Disability Justice:

An Audit Tool
Written by Leah Lakshmi
Piepzna-Samarasinha, envisioned by
Stacey Park Milbern and
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
 “We Are Our Best Strategy To Win”
- Stacey Park Milbern

In honor of Stacey Park Milbern, May 19, 1987- May 19, 2020
Table of Contents

An Origin Story 3

What This Tool Is and Why We Made It 6

How To Use This Tool 9

Section 1: What is Disability Justice? 11

Section 2: Political Vision 15

Section 3: Doing an Internal Audit:

Taking Stock and Getting Real 19

Section 4: 10 Principles of DJ Discussion Questions 21

Section 5: Access Tools 25

Section 6: Four Stories about Organizations

Bringing Disability Justice to their Work 33

Thank Yous 49

2
An Origin Story
Fall 2018, a phone conversation:
Stacey: Hey, we have to work on that proposal for Northwest Health Foun-
dation’s second wave of disability justice programming. What do you think
we should do?
Leah: Well, we could have trainings to help mostly abled BIPOC orgs build
their skill levels and think about DJ and anti-ableism…
Stacey: and we could do coaching and mentoring to emerging disabled
BIPOC leaders about all the little things that no one tells you about when
you’re a disabled organizer trying to do things on your own
Leah: and yeah… ok…
Both: What if we had a disability justice audit?!
Leah: Holy shit!
Stacey: I know, right?
Leah: Tell me more?
Stacey: Well, it could be something orgs
could use if they want to try and figure out
if they’re doing DJ, like Black and brown
orgs that really want to ask themselves if
they’re practicing DJ. Because not everyone
can get a workshop and one workshop can
only do so much…
Leah: ...and so much of this stuff is things
people need to think through on their own
and multiple times because it’s personal,
they need privacy, it means being really
honest, you have to come back to it over
and over again
Stacey: This could super build the capacity
of our movements! I love it! OK, let’s do it!
3
The Backstory

My friend and comrade, the great Stacey Park Milbern, asked me

to work with her on Northwest Health Foundation’s disability justice pro-
gramming in 2016. She told me there was this foundation in Portland that
seemed to be interested in disability justice, and did I want to do a disabil-
ity justice 101 speaking gig at their annual convening? I was suspicious,
because I don’t trust most foundations and couldn’t believe this one was
for real. She said, Leah, organizations never give money to disabled
BIPOC, and they seem to be into it. Let’s see what happens.

Over the next four years, we co-created NWHF’s Disability Justice

Leaders Collaborative (DJLC), and a lot of amazing things happened. The
DJLC brought together rising disabled BIPOC organizers from Oregon
and Southwest Washington for a year-long organizing project that was a
chance to build disability justice knowledge and organizing skills and do
leadership development, including becoming more confident in the lead-
ership they already had (i.e., undoing internalized ableism). The DJLC cre-
ated and released a report with a series of recommendations for advanc-
ing disability justice in Oregon and SW Washington. By 2020, there was a
base of disabled BIPOC organizers running for office, creating organiza-
tions and collectives, hosting conferences and building disability justice
principles into many community-based initiatives.

As part of this work, Stacey and I also created and developed train-
ings and mentorship cohorts for BIPOC-led social justice community orga-
nizations who wanted to learn more about disability justice and integrate
it into their work, becoming accomplices and unpacking ableism in their
workplaces. As demand for our work grew, we dreamed up a DJ Audit
tool that organizations, boards of directors, communities, etc. could use to
assess their knowledge of disability justice and build it.

4
 Then Stacey died suddenly from post-surgical complications on her
33rd birthday on May 19, 2020, in part due to COVID-19-related delays on
a cancer surgery she had been waiting a year to receive. The world and
the disability justice movement lost our friend and one of our greatest or-
ganizers and teachers. I lost my work wife, cherished friend and comrade
in the past 11 years of DJ movement building.

Stacey died before we could start work on this tool, and I wish so
much that she was here to work on it with me. However, creating and
editing this audit tool the way we did it—collaboratively, at the pace of our
bodies and minds, taking in feedfback and learning from the bumps—is
very much in keeping with the way Stacey practiced disability justice
organizing.

May your use of this tool be part of the generational shift to end
ableism and transform your work through disabled wisdom.

5
What This Tool Is and
Why We Made It
What is the Disability Justice Audit Tool?

6
 That’s where this disability justice audit tool comes in. Rather than
being an “ADA checklist,” this toolkit is formulated as a series of questions
you can use to examine to what degree your organization is centering
disability justice politics, practices and leadership. You can start where you
are and return to these questions over and over again.

Why did we make this tool?

Disability and ableism show up in BIPOC-led and culturally specific

organizations in different ways. Sometimes we’re doing disability justice
even when we don’t know it: providing food, ASL and wheelchair accessi-
ble spaces at meetings; driving to pick up elders and sick folks; using the
local library or community center to meet because it’s free and already
wheelchair accessible. Sometimes we shy away from using the word “dis-
abled,” but we’re still talking about and working on disabled issues.

