Claim What Is Yours: A Trauma-Informed Content System for a High-Stakes Writing Task
Instructional Design · April 2026
Claim What Is Yours was a personal initiative I built to address a gap I'd lived through directly: veterans navigating VA disability claims — particularly for conditions tied to military sexual trauma — face a writing task that is procedurally demanding and, for many, close to impossible to approach directly. I designed a four-part content system (a free introductory guide plus a core guide with two companion modules) to walk survivors from "I don't know where to start" to a completed claim package, using AI tools as a structured writing partner along the way.
The venture itself didn't scale into an ongoing business — I wasn't ready to be so open about my trauma to passersby on social media platforms, and the venture's growth depended on exactly that kind of public visibility. But the instructional design thinking behind it is exactly the kind of work I want to keep doing: taking a system that's procedurally hostile to the people who need it most, and rebuilding the path through it so it's usable without requiring the reader to already have expertise, capacity, or calm. That's the same throughline running through my SHLI documentation work and my Local Kine AI teaching — leadership as translation and access, not gatekeeping — and this project is arguably where I articulated that principle most fully, even before I had language for it in a doctoral context.
Outcomes
- Shipped a complete four-part guide system — a free introductory guide plus a core guide with two companion bonus modules (a Personal Statement Pack and a Beyond-the-Rating Resource Guide) — as downloadable resources.
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