Campaign Case Study  /  2022–2024

Accessible Air Travel

United Spinal Association  ·  Communications Strategy

Every month, a thousand wheelchairs are lost, damaged, or destroyed on commercial flights. For wheelchair users, that chair is their legs. Damage it and they cannot easily go anywhere or do anything. For years, the airline industry largely got away with it.

I came to United Spinal Association in 2022 as Director of Communications and Digital Experience with deep roots in the nonprofit world and a clear sense of what our members cared about most. Accessible air travel was the issue that resonated most viscerally — the one with the most urgency, the clearest villains, and real potential to move federal policy. I recognized it as our breakthrough issue and built the communications strategy to make it happen.

The campaign was a coalition effort across the organization. Our advocacy team had built a partnership with SEIU, the service workers union, on a sharp and counterintuitive insight: the same airline cost-cutting that endangered wheelchair users was grinding down the workers handling their chairs — low wages, high turnover, and inadequate training meant passengers and workers were getting hurt by the same broken system. Our board members and development team had cultivated a direct relationship with United Airlines. My job was the frame that pulled all of it together.

We would work with anyone — labor, industry, government — to make air travel safe and accessible for wheelchair users. That was the message. It let us stand next to a union and an airline in the same news cycle without contradiction. It gave our CEO, Vincenzo Piscopo, a clear and consistent voice across national media placements on MSNBC, USA Today, and the New York Times. It gave our members something to fight for.

The wins came in sequence.

"Every passenger deserves safe, dignified travel when they fly. With the new protections we're announcing today, we're establishing a new standard for air travel."

— Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, December 2024

Then the current administration moved to delay enforcement, and the airlines sued to block the rule. The fight isn't over. But a $50 million fine has been levied, a generational rule has been written, and a coalition that had never existed before — disability rights, organized labor, and a major airline, pulling in the same direction — exists now because someone built the message that made it possible.