“Access Is a Culture, Not a Checklist”: Ann Wai-Yee Kwong ’15 on Redefining Disability

“Compliance gets you a ramp. But culture makes you feel welcome walking through the door.”

Ann Wai-Yee Kwong ’15

At UC Berkeley’s Disability Cultural Community Center (DCCC), a new kind of access is being shaped, one that doesn’t begin with regulations or end with accommodation requests. Instead, it begins with people. With stories. With culture. And leading that charge is Ann Wai-Yee Kwong ’15, the center’s founding coordinator and an alum whose story is as layered as the systems she’s working to transform.

Blind, neurodivergent, first-gen, and working-class, Ann’s lived experience has never been a footnote to her leadership. It is the blueprint. For her, access is not a buzzword, but a practice. Not a fix, but a beginning.

“I didn’t find a community. I built it.”

When Ann arrived at UC Berkeley, she didn’t find a readymade community. What she did find, however, was a history: a campus that birthed the Disability Rights Movement, a network of disabled alumni who had changed federal policy, and a legacy of student-led access advocacy.

But legacy alone wasn’t enough.

“I was one of maybe two students using a white cane across campus,” she recalls. “It was a very lonely and scary experience.”

So, she started building. From organizing peer mentorship programs to co-founding the Disabled Students Union, Ann helped create infrastructure where there was none. Along the way, she reimagined access not as something granted by power, but generated through relationship.

She cultivated joy in places where silence had lived. She made sure no disabled student had to wonder if they belonged. “The first time I was around other disabled students,” Ann shares, “I realized I didn’t have to explain myself. We spoke the same language.”

Space to Be

Much of Ann’s advocacy hinges on the distinction between services and culture.

“Disability services helped me graduate,” she says. “But disability culture helped me thrive.”

That distinction is at the heart of the Disability Cultural Community Center, which she now leads. Founded in 2022, it’s one of the first of its kind in the country: not a service provider, but a cultural hub, a space that honors the diverse identities, expressions, and lived experiences within disability.

Here, students host art nights and poetry readings. They process collective grief. They ask hard questions and celebrate each other’s presence.

“There’s so much talk about what disabled people need,” Ann says. “But what we really need is space to just be. To be whole, to be joyful, to be messy and healing and angry and hopeful.”

Language as Liberation

Ann’s academic background is in linguistics and social welfare, and that dual lens permeates her work.

“When we talk about ‘inclusive language,’ we often reduce it to terminology,” she says. “But language is culture. It carries our history, our trauma, our futures.”

She’s careful with her words, replacing phrases like “wheelchair-bound” with “wheelchair user,” not out of political correctness, but because language shapes what’s possible.

It’s this sensitivity to narrative that also informs her policy work. Ann has testified before the U.S. Senate, spoken at national disability conferences, and served as a translator between institutional systems and community needs.

“Too often, institutions design policy for disabled people without us in the room,” she says. “Access is not a service. It’s a relationship.”

Interdependence Over Independence

One of the most radical values Ann espouses is interdependence, a counterpoint to the myth of rugged individualism so often upheld in higher education.

“There’s this unspoken idea that the most successful students are the most self-sufficient,” she says. “But for disabled students, interdependence is how we survive. It’s also how we lead.”

At the DCCC, that means prioritizing collaborative care. Students are encouraged to check in with each other, create community norms around rest, and resist the productivity-at-all-costs culture that defines so much of academic life.

“Sometimes, access means canceling a meeting because someone’s mental health is low,” Ann says. “Sometimes, it means saying, ‘I need help.’ That’s not a weakness. That’s the work.”

Reimagining the Future of Access

When asked what access should look like in higher ed, Ann doesn’t hesitate:

“Access should be how we begin. Not an afterthought. Not an accommodation. A value.”

That reimagining begins with shifting power, away from compliance departments and toward cultural centers, peer networks, and disabled-led organizing.

It also means funding. Visibility. Investment in disabled joy.

“There’s a reason why disability cultural centers are still rare,” she says. “It’s not just about logistics. It’s about whether institutions see us as people with culture, not just people with needs.”

From Berkeley to the Movement

Ann’s work doesn’t stop at campus borders. She’s part of a growing national movement of disabled leaders reshaping how institutions, industries, and media engage with disability.

Still, she keeps coming back to storytelling. “Stories humanize. They build bridges. They name what data can’t.”

And her story, rooted in care, shaped by struggle, blooming in community, is a story that calls all of us in.

As Disability Pride Month unfolds, Ann’s vision reminds us what’s possible when we move beyond checklists. When we design not just for access, but for belonging. Not just for inclusion, but for liberation.

And when we recognize that disability is not a barrier to leadership. It’s a source of leadership.