Today we’d like to introduce you to Kaylee Cooper.
Hi Kaylee, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
To start at the beginning:
When I was 8 years old, I was adopted into a new family after my mom, who was my only caregiver, died from cancer. The first eight years of my life were filled with trauma and instability. There were times when I was homeless, harmed, hungry, and without the stability every child deserves. I swore that I would never allow my own children to experience anything like that. I am incredibly grateful to the family who took me in, removed me from that environment, and gave me a stable home and family.
I am now a single mom of 15-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. I was a young mom when they were born (I was 22) and they arrived three months early at just 27 weeks. They each weighed about two pounds and spent approximately two months in the NICU. Because of their extremely low birth weights and developmental needs, they qualified for disability services, and both were eventually diagnosed with Autism.
We participated in what I called “intensive early intervention,” with therapies taking place both in our home and at a local therapy center.
After aging out of early intervention at age 3, they entered early preschool. They spent three years in preschool receiving therapies in the school setting while continuing therapies at the center. I gained an incredible amount of knowledge during those years by attending therapy sessions with my children and regularly going to their school to observe, participate, ask questions, and learn.
In 2014, my children’s father and I divorced. I moved with my twins into a small apartment on the other side of the state so we could be closer to my parents.
In 2015, I earned my Certified Nursing Assistant license so that I could work as my children’s caregiver. My son was about to have a G-tube placed because of his intense sensory aversion to food. He has ARFID, or Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, which can occur in children on the Autism spectrum. His aversions were so intense that food-related situations could lead to extreme dysregulation and behavioral outbursts lasting for hours. Because of the level of support he required, working outside of the home was impossible.
Being able to work as my children’s caregiver changed our lives. I could earn an income without leaving them, continue helping them develop skills, take them to therapies and appointments, and no longer carry the constant stress of wondering how I was going to pay our bills. For the first time, we were truly stable and had our needs met.
The State of Colorado determined that my children’s needs qualified them for caregiving services, and Colorado supported parents serving as paid caregivers rather than requiring a stranger to provide that care. This is an amazing program for families like mine.
In 2016, I applied for a Governor-appointed board in Colorado called the Interagency Coordinating Council for Early Intervention. I was extremely grateful, and honestly surprised, to be selected. That same year, I was invited to serve as Secretary of our local Arc chapter.
Those two boards marked the beginning of taking everything I had learned while advocating for my own children and using that knowledge to advocate for others.
That same year, the State of Colorado flew me to Washington, D.C., all expenses paid, to represent Colorado at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs Leadership Conference. It was the first time I had the opportunity to advocate at the federal level.
In 2020, my son’s feeding therapist recommended that we attend the Intensive Feeding Program at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Maryland. We were scheduled to fly to Maryland for our first appointment in March, during the same week that everything began shutting down because of COVID.
Because of the circumstances, I had to find and rent an apartment virtually. Thankfully, with the help of a local realtor, Dana Gilley, we were able to find one.
So, in June 2020, I packed everything we owned into a U-Haul and drove across the country from Colorado to Maryland with just my twins and me. They were 8 years old, and I was 31. After unloading everything, we flew back to Colorado, picked up our car, and drove all the way back to Maryland.
Getting established in Maryland was unexpectedly difficult.
I did not realize how much support and coordination we had experienced in Colorado until I began trying to navigate Maryland’s disability system. There was no central place to find information, agencies often did not communicate with one another, and sometimes one agency did not seem to understand the role of another. There were situations where I was bounced between agencies until I could research the issue myself and demonstrate which agency actually had responsibility.
Eventually, I found the Maryland Coalition of Families and participated in their six-week virtual Family Leadership Retreat. Every weekend for six weeks, I sat at my desk learning about Maryland’s systems, programs, and resources while watching my children play.
Because of COVID and asynchronous learning, which was extremely difficult for my son, we made the decision to homeschool. We would complete school during the afternoon and then do Uber Eats together at night to earn extra money. It was another job that allowed me to keep my children with me while continuing to manage their needs.
