Our mission
Disability Guide is a platform that stays with you around the clock, turning a fragmented system into personalized clarity and faster access to the help that's available for you and your loved ones.
Why we started
It's 9:40 on a Tuesday. The other two are finally asleep. She has maybe forty minutes before she's too tired to think straight, and she spends them the way she's spent them for three weeks now — phone six inches from her face, typing some version of the same question.
What help is there for my son?
The results come back in fragments. A state webpage written for case managers, not parents. A PDF last revised in 2019. A Facebook group where twelve people give her eleven different answers, every one of them confident. Somewhere in the middle of it, a sentence that says to contact her community centered board.
She doesn't know what a community centered board is.
So she searches that. It leads to an intake line, and the intake line asks whether her son has a waiver. She doesn't know. She doesn't know what a waiver is, whether he'd qualify, what it would actually pay for, how long the wait might be, or whether the thing she just spent an hour reading was even about children.
Every answer hands her two new questions.
Fourteen tabs open. No next step. She closes the phone.
Nothing about that night was unusual. That's the part that should bother us.
She wasn't lost because she isn't capable. She runs a household of four on one income. She manages a medication schedule, a school she has to push, and two other kids who need her too. She can tell you the precise number of minutes her son can tolerate a grocery store. She is one of the most competent people in the system.
She was lost because the information is scattered across dozens of agencies and hundreds of pages, written for professionals, and the only people who can explain it are the ones with a three-week callback queue. Getting help requires knowing the vocabulary of the help — and you only learn the vocabulary after you've already gotten help.
Eventually she'll figure it out. It will cost her one to three years, and some part of herself she won't get back.
That's the version we consider normal. Families call it "the learning curve," as though the curve is a fact of nature rather than a thing we built and could unbuild.
What she actually needs
Most of what exists for caregivers is a compass. A resource directory. A 90-page manual. A hotline that answers the question you knew how to ask. All of it assumes you can already locate yourself on the map, name your destination, and translate between the two.
She can't do any of those things yet, and it isn't her job to learn how. She's already at capacity. Handing a person on the edge of burnout a better-organized pile of information is not help — it's more homework.
She doesn't need a compass.
She needs a guide who knows the route, and tells her the one thing to do next.
Our mission
Four commitments hold that sentence together. If we ever break one of them, we've become another website.
A complete list of everything a family should do is a form of abandonment. We answer the question underneath the question: what do I do today?
Every answer carries the policy page it came from. Families can verify it, forward it, or bring it to a meeting as evidence. Trust is built by being checkable.
Households don't experience one child's deadlines in isolation. Guidance that ignores the other kids, the job, and the eight hours of sleep isn't guidance.
The families with the least time and the fewest resources need this most. Public policy guidance stays free and open to anyone, with no account required.
Not every child will live alone or work without support, and a mission that implies otherwise fails the families who need it most. We use independence to mean the most self-determined life a person can have — the largest possible say over their own days, with whatever support makes that possible. For some that's an apartment and a job. For others it's choosing their own clothes, their own routine, and who is in the room. Both are the destination.
The route
A cairn is the stack of stones hikers leave to mark the route for whoever comes next. The path already exists. Nobody has marked it.
"Something is different. What happens now?"
The moment a family is handed a word and no instructions. Nothing that follows is obvious, and no one hands them a sequence.
"Who do I even call?"
Case management agencies, intake lines, county Medicaid, early intervention, the school district. Five front doors, no sign explaining which one is yours.
"What's a waiver, and are we on a list?"
Functional eligibility, financial eligibility, target groups, waitlists. The stage where the most families give up, because the vocabulary arrives before the help does.
"Why did we only get 19 of our 25 hours?"
Providers, schedules, documentation, denials, unfilled shifts. Getting approved was the beginning; keeping services intact is the ongoing job.
"Is this IEP actually going to be followed?"
Evaluations, accommodations, disagreements, and the annual meeting where a parent is outnumbered eight to one and expected to negotiate.
"He turns 18 in March. What changes?"
Three systems change on one birthday — waivers, decision-making rights, and income. Families who start this a year out land well. Families who find out in March don't.
What we're building
Two products, in that order, because trust has to be earned before a family hands over their child's records.
A public assistant that reads only vetted Colorado sources: waiver manuals, Medicaid rules, state special education guidance, documentation standards, and county resources. A parent asks in plain language and gets an answer written for parents — with a citation on every claim, so it can be verified or handed to someone who needs proof. No account, no cost, nothing stored.
A single household account holding every child — diagnoses, waivers, approved hours, care teams, schools, renewal dates, documents. One account rather than one per child, because no family experiences their children's deadlines separately. Now the guidance is specific: your agency, your case manager, your dates, your next step.
With families and self-advocates in the room, not consulted afterward. With case managers, because this tool should make their job easier rather than compete with it — a parent who arrives understanding the vocabulary is a better meeting for everyone. And with the state's own published policy as the only thing the assistant is allowed to read, so what we tell families is what the rules actually say.
The research behind this
We analyzed 5,655 caregiver discussions spanning 24 months in a Colorado special-needs parent community. System navigation — waivers, paid caregiving, eligibility, appeals, and "who do I even call?" — was the single largest need, at 43.8%.
Where this goes
Not a directory. Not a manual. One step, the reason for it, and the promise that there'd be another one waiting when she finished. That's the whole thing we're building.