50 Years Strong, Still Moving Forward
The LIFTT team gathered at the 2026 Montana Independent Living Symposium in Billings, surrounded by moments of learning, advocacy, disability leadership, participation, and joy.
For two remarkable days, August 18 and 19, 2026, the entire LIFTT team stepped away from its regular routines and gathered in Billings with advocates from across the state for the 2026 Montana Independent Living Symposium: “50 Years Strong, Empowering Independence, Driving Change.”
This was much more than a professional conference. It was a celebration of a movement, a classroom for the present, and a workshop for imagining the future.
For 50 years, the Independent Living movement has challenged society to understand that disabled people are not problems to be managed, but citizens entitled to direct their own lives, make their own choices, participate fully in their communities, and help shape the policies that affect them. The symposium honored that history while asking an equally important question: What must we do next?
For LIFTT, bringing the entire team to the symposium was an investment in that future.
Learning Together Strengthens Our Work
LIFTT’s employees serve consumers in many different ways. Some provide Independent Living services, employment support, transportation, personal-care assistance, advocacy, outreach, data management, administration, and other essential programs. Although our responsibilities may differ, we share one mission: empowering aging and disabled people to live independently through education, support, and opportunity.
Attending the symposium together allowed us to listen, learn, exchange ideas, and see how every part of our organization contributes to that mission. Professional development is not time away from LIFTT’s work: it is part of the work. When the entire team learns together, we return with a stronger shared language, a broader understanding of disability rights, and a renewed commitment to the people and communities we serve.
The symposium opened with a celebration of five decades of Independent Living in Montana. Participants reflected on the courage, persistence, and advocacy that built the movement while also considering the challenges and possibilities ahead.
From History to Action
Throughout the two-day gathering, LIFTT team members participated in presentations, panels, task forces, and breakout conversations covering many of the issues at the heart of Independent Living.
Sessions examined the future of Independent Living over the next five years, legislative advocacy, youth transition, grassroots organizing, coalition building, and the power of telling our stories. A keynote presentation by Jessica Podesva, Director of Advocacy and Public Policy for the National Council on Independent Living, connected local community experiences with the larger national movement for disability rights and equality.
The symposium also created opportunities for focused work through task forces addressing: (a) Community living; (b) Native American engagement; (c) Accessible transportation; (d) Self-advocacy; and (e) Youth employment and transition.
These are not abstract subjects for LIFTT. They are part of the realities our consumers encounter every day.
Accessible transportation can determine whether someone reaches work, a medical appointment, a grocery store, or a community event. Youth transition services can influence whether a young person enters adulthood with choices and support. Self-advocacy can transform a person’s relationship with schools, employers, healthcare providers, public agencies, and the wider community. Coalition building can turn one person’s concern into lasting systems change.
The symposium reminded us that Independent Living is both deeply personal and unmistakably public. It begins with individual choice, but it also requires accessible communities, responsive institutions, informed public policy, and the removal of barriers that prevent full participation.
Disability Leadership at the Center
One of the symposium’s most meaningful qualities was the visibility of disabled people as leaders, presenters, advocates, professionals, and experts in their own lives.
Independent Living has always insisted upon a simple but revolutionary principle: decisions affecting disabled people must not be made without disabled people at the table. The movement is grounded in consumer control, dignity of risk, self-determination, peer support, and the conviction that lived experience is a vital form of knowledge.
The presentations and conversations in Billings brought those principles to life. They also challenged all of us to continue examining our own work: Are we listening carefully enough? Are consumers directing their own goals? Are our programs truly accessible? Are we building opportunities, or unintentionally creating new barriers? Are we telling our stories in ways that change public understanding and public policy?
These are questions LIFTT must continue asking, not only during a symposium, but every day.
A Team Renewed
The photographs capture something the formal agenda cannot fully express: colleagues learning together, people sharing their experiences, advocates leading conversations, and a great deal of laughter along the way.
There was joy in the room, and that matters.
Movements are sustained not only by policies, meetings, and strategic plans, but also by relationships. They grow when people recognize one another, exchange stories, discover common purpose, and remember that difficult work can also be hopeful work.
The symposium gave LIFTT’s team time to strengthen those relationships and recognize how much we accomplish together. It reminded us that no single employee, program, or office carries LIFTT’s mission alone. Each person contributes something necessary to the whole.
Carrying the Experience Forward
The value of the symposium will ultimately be measured by what happens after we return to our offices and communities.
LIFTT’s team returns from the 2026 Independent Living Symposium with new knowledge, stronger connections, important questions, and renewed energy. We will carry these lessons into our work with consumers, our community partnerships, our advocacy, our transportation initiatives, our employment and transition services, and every conversation about accessibility and inclusion.
Fifty years of Independent Living in Montana is an extraordinary achievement—but it is not a conclusion. It is a foundation.
The barriers have not disappeared. The work continues. And LIFTT is proud to be part of a movement that remains courageous enough to imagine more, organized enough to demand change, and hopeful enough to build communities in which everyone belongs.
For more information on how to be part of this exciting adventure, please visit www.liftt.org or call one of our offices at (406) 259-5181 in Billings or (406) 948-8500 in Glendive.
About Living Independently for Today & Tomorrow (LIFTT): LIFTT is a Montana 501(c)3 corporation organized as a Center for Independent Living (CIL). With team members based in Billings and Glendive, LIFTT provides people with disabilites and aging indivduals with programs, services, resources and advocacy that help empower them to break down the physical, bureaucratic, and cultural barriers that prevent them from being fully independent participants in their lives and communities throughout 18 counties in southeastern and south-central Montana: Big Horn, Carbon, Carter, Custer, Dawson, Fallon, Garfield, Golden Valley, McCone, Musselshell, Powder River, Prairie, Richland, Rosebud, Stillwater, Treasure, Wibaux, and Yellowstone. For more information, please visit liftt.org
Our Vision: Empowering aging individuals and people with disabilities to LIFTT themselves above the barriers of life.
Our Mission: Living Independently for Today and Tomorrow’s (LIFTT’s) mission as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit Center for Independent Living serving Southeastern Montana is to empower aging individuals and people with disabilities to live independently through education, support, and opportunities.