When we first moved to Maryland, we applied for the Community First Choice program, or CFC, as well as a Medicaid waiver through the Developmental Disabilities Administration, or DDA.
CFC provided caregiving services similar in some ways to the program we had used in Colorado, although it did not require me to maintain a CNA license. I was able to work as my son’s caregiver through CFC from February 2021 until August 2021.
In August 2021, Maryland announced that the COVID flexibility allowing parents to serve as paid caregivers was ending. I was told that because I was my son’s legally responsible parent, I could no longer be paid to provide his care unless I gave up legal responsibility for him. Otherwise, another caregiver, a stranger, would have to come into our home and take my place.
Because of my son’s significant behavioral and feeding needs, having an unfamiliar person step into that role was not realistic. As a result, my son could no longer utilize the services he had been approved for, and I lost my job.
In October 2021, it was finally our turn to attend the Intensive Feeding Program at Kennedy Krieger.
My son did not respond well to the program’s highly structured, ABA-based, data-driven approach. He resisted the treatment intensely. During one session, four adults physically restrained him without my consent while another attempted to place food into his mouth. Even then, he did not take the bite.
After two weeks, he was discharged from the program without having taken a single bite for the treatment team. I was ultimately told that, because of the severity of his behaviors and feeding needs, no one could successfully feed him except me.
At that point, I contacted DDA and essentially asked: What am I supposed to do? I could not work as his caregiver through CFC, placing him in a traditional school setting was not realistic, and now the recommendation from an intensive feeding program was that I was the only person able to feed him.
That situation moved my son to the top of the priority list for a Medicaid waiver.
From the time we initially applied for DDA services until the time he began receiving waiver services was just under two years, which is almost unheard of, as many families wait for years.
I began working as my son’s caregiver through DDA services in June 2022.
This program has been life-changing for our family. If the arrangement had not worked, we very likely would have moved back to Colorado.
Between my income as my son’s caregiver and doing Uber Eats, I was able to purchase my first home in October 2023, again with the help of Realtor Dana Gilley. I chose a rural home on an acre of land so my children could have room to run, play, and simply exist safely in their own space.
In 2024, I wrote a book called How To Guide: Starting Your Journey to Support Your Child’s Needs. I wrote it for families who are scared, overwhelmed, and unsure where to begin.
Sometimes throughout our journey, someone was there to point us in the right direction. Other times, we struggled until we figured things out ourselves. My children and I have overcome so much, and I hope families can use what I have learned to make their own journeys a little easier.
In 2025, I created Unity Ed, LLC, a business through which I work with individuals who need help navigating complex systems, developing self-advocacy skills, and engaging in self-healing and emotional regulation work. Throughout the years I spent caring for and advocating for my children, I was also processing the trauma and grief from my own childhood. It was not always easy to be the best mother I could be while working through painful memories and emotions. My children deserved the healthiest version of me possible, and that motivated me to do the work to heal. Healing is not easy, it is not pretty, and it takes real effort. But I want people to see that doing the work is worth it, and that we are capable of changing the way our past affects our present.
I also created a masterclass called Reclaim Your Sovereignty, which grew out of many of the lessons I learned through my own healing journey. The class is designed to help people become more cognitively engaged: learning to recognize their own patterns, question automatic thoughts and reactions, and make more intentional choices. It encourages people to take accountability for their thoughts, emotions, and actions while developing the skills to create healthier, more intentional lives. During the summer of 2026, I presented the masterclass for the first time.
In October 2025, I became a certified DDA Support Broker for participants in Maryland’s DDA Self-Directed Services program. Self-Direction allows people with disabilities and their families to have greater choice and control over their services, but navigating the program can be incredibly complex. My role is to help participants understand the system, manage their budgets, employees, and vendors, etc. After years of navigating these systems for my own family, becoming a Support Broker felt like a natural way to take what I had learned and use it to help others.
