Michele Mashburn is a disability equity advocate, researcher, and community leader with more than 13 years of experience across nonprofit, public sector, and grassroots spaces. Her work is grounded in lived experience and systems-level analysis, with a clear focus on dismantling structural ableism and naming disability as a core equity issue, not an add-on.

She works with organizations and public agencies through training, facilitation, and technical assistance to move beyond compliance toward disability-informed, equity-driven practice. Michele’s approach is direct and practical. She focuses on how systems actually function for disabled people and where policy, process, and decision-making consistently fail.

In 2024, Michele was recognized as an Equity and Inclusion Champion at the Women’s Leadership and Policy Summit for her disability equity work in Santa Clara County. The recognition reflected what has long defined her work: naming harm clearly and holding institutions accountable for doing better.

Michele founded All Things Disability Equity (ATDE) to address a gap she saw repeatedly in equity efforts. Disability was treated as an afterthought, handled through accommodations instead of systemic design. ATDE centers disability as a cross-cutting equity variable and prioritizes leadership by disabled people most impacted by policy and design decisions.

Her work spans disability, healthcare access, housing, public safety, transportation, urban planning, LGBTQ+ equity, disaster response, and violence against disabled people. Across all of it, Michele brings a human rights framework and a clear stance: access needs are human needs, and equity requires accountability, not intent.

She believes interdependence, not independence, is what makes communities stronger—and consistently centers lived experience as essential expertise, not supplemental input.