At the same time, we may struggle to know how

to talk about disability in our communities. A lot of vis-
ible disability organizing for many years was very
white-dominated and single-issue, so we may
look for resources and be discouraged when we
encounter racism, or discover all the people
doing the work are white. Some of our experi-
ences of racialized ableism, which can include
colonization, enslavement, war, genocide,
bad working conditions that are disabling
(like farmwork or factory or cleaning
work), medical abuse, institutionaliza-
tion and school and workplace discrim-
ination, are painful to talk about. Doing
so means grappling with trauma and
shame and requires trust, safety and
a space to be vulnerable.

7
 We may also feel that, as Black and brown people already facing rac-
ism and other oppression, it is not safe for us to talk about our disabilities,
because we are already dealing with a lot.

Disability justice organizer Mia Mingus once wrote, “Over and over I meet
disabled women of color who do not identify as disabled, even though
they have the lived reality of being disabled. And this is for many
complicated reasons around race, ability, gender, access, etc. It can be
very dangerous to identify as disabled when your survival depends on you
denying it.”

There are many ways it hasn’t been safe for us to talk about disability
in our lives and communities. But unpacking the ways ableism has impact-
ed our families and communities gives us incredible opportunity to heal.
Our work can become more successful and powerful when we integrate
disability justice. Our policy and community advocacy can be more effec-
tive and sustainable, our organization can center, not lose, the disabled
leaders, staff and community that have the solutions. We can face and
transform histories of ableism in our communities and organizations, heal
wounds and remake the world.

8
How To Use This Tool
This tool is organized into six sections:

Section 1: What is Disability Justice?

This section introduces the basics of the disability justice movement
framework.

Section 2: Political Vision

This section asks question about how you’re thinking about and integrat-
ing disability justice into your political organizing.

Section 3: Doing an Internal Audit: Taking Stock and

Getting Real
This section asks you to think about the histories of disability in your com-
munity, political work and organization.

Section 4: 10 Principles of Disability Justice Discussion

Questions
In this section, we ask you to move through each of the 10 Principles of
Disability Justice, asking yourself how you are or are not practicing these
principles in your work.

Section 5: Access Tools

This section contains some incredible nuts-and-bolts tools to deepen the
access you provide in your work.

Section 6: Four Stories about Organizations Bringing

Disability Justice to their Work
These are stories from organizations putting DJ into practice, with con-
crete descriptions of steps they took, attitudes and policies they changed,
and how they pulled it off, as well as a story from a political campaign and
an electoral campaign that integrated DJ into their work.

9
Some suggestions for using this document:

Individual Journaling
Go through the toolkit and take some time to journal your thoughts and
responses to the questions. Assess yourself. Notice what comes up for
you. Come back in a few months, or every year, and see where you’re at
and how you’ve changed.

Study Group
The same but done as a group. Maybe you pick a section per season,
meet every month and go through the questions a chunk at a time. What
are the internal and external changes you could make or actions you
could take from what you find?

Accessibility Audits
Use the access audit templates provided and go through your org’s cur-
rent situation. Check out your physical space, the way you plan and throw
events, your website, your policies around remote work, disability access
needs of workers and members, how you organize. What are you doing
well? Where could you shift?

Assessing Organizational History

This could be done by a group of people or an individual. People who
have worked at your organization for a while and hold a lot of history can
contribute their knowledge. Maybe there are a variety of folks with differ-
ent knowledge bases/entry points into this history who could all talk about
what they know about the history of the organization and ableism and dis-
ability. Maybe you could send out a survey to former workers or reach out
to specific disabled former staff who got screwed over and could provide
important information. (Maybe this could be a form of repair.) What are
three steps you could take towards enacting more disability justice prac-
tices and policies in your group?

10
Section 1: What is Disability Justice?
Disability justice is a term and a movement-building framework (i.e. a
way of envisioning the ways people can organize around and think about
disability) that centers the lives and leadership of disabled Black, Indige-
nous and people of color and/or queer, trans, Two Spirit and gender non-
conforming people.

To paraphrase Patty Berne, disability justice leader and co-founder of

DJ performance and political collective Sins Invalid, disability justice steps
into the “cliffhangers” left over from the disability rights movement.

The disability rights movement in North America, which began in the

late 60s amidst other forms of social justice and radical organizing, has
historically focused on a legal/civil rights framework, using laws and policy
changes to get rights for disabled people. It has also had long-term chal-
lenges with centering white male leadership, racism and using a single-is-
sue approach instead of working with other movements. Many disabled
BIPOC have faced racism in the disability rights movement, or have felt
like our experiences of disability were not centered.

11
Disability justice activists have organized around a
wide variety of issues, like:

• Police violence and murder of disabled and Deaf BIPOC, and prison
justice for disabled and Deaf imprisoned BIPOC

• Medical abuse, denial of care and experimentation on disabled BIPOC

communities, including fighting against “ICUgenics” and the denial
of care and vaccines to disabled and chronically ill people during the
COVID-19 pandemic

• Climate justice, surviving climate catastrophe and fighting for the rights
of disabled, elder and medically vulnerable people to survive climate
events, in and outside institutions

• Fighting immigrations laws like Trump’s public charge law that excludes
disabled people from being able to migrate

• Fighting voter suppression of disabled people, particularly BIPOC

• Equal access to education for BIPOC disabled youth and adults, ending
the special-ed-to-prison pipeline

We are also a movement full of cultural workers, community builders

and educators, expressing ourselves through art, performance, zines, on-
line communities, clothing, writing, music, hiphop and many forms of sto-
rytelling and creation. The community building, friendships and networks
of collective care we create are as much a part of our work as big public
campaigns.

