Animal-Centered Design and John O’Brien
- Anne Mitchell
- Jul 19
- 9 min read
by Anne Mitchell
July 6, 2025
Reflecting on John just after his passing and realizing how deep and profound his impact on my life has been and how deep and profound his impact on our entire culture has been is fascinating to contemplate. I met John in October, 1983. I was a brand new group home manager and he was leading a PASS workshop in Lansing, Michigan. I only participated because my boss got sick and couldn’t attend at the last moment and I could. I knew it was about “normalization” and I thought I knew all about that so I was thrilled with the idea of spending a week in a hotel, eating at restaurants and learning something I already knew about. PASS workshops began on Sunday evenings and finished on Friday about noon. John was the workshop lead while participants were assigned teams to work with and each team had its own lead person. Sunday night I started out quite comfortable, only half listening and then I realized that I might not know as much as I thought I did about this idea of normalization.
Monday the real work began, some lecture, visiting our assessment site and beginning to talk about what we were going to do throughout the week. I began to think I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. The discomfort that comes from realizing your beliefs might not be the whole story can be confusing. By Tuesday I knew I knew nothing and even worse, I had behaved in ways I could not reconcile with my values, ethics and sense of justice. I had so many blindspots. So I decided to leave the workshop, quit my job and find something else to do.
However, I did not want to be rude so I went to John’s room that evening, politely knocked on the door and after he invited me in, I told him I was leaving in the morning but not because of him, just because I was not fit to do this work. I poured my heart out to him while he intently listened the way we know he can and does. When I was finished, he paused, and said that it occurred to him I couldn’t get a refund so my agency would be out the money even if I left. He said they expected me to stay through the workshop and the expenses had already been approved and no one expected me back until Friday afternoon anyway. I remember him telling me that I could quit just as easily on Monday morning as on any other day so it would probably be good to stay. For some odd reason, though that response did not address any of my concerns, it made sense to me and I agreed to stay.
John’s ability to listen and then say the thing you need to hear is remarkable and reminds me of the Bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara in Buddhism. Here is the invocation about his listening superpower:
We invoke your name, Avalokiteshvara. We aspire to learn your way of listening in order to help relieve the suffering in the world. You know how to listen in order to understand. We invoke your name in order to practice listening with all our attention and open-heartedness. We will sit and listen without any prejudice. We will sit and listen without judging or reacting. We will sit and listen in order to understand. We will sit and listen so attentively that we will be able to hear what the other person is saying and also what is being left unsaid. We know that just by listening deeply we already alleviate a great deal of pain and suffering in the other person.
This is how John listened. This is how John alleviated suffering.
What would my life have been like if I had left? What would I have missed? Who would I have become? His power to see, be curious and stay open to the possibilities is remarkable. And that was 42 years ago. I’m still connected to the people and ideas and values and ethics and sense of justice John shared during that workshop. The complexity. The gray of it all. The responsibility to pursue it. I wonder at the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people he has had similar impact on and with.
I have done many things in the past 42 years trying to see and find and clarify those ideas and values and and ethics and sense of justice from that workshop. I know those things lived in me before PASS but they took on new meaning that week and have never left me since.
My own learning, this past decade especially, has taken me outside, beyond people with disabilities. Over many twists and turns my commitment to other groups of people who have been marginalized and my commitment to non-humans and the earth herself has become much stronger and I have pivoted to working more directly for non-human and earth justice. And yet all the lessons from those early days still apply. Justice is justice wherever we are. Suffering is suffering no matter how it manifests or in whom. I strongly believe our planet is suffering deeply, in profound ways and that there is still time to support her in recovery. All the work needs to be done and I am grateful for the lessons John shared with me - even the many lessons that were painful to learn.
The one lesson I still mightily struggle with is one I read after his passing: On the curiosity that comes with humility, and never ending work...
"I have probably found more ways to fail at influencing people, then anybody else, or anywhere else. And I'm obsessed about this pretty consistent failure. People are sometimes complimentary about what I've got to say. But if you look at the actual impact of lots of it, it doesn't add up to very much. That doesn't bother me probably as much as it should, so much as it keeps me curious. And so I keep looking around to see who else is doing something that might help, that might reduce my next failure, or make my next failure more interesting.” - John O’Brien
I never had this conversation this specifically with John but this quote resonates deeply and will accompany me the rest of my life. And I am re-reading some of his work and will find pieces I never read before that will shape how I move forward.
