What Makes My Week Work: An Accessible Home and Reliable Transportation

“What Makes My Week Work” is a new series in GCDD’s Making a Difference magazine. The goal is to share advocacy and success stories from self-advocates across Georgia. They talk about what helps their week go well and what needs to improve so people with disabilities can live and participate fully in their communities, as promised by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Olmstead Decision. Would you like to share your story? Complete this form.

This month, LJ Young and Sheila Jeffrey, a married couple living in College Park, Georgia, share what makes their week work.

For us, a good week starts with having a home that meets our needs. We recently moved, and it has been a great, positive change. We live in a safe, quiet, and accessible neighborhood. Our leasing office is very helpful, and we can walk to a lot of what we need daily. Also, our apartment is also fully accessible. That makes the biggest difference.

LJ: In our last apartment, I spent most of my time in my room because the space didn’t work for me. Now, opening, closing, and locking the front door is easy. I can get whatever I need from the refrigerator, and the shower and tub are fully accessible. I have a lot more freedom here.

Having our own spaces also helps our home work for both of us.

Sheila: LJ likes his video games, and I need a quiet, dim space because my traumatic brain injury causes seizures and chronic migraines. We each have somewhere comfortable to go. Everybody wins.

We’ve also been having fun grilling on our back porch. Our home gives us more freedom, but what happens outside our front door matters just as much.

We depend on MARTA to get to medical appointments, church, and a lot more. MARTA is the Atlanta area public transit system. When buses arrive on time and the bus’s wheelchair lifts and station elevators are working, everything goes smoothly.

But when one part of the system fails, everything else can quickly fall apart.

We once had to cancel an important medical appointment because MARTA couldn’t pick us up. The medical office said it could take six months or longer to reschedule.

LJ: Because of the side effects I was having, six months was way too long to wait. I ended up being admitted to the hospital for several days. Transportation should not be the reason someone misses medical care.

We’ve applied for MARTA Mobility, the MARTA paratransit service, but getting approved has taken a long time. We end up paying out of pocket for accessible transportation, which is very expensive. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is supposed to make sure people with disabilities have equal access to affordable public transit.

Sheila: I travel with a service dog, and some bus drivers aren’t educated on ADA protections. Drivers have refused to let her on the bus or told me to put her in a cage. She cannot do her job from a cage. That is not how service dogs work.

We have been left waiting in the rain, cold, and heat when buses were full or didn’t have a working wheelchair lift. It’s not just an inconvenience for us. It puts our safety at risk.

When public transportation works and meets our needs, we can do more than just make it to appointments that keep us healthy and out of the hospital. We can get out in the community and have fun. We can connect with other self-advocates and use our voices to make a meaningful difference.

The ADA and the Olmstead Decision helped protect the right of people with disabilities to live and take part in their communities. But those rights depend on services and systems that work in real life.

What makes our week work is not one service by itself. It is having the systems around us work together and help us live the lives we choose.