12
Ten Principles of Disability Justice

From Sins Invalid

1. Intersectionality

2. Leadership of Those Most Impacted

3. Anti-capitalist Politic

4. Commitment to Cross-movement Organizing

5. Recognizing Wholeness

6. Sustainability
We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long
term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice
and liberation.

13
7. Commitment to Cross-disability Solidarity

8. Interdependence
We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing
that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.

9. Collective Access

10. Collective Liberation

14
Section 2: Political Vision
Many organizations that are in the early stages of bringing disability
justice into their work start by adding in some access—making sure meet-
ing spaces are wheelchair accessible, hiring ASL interpreters, etc.—and
hoping disabled and Deaf people show up. This isn’t wrong or a bad
thing, but disability justice is about more than adding access. It is also
about shifting power. What these organizations don’t often ask is:

• How is disability justice influencing our politics and practices?

• When we plan a campaign or action, how are we thinking about dis-

abled people and issues as we do our work? Are we thinking about
disability from the beginning or going “oops” and remembering it at
the end?

• Are we thinking of disabled people as leaders and members of our or-

ganization, or just as clients to be served?

• How are we addressing and mending histories of ableism in our organi-

zation and building with disabled communities and organizations?

All of these are questions you can bring to your meetings, planning
sessions and hangouts. You can ask them as you create campaigns and
projects and community spaces. And you can use the following questions
to examine where disability justice is (or is not) in the work you’re doing.

History
Are disability justice and disability talked about in your organization
or community? How?

What are the specific histories of disability in your community or the

communities your organization works with?

15
 Are there incidents of ableism in your organization’s history that
you need to examine? Are there needs for accountability or repair?
(If you think there are none, don’t be so sure. You may need to talk
to people, be curious, ask questions, figure out what people need to
feel safe disclosing.)

Is disability or disability justice a topic within the coalitions or

networks that you are a member of? How so? Could you bring it up
if not?

Relationships
Do you have knowledge of and relationships with disabled activists,
organizations, communities? What’s your sense of what the
landscape is like currently for disabled/Deaf/neurodivergent people
and activism in your communit(ies)?

What are those relationships like currently? How healthy are they?
Where could they be built deeper and strengthened? Is there any
repair needed?

What do you need to do to build deeper relationships with disabled

activists, community members and communities?

What can your organization do to support disabled organizers,

collectives, communities and organizations in the work they are
already doing? What are the resources you can share? Where and
how can you share a platform, money, funding, equipment?

Knowledge
What do you know about the disability justice movement? Who and
where did you learn it from?

16
 Do you have a sense of how disability justice is different from the
disability rights movement?

Who are disabled leaders and thinkers you respect and have learned
(are learning) from?

What disability justice issues do you think you need to learn more
about? How are you learning about them? Do you have a plan for
ongoing political education about DJ?

What are the specific histories of disability in your community or the

communities your organization works with?

What are the disabled issues in your community or the community

you work with right now?

Are there specific communities of disabled people (i.e. Deaf people,

autistic folks, etc.) whose histories, issues, organizing and current
issues you want to deepen your knowledge of?

Politics
How long has your organization been doing DJ or disability work?

How is disability talked about in your organization or community?

Who and what are the disabled people, leaders, issues and
organizing strategies in the current campaigns or organizational
work you’re doing?

Do you ask for, and pay, for the expertise of disabled people to help
shape your policy perspectives?

What are the strategic goals you have for the next one, two, five or
ten years to advance disability justice?
17
Have you considered the intended and unintended impacts on
disability communities if you achieve your policy win?

Are disability justice and DJ issues a perspective/topic within the

coalitions that you are a member of? If not, how can you bring
them in?

18
Section 3: Doing an Internal Audit:
Taking Stock and Getting Real
Procedures and Structures
Do you create budgets that recognize the need for access supports?
(e.g. ASL, interpretation, childcare, support staff, etc.)

Do you maintain a list of access support vendors (i.e. CART and ASL
interpreters, people to do access audits, web designers who practice
accessible design, chemical-safe cleaners, caterers who cook for
specific food access needs)? If not, can you start making one and
working with those vendors now so they’re ready to go when you are
planning an event?

Do you have a protocol checklist or access rider for ensuring access

happens during events?

Do you have standard emails you send to people orienting them

towards access requests before a meeting or event? (e.g. an
existing protocol for ensuring presenters get their scripts to ASL
interpreters a week before the event, existing langage around
fragrance free requests, etc.)

Do you have an existing list of accessible venues to use for events?

People
How many disabled people are working in your organization? How
do you know this?

How many of those folks are in leadership? Do you know how they
feel about the ways they are supported in their disabled and access
needs? Is there a method for checking in about this regularly?
19
 How many of the disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people in your
organization (including you) are involved in disability organizing,
culture, community, etc?

Is there a history of disabled people being forced to leave your

organization, actively or passively? What happened? What were the
elements that pushed them out? How have you worked towards
repairing this?

