New Title available from Jill Center
Making Room: Community, Care, and the Right to Belong
Published August 2026
When a country starts deciding some people are too costly to keep, this is the book that answers back — with evidence, with a plan, and with a hand for the families holding the line.
For a quarter-century, American policy moved toward a single principle: that people with disabilities — including those with the most profound needs — belong in their communities, not in institutions. Between 2025 and 2026, that consensus began to reverse. Historic Medicaid cuts, a federal retreat from civil-rights enforcement, and a rising rhetoric that measures a human life by what it produces have left millions of families asking an impossible question: how do you build a good life for the person you love when the system is walking away, and private care is out of reach?
Making Room is both an argument and a manual. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, federal data, and the hard-won experience of families, Jill Center makes the case that community-based care is not a luxury but the humane, effective, and — dollar for dollar — cheaper answer, even for those who need the most support. Then she shows you, step by step, how to build it: circles of support, housing, legal and financial planning, navigating a shrinking system, and the hardest question of all — what happens when you’re gone.
Honest and unsentimental, refusing both the “tragedy” and the “inspiration” stories so often told about disability, Making Room speaks to three readers at once: the family caregiver who needs a plan, the advocate fighting the retreat, and every citizen who believes a person’s worth was never a matter of what they can produce.
Make room — and hold it.
“Inside this book”
• What community-based care really is — and why it beats the institution, even for profound needs
• The real cost comparison, in plain numbers: community care vs. institutional care
• The hidden toll on family caregivers — and how community makes caregiving survivable
• A step-by-step toolkit: circles of support, housing, legal and financial planning
• How to navigate a shrinking Medicaid system — and appeal when you’re denied
• The hardest plan of all: what happens to your person when you’re gone
• How to defend disability rights when federal enforcement retreats