What does Disability Pride mean to me?
July is Disability Pride Month, and Camp Summit will be honoring the lives of those with diverse abilities. Today on the blog, Camp Summit staff member Allie Becker will take us through what disability pride means to her as an autistic individual and valued member of Camp Summit staff. Allie joined our team in January 2025. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre with a minor in Nonprofit Administration from Ohio Northern University. With interests and skills ranging from music and theatre education to political advocacy, Allie loves to spend her time helping others and encouraging creativity and compassion.
Every day at Camp Summit, we get to celebrate the amazing things our campers can do. One of the coolest truths we see proven again and again is that our campers do awesome stuff not in spite of their disabilities but in concert with them.
A big part of my role as Camp Summit’s Registrar and Receptionist is talking to prospective camper families, and a common thread I hear is, “Your campers do that?” Whether they’re thinking of someone in a wheelchair doing archery or someone nonverbal playing games with their friends, sometimes people (even people with a loved one with a disability) have a hard time envisioning those with disabilities participating in these ways. That makes sense, because we live in a world that is rarely built to be accessible and inclusive.
I get to be familiar with our not-always-accessible world in my own special way—I’m autistic and have mental illness diagnoses, which can sometimes make everyday life hard to navigate. Often when I mention this, people are surprised. I have a full-time job, a couple part-time jobs; I live alone and love to travel solo; when I leave my comfort zone, I don’t so much step out of it as fling myself out with reckless abandon. But…people with disabilities can’t do those things, can they?
In a class I took last year, my professor pointed out that “the disabled” is the only legally protected group whose identity is determined entirely by what they are not. Folks with disabilities are verbally defined as a group lacking something that “normal” people have. When I think about that, it starts to make a lot of sense why people get so focused on what I, or all kinds of people with all kinds of disabilities, cannot do.
This is why I’m so proud to work at Camp Summit. We spend our time on what our campers can do. While most spaces are designed for the non-disabled and then adapted to accommodate disability, our facilities and activities are barrier-free from the start. And the more I learn about my own neurodivergence, the more I realize how rare that is.
Autism and mental illness are conditions that affect people in a ton of different ways. The term “autism spectrum” has become much more widely used in the last few years, but it’s important to remember that the spectrum isn’t a horizontal line with “not autistic” on one end and “super-duper autistic” on the other. At a training the Camp Summit staff attended before the start of the summer season, we had it explained to us through the analogy of the prism.
When light hits a prism, it’s refracted and then comes out as a rainbow of colors. Depending on the angle, some colors come out brighter, some more dim. This color spectrum is a lot like the autism spectrum. Some autistic people may be stellar verbal communicators but struggle with sensory input; some may hate being in big crowds but love spending time with a few chosen people; some might find it impossible to focus on schoolwork or reading but lose themselves in the flow of a physical or creative activity. The spectrum affects each person differently, and then especially adding on any other conditions, like mental illness in my case, no two people with autism look the same.
No two people with any disability look the same, and sometimes this makes it hard to find unity, and thus, hard to find pride. I know I’ve felt that struggle. But learning about our camp, our campers, their caregivers and families, our staff, our history—these things have taught me a lot about what disability pride means.
Disability pride is celebrating all the incredible things we can do—and not feeling like a burden because of the things we can’t. It’s existing in spaces that not only fit our needs but are built to fit our needs and designed for us to thrive. It’s trying new things, seeing that we’re not alone, and facing challenges with optimism, not fear.
And at our “Remarkable Place for Remarkable People,” it’s pretty clear to see that here, every month is Disability Pride Month.
