BushBerry Books & Defining Inclusivity

In the last month, when considering the newest corner of our garden: The children’s branch, Bushberry Books in Midnight Garden; and how it should be shaped, there have been some questions. “What are you going to do to ensure your children’s branch is inclusive?” and “What sorts of activities does your training do for that?”

As I considered their questions I began to understand a trend. When we speak about doing something, humans largely take that very literally. They might imagine a checklist of actions they take, things they put in place, or what they say that then means they can look at the box marked “INCLUSIVE!”, check it off and be on their merry way. But, in reality, inclusivity is much more than that. Paradoxically, much simpler in action. At its core, being inclusive just means giving space and understanding for all the types of people to exist equally in the same space. Being curious, asking questions, giving opportunities to receive improvement and new information. While on one hand, yes, there are lists of things that we do to ensure we uphold ADA accessibility mandates, being consistently inclusive means more than just a list of chores.

Vocabulary has a way of sneaking into our worlds in different ways. Political, healthcare, identity…all of these avenues can cause a perfectly neutral word to incur emotions that are not genuinely about the process, but rather about our distaste for the ways in which they are used. Before approaching a person or group with questions about what their needs are, consider where your questions are coming from.

What it’s not:

1). Doing someone a favor

2). Being Polite

3). Someone complaining, or being dramatic

4). Someone who is incompetent or doesn’t understand what they need

What it is:

1). Being accessible to all, not just the most common, people in your community

2). Being empathetic to a world with all types of people in it

3). Being curious, and actively listening to the people around you

4). Being unassuming, knowing that we only know the world from the perspective in which we’ve lived it.

Midnight Garden is also part of the KC Disability Collective with the Empower Network, a nonprofit that works to ensure entrepreneurs with disabilities succeed in a space that society rarely fully considers when it is being shaped. Kansas City has one of the highest numbers of small business owners in the metro and surrounding areas. Why shouldn’t we strive to excel at it!? By altering our mindsets from fixing specific things on our list requirements, to asking questions and encouraging our community to take up all the space they need for us to know what we can do to make our system better. Improving businesses and community spaces towards a more inclusive environment is not only beneficial to people with disabilities, but to everyone as a whole. All people, at one point or another, will be in a place in their lives when special considerations are needed, if a system is created with that in mind it’s not going to need to catch up. It will already be.

Inclusivity might seem like a hot button issue, or a challenging concept with a fuzzy notion of how to employ it. However, at the end of the day it’s simply thinking collaboratively. As any good business owner knows, we work better when we work together! Have a frightfully positive October, and as always, keep looking for that silver lining.