Policy
What is your policy around disability, sick or caregiving access
requests?

What kind of documentation do you require in order for someone to

get access needs approved? How much gatekeeping, assumptions
that people are lying/hustling the system, or medical approval do
you require?

What is your policy around sick time/disability time/paid medical

leave? If someone needs to take off more than a short period of time
for disability, chronic illness or mental health-related needs, how do
you deal with that?

Do you have strategies for making it work when a disabled worker

gets sick, is late, or can’t make it to a venue because of an access
failure? How do you build in backups, rest time and low-stimulation
time?

How do you assess “achievement” in an anti-ableist way? How do you

view things like “intelligence,” “reliability” and other metrics often
used to assess people that can often be ableist?

20
Section 4: 10 Principles of DJ
Discussion Questions

Intersectionality
How are you embodying intersectionality in your disability justice
work?

How are you making sure that the BIPOC, the queer/trans folks, the
not-men, and the working-class/poor are part of your DJ work?

How do you take leadership from and support the leadership of

people targeted by multiple, interlocking oppressions?

Leadership of Those Most Impacted

How are you embodying the leadership of those most impacted in
your work?

How are you ensuring that the people most impacted by ableism are
leading?

Are you looking to disabled people as leaders, particularly multiply

marginalized crips and disabled people who are poor, who don’t
have fancy degrees or jobs?

21
Anti-capitalist Politic
How are you embodying an anti-capitalist politic in your work?

How are you doing work that’s not disability capitalism?

How do you do things in a way that challenges professionalism,

501(c)3 tax status, grants, making money, and having to work on a
certain timeline?

What comes up for you here?

22
Commitment to Cross-movement Organizing
How do you bring DJ into your cross-movement organizing?

Recognizing Wholeness
How are you recognizing wholeness in your work, including when
someone is “unproductive” or slower than what you’ve been taught
is “productive?”

How do you build with the leadership of people who are not
many-degreed, super fast, full-time workers with standard CVs?

What are your connections to disabled people who are sick,

homebound, institutionalized, “weird,” without formal education and
poor?

Sustainability
How are you thinking about and practicing sustainability?

Where are your successes? Where are your challenges?

Where do you want to grow next?

How do you embody sustainability as an access need for everyone

you interact with?

Commitment to Cross-disability Solidarity

How are you practicing cross-disability solidarity?

Where are your successes? Where are the places you are struggling?

Where and how can you learn and grow?

23
Interdependence
What does interdependence mean to you?

What is easy, what is harder?

How are you practicing interdependence?

Where are your successes? Where are the places you are struggling?

Where and how can you learn and grow?

Collective Access
How are you doing with collective access?

Tell some stories of flexibility and creativity in creating collective

access.

Tell some stories about the struggle places.

Collective Liberation
How have you been working for collective liberation right now with
disability justice at the center?

Tell some stories of how you’re working for collective liberation.

Where do you still want to grow?

24
Section 5: Access Tools
Why is accessibility important? Why is it not the only
thing we’re asking about?

25
 Accessibility is often the first place that organizations go to when they
start looking at dismantling ableism in their organization. Accessibility is
crucial. Without it, we can’t get in the door or stay there to build power as
disabled people. (Sometimes we end up building our own buildings, or
meeting outside.)

Access is an area of much disabled expertise, and there are many,

many access tools created by disabled people already out there. Instead
of trying to reinvent the wheel, I’ve linked to them. As you use this guide,
move through them a step at a time. You might use the RAMP physical
space audit and move through your workspace with a measuring tape,
answering the questions, one week. And the next week, you could take
Sins Invalid’s “Suggestions for a Public Protest” and think through which
of their suggestions you have used in planning protests and actions, and
which you could use going forward.

Tools
HEARD’s The Revolution Must Be Accessible Toolkit for
Online Access
Disabled communities have used Zoom and other online meeting
platforms for years to make meetings accessible to people who have diffi-
culty meeting in person because of access barriers, ableist transportation
and lack of spoons. Since COVID-19 hit in early 2020, online meetings
have boomed, including among majority-abled organizations who have
never used Zoom before. This has resulted in both a boom in organiza-
tions asking for ASL and CART services, and a lack of good skills around
doing online access well.

In response, HEARD (Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of Deaf

communities), a cross-disability abolitionist organization, created “The
Revolution Must be Accessible: A Guide For Creating Access Centered

26
Online Movement Education,” which is filled with tips and advice for or-
ganizers creating accessible online events, particularly with regard to ASL
and CART (real time captioning). You can find it below.

ASL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVBV0vUvT18&feature=youtu.be

English Resource: bit.ly/accessrevolution

Spanish Resource: bit.ly/revolucionacceso

Text Only English & Spanish with image descriptions:

bit.ly/accessrevolutionTXT

Here are some examples, taken from Leah Lakshmi

Piepzna-Samarasinha’s access rider, which was adapted
from Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project’s rider:
• American Sign Language interpreters during the online event. They
must be certified interpreters with experience and comfort working with
online events and with queer/
BIPOC/disabled/progressive
material. At least 2 interpreters
for an event over 1 hour.

