent living and attendant networks
Jae Kennedy, Lex Frieden, and Jennifer Dick-Mosher show a related pattern during COVID-19 through Centers for Independent Living, which are community-based organizations designed and operated by people with disabilities [@kennedy2021]. Their survey responses emphasize that people living in the community often depend on paid attendants and non-paid caregivers for daily survival, and that pandemic disruption to those relations quickly became a crisis of getting out of bed, eating, taking medication, and maintaining basic autonomy [@kennedy2021].
This is significant because it changes what counts as disaster infrastructure. Response is not only shelters, command centers, and supply chains. It is also attendant labor, accessible communication, peer support, and community organizations capable of helping people maintain life outside institutions [@kennedy2021].
Preparedness and community advantage
Disability research also shows that preparedness cannot be reduced to individual responsibility. Rachel Adams, David Eisenman, and Deborah Glik found that disabled participants with poor health and activity limitations engaged in fewer preparedness behaviors, but that living in communities with greater social and housing advantages reduced some of that disadvantage [@adams2019].
That finding supports a central claim of this school: capacity is relational. It depends on neighborhood conditions, organizational presence, and trusted networks, not only on whether individuals have been told to prepare [@adams2019].
Practice under recurring disaster
Suzanne McDermott, Kathy Martin, and Jevettra Devlin Gardner describe South Carolina’s disability response to the 2015 flood as swift because of a strong collaborative network, while still noting unresolved challenges [@mcdermott2016]. Their article is brief, but it reinforces a pattern visible across the other sources: disabled survival in disaster often depends on preexisting collaborative networks that can act quickly when ordinary support arrangements break down.
Within emergent disaster response, that means disability-inclusive work should not be treated as a specialized add-on to a general response. It should be understood as one of the clearest tests of whether a community response is actually capable of sustaining life beyond the imagined average survivor.
Significance
Disability-inclusive grassroots disaster response broadens this school in two ways. First, it makes accessibility, attendant labor, and peer-led infrastructure central rather than secondary. Second, it shows that the line between disaster response and everyday social reproduction is often thin for people whose continued independence already depends on community support.
For that reason, disability-inclusive response belongs beside COVID-19 Mutual Aid as Long-Haul Disaster Response and Studying Emergent Disaster Response. It sharpens the school’s attention to who gets left behind when response is imagined from the standpoint of able-bodied norms.
Sources
- PMC: Engelman et al., Assessing the Emergency Response Role of Community-Based Organizations
- PMC: Kennedy et al., Responding to the Needs of People with Disabilities in the COVID-19 Pandemic
- PubMed: McDermott et al., Disaster response for people with disability
- PubMed: Adams et al., Community Advantage and Individual Self-Efficacy Promote Disaster Preparedness