One of the most interesting things that happened very recently is that I am peripherally involved in documentary projects about the human relationship with non-humans and raising all the questions we need to consider about this relationship. I was watching the trailer for a new documentary that will be available this fall at the earliest, https://www.foreverhome.love/why and I heard the phrase “animal-centered design”. I was filled with a deep sense of warmth and of belonging and purpose - I know the people who coined the term “person-centered planning” and have learned through and with them over decades and now this phrase has led, through many iterations, to “animal-centered”. John’s (and all of us but significantly held together through John) impact on our entire culture, far beyond the disability world is awesome to contemplate.
Here is what AI had to share about the origins of the phrase:
The term "person-centered planning" originated in the 1980s, primarily in the US and Canada, as a response to the limitations of traditional service models for people with disabilities. It emphasizes placing the individual at the center of the planning process, focusing on their goals, preferences, and needs, rather than solely on deficits or service provider convenience.
Here's a more detailed look at the origins:
Challenging Traditional Models: Person-centered planning emerged as an alternative to the medical model of disability, which often prioritized professional diagnoses and treatment plans over the individual's own desires and aspirations.
Key Pioneers: Individuals like John O'Brien, Connie Lyle O'Brien, Beth Mount, Jack Pearpoint, Marsha Forest, were instrumental in developing and promoting these ideas.
I can simply change some of the words and all this applies equally to animal and environmental justice. While I failed at convincing most at TSI that it is time to expand our circle of compassion to include non-humans and the earth herself in our journey toward justice for all — an idea I presented at TSI in 2016 but which did not gain much traction — I can now look at this failure as being really interesting and develop my curiosity about what I might learn from that. If one chooses to go to https://www.foreverhome.love/why, they will find language very familiar to our work including people with disabilities in the beloved community but with a different subject altogether.
John’s work, our work, has been about making the invisible, visible in people with disability and in our communities. Seeing the unseen. Our culture teaches us not to see. To see those who look or behave differently as less than - less than adults, less than people without disability, even less than human. We look past them. We literally don’t see them even when they are right in front of us. We make up things to justify the way we treat them — they don’t feel pain like we do. They don’t think like we do. They don’t want or need like we do. They don’t participate in relationships the way we do. They don’t have dreams or aspirations or higher callings. We commodify them.
John was a master at helping us to see the fallacy in this, to see the myths we have constructed. To actually see the person, the essence of who they are, the role they do or can play in our communities regardless of their differences. To offer us a glimpse, a taste, a sense of the promise of the Beloved Community. All means all. Everyone is needed.
I have come to apply all of this to non-humans and to the earth herself. We do not see insects or any other animals or plants or water or air or soil - in the way we see humans. We see humans as having value in and of themselves. Because of who they are. But for every being that is not human we only see their value in what they can provide to humans. We deny non-humans everything. We make up fallacies and myths to justify the way we treat them. And just like with people with disability, we commodify them. We built institutions and whole economic sectors that rely on people with disability as the commodity. We have built many economic sectors that rely on non-humans for food, clothing, entertainment, research and we use leftover animal parts in many, many ways that the average person has no idea about.
In the words of Upton Sinclair:
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
Sinclair too failed to influence people. I don’t know if he was curious about that, but one of his messages was about the plight of the animals in our food system and the plight of the immigrant laborers forced to work in appalling conditions to get those animal parts to our tables. (The more things change... see current struggles about immigration and our food system.)
It’s all the same thing. Social justice work is social justice work no matter where or how or for whom. How do we expand our vision to see it all? How do we enlarge our circle of compassion to include everyone? To understand how interconnected we ALL (not just humans but non-humans and the earth herself) are and how each and every one of us is necessary to continued life on earth. How the promise of the Beloved Community includes not only humans but all life on earth.
For me it has become one work. One path to the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King Junior and Thich Nhat Hahn envisioned and Waddie Welcome made real for me for a bit of time in his story in Savannah and for which we all continue to look toward. John has had an outsized impact on us understanding what the Beloved Community is and how we might get there. A quiet giant is how I think of John.
May we continue to feel his curiosity and love of learning, embody his humility and get on with our never ending work. I wonder what John would think of his impact on animal rights work? I’m certain he would be curious and amused. I will have fun reflecting on how that conversation might unfold.