• Live captioning during the on-

line event by a Communication
Access Realtime Translation
transcriptionist (not by an app
or autocaption, which are inac-
curate and do not provide lan-
guage equity). CART alone does
not provide language equity for
Deaf people for whom ASL is
their first language.

27
• After the event if you also plan to post a video of it online, you need to
include captions and a link to a transcript (see below).

• One option post-event if you cannot provide ASL/CART: upload a vid-

eo of the event with captions (not auto-generated ones) on YouTube or
another video platform and include a link to the text transcript with the
post.

• Adequate prep time and script collection (no more than 48 hours be-
fore event does script, including run of show, get to CART and ASL in-
terpreters).

• A rehearsal time, separate from the event, where interpreters, event

organizers and volunteers are present to make sure everyone is on the
same page in terms of where interpreters will be pinned, CART login/
assignment being done well, and the use of chat.

• All online events will have security protocols (registration required, abil-
ity to mute participants, no screen share from participants) in order to
limit the possibility of Zoom bombing and harassment.

• All online events will have at least one designated person working as
an “access usher” to answer any access requests or questions from par-
ticipants and troubleshoot any access problems (CART embed stops
working, ASL interpreters disappear, there’s a language question from
an ASL-using attendee, etc.).

Example of a YouTube video with human-generated captions (BTW,

these are more accurate) and a link to transcript in the description section:
2019 Autistic Self Advocacy Network Annual Gala: Keynote by Alice
Wong (captioned)

28
Publicity/Media

• Graphics and posts about the event should include info that ASL inter-
preters and captioning/CART will be provided.

• Image descriptions added as alt text on social media platforms (e.g.,

Twitter, Instagram or Facebook)

• Inclusion of an email of a contact person if anyone has questions or ac-

commodation requests for the event

Radio/Podcast

• Include a text transcript with your post.

A Promise and a Practice: Carolyn Lazard’s Accessibility In

the Arts toolkit
“Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice” is an accessibility
guide geared toward small-scale arts nonprofits and the potentially ex-
pansive publics these organizations serve. It details specific ways in which
disabled people are excluded from cultural spaces and offers possible
solutions to those barriers. Moving away from historical and juridical defi-
nitions of accessibility, this guide considers the unique capacity of small
scale arts organizations to meet the needs of disabled communities. It
engages principles of disability justice to think through what can urgently
be done to create more equitable and accessible arts spaces.

While this toolkit was developed specifically for art and cultural spac-
es, it is an INCREDIBLY thorough and comprehensive resource for access,
providing best practices, requirements and hacks for all kinds of access
in its “Accommodations” section. It also contains equally important info
about how to list access info on promotional materials, and most import-
ant of all, how to budget for access, including a comprehensive list of free
or low cost access tools, apps and programs.
29
Website accessibility checker:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-intro/

Accessibility: A checklist by Stacey Park Milbern from the book

Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind from 2011 that still holds up. Has info
about food, gender neutral bathrooms, wheelchair access and a whole
lot more.

Office space access audit: RAMP Vancouver Access Audit

Suggestions and Questions for Public Protests and Rallies

Some questions to ask yourself before you start planning and along the
way:

• What are your goals, values and strategy?

• How is disability justice a part of your goals and strategies?

30
• Are you thinking of actions in a way that’s accessible to disabled, im-
mune compromised, neurodivergent and Deaf people?

• What are some ways of doing actions that are not “big rally outside with
chanting and speeches?”

Sins Invalid’s “Suggestions for a public event” are a great place to start in
thinking through your march/rally planning: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/
news-1/2020/6/8/access-suggestions-for-mobilizations

Some initial questions to ask yourself:

• How long is your action? What is the distance of the march route?

• How much time will the action take?

• If it’s a rally with

speakers, can you
bring folding chairs
for people? These can
be useful for many
people, including par-
ents, elders, sick and
disabled folks.

• Do you have ASL and

ESL access? Inter-
preters need to be
booked in advance.
Also, not all ASL inter-
preters are the same.

31
• Do you have water and snacks?

• What about bringing a folding wheelchair for if folks get tired and need
the support?

• Disabled people often get pushed and shoved around in marches. Can
you have volunteers help walking people get out of the way?

“Cripping the Resistance: No Revolution Without Us.”

“26 Ways To Be In the Struggle, Beyond the Streets,” by Ejeris

Dixon, Piper Anderson, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Ro Garrido, Emi Kane, Bhava-
na Nancherla, Deesha Narichania, Sabelo Narasimhan, Amir Rabiyah and
Meejin Richart, is an amazing toolkit that lifts up ways we can organize
without being in the streets, through teaching, making art, posting, fund-
raising and educating.

Plain Language
Plain language is a key need by many communities, including devel-
opmentally and intellectually disabled communities, to understand infor-
mation. A great 101 guide to plain language can be found here.

32
Section 6: Four Stories about
Organizations Bringing Disability
Justice to their Work

Block Build Be

33
 The Buddhist Peace Fellow-
ship created BBB as an annual and
monthly space where people from
different social justice movements
come together to learn political or-
ganizing skills and about each other’s
work in a wide variety of communities
and movements, including racial and eco-
nomic justice, Black liberation, healing jus-
tice, labor, immigrant rights, Indigenous
sovereignty, prison abolition, queer and
trans and gender justice, feminism, Tibetan
freedom, environmental justice, anti-Islam-
ophobia, anti-sexual violence, children’s
rights, housing justice, anti-fascism and
more.

