Volume 37, Number 8
AUGUST 2026
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Lawsuit fights to save vulnerable Minnesotans from institutionalization
By Joey Carlson For the average Minnesotan, waking up, going to work, doing a load of laundry, and brushing their teeth are simply the mundane, unthinking routines of a regular day. But for Chris Freilinger, these everyday actions are monumental victories, milestones of an independence he spent years fighting to achieve. Today, Chris clocks at least 20 hours a week at Cub Foods, taking immense pride in maintaining the store and pushing carts through the lot. It is a reality that would have seemed entirely unimaginable six years ago, when he weighed 300 pounds, suffered from severe dental decay, and endured a life of profound institutional neglect. Chris credits his life-saving transformation entirely to his Family Residential Services (FRS) home, a deeply personalized care setting managed by disability advocate Angela Strasser. In Strasser’s home, care is never treated as a transactional, clock-in clock-out shift. She makes it her life duty to treat everyone in her house with human dignity. “When you have individuals who truly want to be a part of something, they want someone to invest in them, they want to be seen, they want to be heard, they want to have opportunities. Well, that’s what family residential settings are,” Strasser explained. “We’re a family here. We do everything. We cry together, we eat together... It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.” Today, Freilinger’s hard-won stability is under siege. A drastic, bureaucratic shift in Minnesota’s adult foster care reimbursement framework threatens to dismantle the exact family environments that allow individuals like Chris to truly live, rather than just exist. But with its recent replacement of individualized care budgets with rigid flat rates, the state is forcing a vulnerable community out of their sanctuaries, driving a statewide coalition of families and advocates into a high-stakes legal fight to save their homes and their freedom.
IN THIS ISSUE
Helping people in Minnesota and Liberia Page 4 Redefining inclusion on the racecourse Page 5 MnDOT’s Greater Minnesota Transit Plan Page 8 DOJ memo sparks outrage Page 11
Hands-on learning - Angela Strasser guides Chris Freilinger through a cooking lesson at home.
The cost of neglect
Before moving into Strasser’s home, Freilinger experienced neglect from multiple providers, including stints in corporate group homes that left him feeling deeply isolated. While exceptional corporate providers across the state deliver vital, high-quality care every day, Freilinger’s personal journey highlights
what happens when the fit isn’t right. “They didn’t really care,” Freilinger recalled. “They put me in a room, put a TV in front of me, and then gave me chicken nuggets. They really didn’t give a crap. They were in it for the paycheck, and that’s about it.” Everything shifted when he entered an FRS LAWSUIT To page 6
Children’s Museum of Minnesota celebrates Disability Pride Month with a book wall
The Children’s Museum of Minnesota has a wall of books featuring children with a variety of disabilities.
By John Kuziej The Children’s Museum of Minnesota launched a yearlong installation highlighting diverse communities, cultures, and heritages to amplify the state’s diversity. “It’s important to celebrate everybody’s differences, and we can do it in big ways and small ways, but everybody should have an opportunity to see themselves represented in our public spaces,” Jess Turgeon, the vice president of museum experiences, said. In July, visitors entering the museum’s atrium saw books lining a large black wall, designed to stand out against the colorful space, along with a banner representing Disability Pride Month. The museum believes seeing themselves represented can help children with disabilities feel included. “I think a child with a disability often might feel like an ‘other’ in their community,” Turgeon said. “So when something is put on display, kind of loud and proud, then that’s celebrating that child, and I think that’s hopefully going to make them feel more comfortable and more confident in themselves.” The museum selected books featuring a range of disabilities and placed them along the book wall and in book bins throughout the atrium. “We really also just wanted books that
highlighted a diverse set of different abilities or disabilities,” Turgeon said. An important goal of the book wall was to help build a community of children who are empathetic to others’ needs. “When kids are exposed to different types of people, they build up their empathetic skills, and that’s really important to us,” Turgeon said.
How the books were selected for display
Every month, the museum works with a partner organization to make sure the books are relevant to the communities it aims to highlight. For Disability Pride Month, the museum reached out to the PACER Center for book recommendations. When selecting the books, PACER Center staff wanted to find stories that showed a person’s disability isn’t the whole story. “Disability goes beyond simply explaining the disability and the diagnosis. It’s more like the child, the whole child at the center,” Elizabeth Ross, marketing and communications director at PACER, said. When deciding which books to feature, the PACER Center asked its staff for DISABILITY PRIDE To page 8
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