Meet Our Founder

Lilly Grossman is a disability policy researcher, systems strategist, and Founder and CEO of Beyond The Box Advocacy, a nonpartisan disability policy and systems organization focused on improving how disability systems function in practice.

Her research centers on a core structural problem within disability policy: support services do not follow people across geography. Lilly developed the Disability Support Service Portability Framework to examine how place based eligibility structures can restrict mobility, employment, housing stability, and long-term independence. She also introduced the concept of “geographic lock-in” to describe how disability systems can constrain where people with disabilities are realistically able to live and work.

Lilly is also the creator of the Enforced Barriers Project, a systems analysis initiative examining recurring structural patterns embedded across disability systems that limit autonomy and shape long-term outcomes. The project explores concepts including enforced dependency, enforced immobility, enforced insecurity, and enforced invisibility to better understand how administrative design, fragmented services, and institutional structures influence the lives of people with disabilities.

In addition to leading Beyond The Box Advocacy, Lilly serves as an Independent Research Fellow with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, where she studies disability-related geographic mobility. Her work combines quantitative analysis, systems mapping, policy research, and lived systems expertise to translate complex structural issues into practical policy conversations.

Lilly also contributes to advisory and leadership initiatives across disability policy, healthcare access, and systems reform. She serves on the Boards of Directors for Disability Community Resource Center and Access Central Coast, chairs the National Association of Social Workers California Chapter DisAbilities Council Policy Subcommittee, and serves as a Community Advisory Board Member for Making Space. She is also the 2026 Eileen Sweeney Graduate Intern on Disability Policy with the National Academy of Social Insurance in partnership with Elevance Health.

Lilly’s work focuses on making disability policy human while helping organizations, institutions, and policymakers better understand how systems shape real world outcomes for people with disabilities.

Lilly is currently pursuing her Master of Social Work at the University of Southern California. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with a minor in English from Whittier College.