BBB is named after peace activist Joanna Macy’s ideas of three nec-
essary modes of action as we work to create justice and liberation:

Block: resisting harm and injustice

Build: cultivating relationships, communities and new structures
Be: contemplative practices for resilience and liberation

After BBB held a first retreat that felt only marginally accessible,
member Max Airborne, a disabled white genderqueer person, trained the
BBB retreat’s ten-person facilitation team in disability justice principles
over a couple of meetings.

Max Airborne says about this experience of bringing DJ to the BBB

retreat: “When they invited me on to the team, I knew there was potential
for this to be a community that could support integrating disability justice,
even though it is not a community primarily for disabled folks.
34
 “We began preparing
among the facilitation team by
talking about what it means to
center access as part of our frame-
work. While a checklist of access
needs can certainly be helpful, I want-
ed us to get rooted in access needs as things
that are constantly revealing themselves, always
changing. Access needs are things everyone
has, it’s just that in an ableist world, certain peo-
ple’s access needs are more likely to be met.

“The way this got actualized on the retreat

was so beautiful… Each person was invited to
consider and share their access needs, not just at
the beginning of the retreat, but at the beginning
of every session. Access needs were not held as
something extra, but as necessary and emerging.

“It was deeply healing to feel the whole community participating in

this with such love and tenderness and vulnerability—tending to the mobil-
ity pathways in the room so everyone could get where they needed to go,
taking care with how we used the microphones so everyone could hear,
facing those who were supported by being able to see the lips of those
speaking, and feeling their way into asking for support when needed: low-
ered light to avert a migraine, patience and understanding around social
conventions, emotional support, help carrying stuff.

“We created a team of ‘access pixies’ whose role was to assist as

needed around access issues, and they really took it on in a deeper way
than I had even imagined. The team of access pixies met with each other
regularly, discussed needs that were emerging, made announcements
during each full-group session and invited new announcements about

35
access needs each time. Their dedication was so palpable, joyful and
creative. I heard from a number of them at the end how much they loved
being an access pixie and learning more deeply about how to center and
support access. Next year I really want to make wings for access pixies!”

Kebo Drew, Queer Women of Color Media Access Project

QWOCMAP is a 25-year-old queer and trans BIPOC media-making
project that trains QTBIPOC in all aspects of film and video making and
throws an annual, multi-day free film festival that is the talk of the town and
a hot date night. I first started attending their film festivals when I was new-
ly living in the Bay Area in 2007 and encountered a vibrant event of 300-
500 queer women of color of all ages and identities, flirting, hanging out,
enjoying free desserts and spending time together. Because it was free,
I saw many poor and working class folks attending. There was an atmo-
sphere of love, welcoming, fellowship and kindness. It was not a “cool kids
club.”

Around 2011, QWOCMAP drew my attention again when I noticed

they were asking attendees, in a loving,
down-to-earth way, to be fragrance free!
I knew it could be really tough to get
non-disabled BIPOC spaces to ask people
to think about access, and that
it was especially hard for a lot
of Black and brown people to
go fragrance free, because it
was seen as a “white thing,” be-
cause of our cultural ties and

36
love for fragranced products, and because it can be hard to find and pay
for fragrance-free Black and brown body and hair care products. Mix that
together with the fact that many BIPOC have cultural trauma over being
cautioned by our families to always smell “clean,” getting BIPOC spaces to
go fragrance free was an uphill battle.

QWOCMAP’S announcement of their 10th anniversary “Season of Love”

festival in 2014 read:

Dear QWOCMAP Community,

Hey, we really need your help with something.

Are you willing to learn about being Fragrance Free?

This year, our 10th anniversary Festival Focus, “Re-Generation:

Food, Environment & Land,” takes root in our cultural legacies
of sustaining the earth, sowing seeds of resistance and culti-
vating justice.

As people of color, we are environmentally at-risk every day.

We have less access to healthy foods, clean water, and sus-
tainable energy. Affordable housing can be filled with pests,
mold and chemicals. As workers, we deal with toxic cleaning
products, artificial nail & polish fumes in salons, hair dyes and
straightening relaxers. Our neighborhoods are built upon radi-
ation and industrial pollution.

Our communities disproportionately bear the burden of en-

vironmental injustice, and this has an intense impact on our
health and our bodies. From perfumes to essential oils, chem-

37
ical clouds of fragrance and scents do damage. As environ-
mental injury and severe chemical sensitivity increase, it is
important that we examine the intersection of environmental
justice and disability justice.

For QWOCMAP, justice is about access and equity. As queer

women of color, gender nonconforming and transgender peo-
ple of color, the spaces that we create need to be accessible
to all of our people.

Therefore, our Queer Women of Color Film Festival:

RESPECTS community members who are environmentally at-

risk and chemically sensitive

OFFERS SCENT-FREE Seating at House Right Orchestra level

WORKS with our venue to use fragrance free, non-toxic clean-

ing products and other supplies, and avoid scented products

STRONGLY REQUESTS that all audience members, volunteers,

partners and community members AVOID scented-products,
and

REFRAIN from wearing, bathing with, using on their bodies or

washing their clothing with products that have fragrance

This has been QWOCMAP policy for several years. Yet we also
understand that ending ableism and creating disability justice
is an ongoing process.