Entering Self-Direction can feel like being thrown into the deep end of a pool, or being sprayed with a fire hose. There is an enormous amount of information coming at families all at once. I genuinely enjoy helping people understand the program, navigate the system, and feel more confident making decisions for themselves and their loved ones. I bring a combination of lived experience, systems knowledge, and practical problem-solving to the teams I support.
Most recently, I have expanded my work into policy-level advocacy. I have worked with local, state, and federal legislators, government officials, and their staff around policies affecting Maryland’s Self-Directed Services and Home- and Community-Based Services. My goal is to protect my son’s services, my clients’ services, and the ability of people with disabilities and their families to have meaningful choice and control over their lives.
Through all of this, I remain the sole provider, caregiver, and homeschool teacher for my children.
I am incredibly proud of what my twins and I have overcome and everything we have experienced together. Nearly every professional path I have taken grew out of trying to build a safe, stable life for them and learning how to solve the problems we encountered along the way.
I love them more than anything.
Of everything I have done and everything I may still accomplish, I hope that when they are adults, they are proud to call me their mother.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Unity Ed, LLC was created to help people navigate complicated systems, strengthen their ability to advocate for themselves, and build greater confidence and control in their own lives.
What sets me apart is that I bring both professional knowledge and lived experience. I have spent more than a decade navigating disability systems as a parent, caregiver, advocate, board member, and now Support Broker. I understand what it feels like to be on the other side of the table, to be the parent trying to figure out who to call, what a policy means, whether something is actually required, and what to do when different agencies give conflicting information. That experience shapes the way I work with every client.
I am very systems-oriented. I tend to look beyond the immediate problem and ask why it is happening, what policy or process is driving it, who actually has authority over it, and what options exist for resolving it. I bring a combination of lived experience, systems knowledge, research, advocacy, and practical problem-solving to the people I support.
One part of my work is within Maryland’s Developmental Disabilities Administration Self-Directed Services program, where I work as a certified Support Broker. I help participants and families understand Self-Direction, manage budgets, employees, and vendors, and troubleshoot problems, etc. These systems can be incredibly overwhelming, especially when families are first getting started. I enjoy taking complicated information, breaking it down, creating systems to help them streamline tasks, and helping people understand what their options actually are.
Unity Ed is also broader than disability-system navigation. Another part of my work that I am deeply passionate about focuses on self-advocacy, emotional regulation, healing, and helping people become more intentional about how they think and respond to the world around them. My masterclass, Reclaim Your Sovereignty, grew out of my own healing journey and teaches people to recognize patterns, question automatic thoughts and reactions, take accountability for their choices, and become more active participants in their own lives.
What I am most proud of about Unity Ed is that the business reflects things I genuinely believe in: autonomy, informed choice, accountability, and helping people understand that they are capable of learning difficult things and advocating for themselves.
I do not want people to leave an interaction with me feeling more dependent on me. I want them to leave understanding their situation better, knowing what questions to ask, and feeling more capable of making their own decisions.
That, more than anything, is what I want Unity Ed to be known for.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Over the next 5–10 years for the coaching side of my business, I think we will see much more focus on self-regulation, emotional awareness, nervous-system education, and personal accountability. People are becoming more interested in understanding why they react the way they do and want to take accountability for themselves instead of only trying to manage symptoms after the fact.
I also think there will be growing demand for practical, accessible education that helps people recognize patterns, regulate themselves, think more intentionally, and advocate for their own needs. That is where I see work like Reclaim Your Sovereignty fitting in, helping people become more active participants in their own healing, decisions, and lives.
Over the next 5–10 years for the disability advocacy aspect, I think we will see continued growth in Self-Directed Services and a greater emphasis on giving people with disabilities more choice and control over how their supports are delivered. At the same time, workforce shortages, funding pressures, and increasingly complex regulations will make strong advocacy and knowledgeable navigation important ongoing.
I also think families will expect systems to become more transparent, coordinated, and easier to navigate, with technology playing a larger role in education, service management, and access to information.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.unityed.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/unityed/
- Yelp: https://unity-ed.myshopify.com/
- Soundcloud: https://www.skool.com/unity-ed-7915
- Other: unity.ed@proton.me