We are dismayed that several community members have had

38
to leave the Film Festival due to illness caused by scents and
once again, we extend our deepest apologies to you. We
thank you for letting us know and working in community with
us to figure out solutions. We deeply appreciate your leader-
ship and knowledge.

This year, we want it to be CLEAR to everyone, we need your

help being FRAGRANCE FREE.

We ask not only for our larger community, but also for our-
selves as QWOCMAP staff, interns and Board members, as
Film Festival volunteers. We are people with environmental
injuries and chemical sensitivity.

We need a fragrance free space so that we can do our jobs,

and maintain our health, while we work hard to serve you.

Audiences need a fragrance free space so that we all let our

spirits soar with the combination of films and community.

As we prepare for our upcoming 10th annual Queer Women

of Color Film Festival, we wanted you to understand our pro-
cess. Below, there are links to becoming fragrance free. Much
of the information has been written and complied by queer
and transgender people of color. Everyone from femmes with
locs to divas with designer tresses is covered. We know that
y’all care about community, so we’re sending this email as a
FYI for us all to learn more.

Email us, we’re happy to answer queer queries and discuss

trans* topics at any time. Please email us, we love working in
community with you!

39
 I interviewed QWOCMAP co-founder and co-director Kebo Drew,
who identifies as a Black, Southern-raised, chronically ill/disabled queer
femme, in June 2021 about QWOCMAP’s process of bringing disability
justice to their work. Here are some highlights:

“There’s all kinds of shenanigans with funding in the arts. So, the
California Arts Council decided to take funding away from the National
Arts and Disability Center, like 100k taken away. We get there and I was
like look, POC are disabled,
queer and trans POC ID as
being sick and disabled;
there’s an intersection be-
tween what we’re suffering
from white suprem-
acy and ableism.
They were taken
aback. They were not seeing
ableism as a part of white
supremacy. QWOCMAP is
deep up in it because we
can offer testimony connect-
ing all these threads.

“That’s one of the plac-

es we find ourselves, one of
the ways we do DJ. We all
identify as disabled or neu-
rodivergent, but we are not,
in our byline, a disability org.
But, we are an org learning to embody DJ politics and practices. So we
can get in that room and push people to think about DJ stuff where may-
be other groups wouldn’t get in the door.

40
 “If you start from a stance that everyone’s disabled rather than it’s a
burden, everything is different. I look at my family and I can’t think of any-
one who’s fully abled. Diabetes, strokes, high blood pressure. Being folks
of color – when my dad passed, he had cancer because of being exposed
to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. One of the stories that came
out when my dad died was how his sister was working in the fields, preg-
nant, lost the baby, and was never able to have another child. Her repro-
ductive health being impacted by the kinds of work, the layers of disability
on both sides of my family… it’s a lot. In doing DJ work as folks of color,
we need to start thinking about how histories are disabling instead of ‘we
overcame and we’re all fine now.’

“So, it’s not a burden to make things accessible. Of course I want to

make a space where my family can come. We have a lot of disabled peo-
ple who work at QWOCMAP who don’t identify as disabled—like, “oh i’m
not disabled it’s just a condition, it’s ok.” But, wait a second! OK, let me get
you in the door, show you this space that is practicing DJ and maybe your
ability to talk about it will shift a little.

~~~
“It’s not a burden to make things accessible.
Of course I want to make a space where
my family can come.”
~~~

“We started out with ADA/Section 504 compliance and cross check-
ing all the lists. But then we hit this point where we crossed off all the lists
but we were like, is this really working? Compliance lists are a baseline! I’m
looking for something better than this baseline. At QWOCMAP, everything
we do is free, people just have to show up. Everything people need is
there. So we asked, why not use that same principle for disability? Where
you don’t have to ask, the ASL terp is just there. We have open captions on
every single one of our films.
41
 “This came out of our personal experience. Mad, who is the
co-founder, is hard of hearing, but her mom has hearing aids. There’s the
whole process of going to the movies and there’s that device you have to
ask for that barely works. Another intern who is HOH was like, I can hear
these things, but not these. So then we were like, let’s just get transcripts!

“Then the question was, how are we going to pay for captioning ev-
erything? We got money, just for two years, but we’ve been absorbing the
costs ever since. People are like ‘We don’t have money for DEI!’ Well no,
you have to put your money and resources in.

“It became a thing that we did. If you submit your film, it’s gotta be
captioned, that’s it. But we made it easy for people to caption their work.
We have a one-pager that explains open captions, the size of the font, etc.
So when people are like, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ we have this one pager
we send them.

“One year, six or seven people got triggered at once at the festival.
Even with my training as a crisis counselor, tagging people at CUAV (lo-
cal queer/trans anti violence organization), we couldn’t have anticipated
it, but what we can anticipate is making sure someone is there for them.
So we always have crisis counselors at the festival. Being aware of trauma
and mental health, building it into how we do things and not being sur-
prised by it happening is disability justice too, because PTSD and other
mental health disabilities are disabilities!

“We’re always moving from a place of, the three of us can’t do it all.
But who do we know who can help us? Who are the people and organiza-
tions we can reach out to? When it got so intense one year around issues
of abuse, violence and safety, with everyone asking me to intervene, we
reached out to a lot of different queer anti-violence organizations all over
the country and we got support and advice.

42
 ~~~
“When people say, we can’t do this, about DJ, about ac-
cess, I say, of course you can! You can do it if you come
from a stance of learning and listening and a sense of,
each year we’ve gotta make this better. ”
~~~

“We have an organizer mindset where people can come in from the
community and directly go into leadership. People can suggest something
and we’re like, as long as they’re ok with leading it, do it! That’s how we
got childcare. People needed it and were like, here’s what we can do. Peo-
ple know what they need and are a resource, if you give them the power
to make it happen.

“Things can also serve multiple needs. What do survivors need? Ok,
often they need a quiet space if they get triggered. Turns out quiet space
also tended to be a low sensory place that ND folks needed.

“Sometimes, with some issues, people get pissed because we were

taking a long time to respond. But that was the year my dad died, three
months later to the day Mad’s dad died. We need time to learn, rather
than respond really quickly, and that’s working the DJ principles too.

“Once we started, we just kept improving. Every time we would go

back to our values and practices document, we had volunteers who would
read through the whole thing and make sure it matched up with what we
were actually doing.

“So, for example, with the festival, a lot of people were bringing in
service animals, but wait, they’re not hypoallergenic, and there’s also peo-
ple coming who have really bad asthma. We started mapping out the seat-
ing of the theater: frag-free here, service animals here, ASL here because
sight lines.
43
 “When ASL interpreters of color were like, here’s the deal: the white
terps always answer the calls for ‘we need an interpreter’ first! So I em-
ployed a thing where I would hire all the POC ASL interpreters first in-
stead! So we would develop these terp lists and relationships that makes
it easier for us to make a script. Instead of making it an add-on, it became
part of the whole process.

“It’s also about listening to the community. We do a lot of surveys,

and we’d say, ‘This work was made with the input of hundreds of people,
but if you have something to add let us know, because of course we’re
gonna do it!’ So with food we had people saying hey, I’m vegan; I can’t
have nuts; I have a fish allergy. Fragrances! How do we get an air filter?
Now we have one. How can we do this and explain it to our people in
a way they can get behind it? So we started talking about what’s in fra-
grance. Black people understand conspiracy. I’d be like, ‘you know they
don’t have to tell people what’s in fragrance,’ and they’d be like, ‘what?!’
We got this email from an elder that the font size is too small. We get that!

“So when people say, we can’t do this, about DJ, about access, I say,
of course you can! You can do it if you come from a stance of learning and
listening and a sense of, each year we’ve gotta make this better. Thinking
of it as, how do we make the festival be a place where people can feel
nourished by it?

“We’re always asking questions: What do we need to know about

autism? What do we need to know about Deaf culture? We can have con-
flicting needs, how do we accommodate as many people as possible so it
can be better for everyone? Our response is always, we can do something
about this, and empowering people so everyone is working on it. We de-
serve abundance. That’s hard to remember sometimes, but we do.

“We ground our DJ work as, how do we welcome people? QWOC-

MAP values are all around welcoming people into the space. You can say

44
‘respect people,’ but that means something different to me being from the
South, so, give people scripts. You can’t just say it, you have to implement
it, and you have to make it easy for folks. Like, ‘If you see someone in a
wheelchair, the theater says the house manager has to seat them, but ask
what they feel comfortable with.’

“What a lot of people would see as a roadblock, we use the rela-

tionships we’ve built to innovate. We threw our first workshop specifically
for sick and disabled people, and that was the year the big wildfires hit
Northern California. And so many people were like, shoot, no one can
leave their house with the air purifier, this is going to be a bust. Except that
we were partnering with the Women’s Cancer Alliance, and they had just
moved into this new building, which had an air filtration system because
it serves women with cancer. So in the middle of horrible fires, our work-
shop was a place of respite, a place where participants could hang out all
day, get clean air, not have to wear their mask (this was before COVID). It
was a win-win, not a loss.

~~~
“The world is ableist and disabling and things happen
to us as POC. But at the same time it allows us to be way
more brilliant than if we weren’t.”
~~~

“We have a relationship-building style versus a policing or lectur-

ing-people style. We’re working class as fuck! My people are COUNTRY,
and we have this real working-class ethic. We use grandma language. If
you can’t explain something to your grandma, what are you doing?

“The working-class ethic is, what can we do? Other arts organizations
are like, we’re gonna need this much money to do this: I’m like, there’s
ways to be creative with it. Let’s get the food donated and use the money
we would have spent on that on terps.

45
 “The world is ableist and disabling and things happen to us as
POC. But at the same time it allows us to be way more brilliant than if we
weren’t. We’re moving at a pace that is real. We built the work around our
bodies rather than the other way around. I can only sit in a chair for two
to three hours a day at this point? Ok, no sitting in chairs. Or, everybody’s
office has an ergonomic chair, everybody has a set-up so we don’t have to
hurt. Reminding each other to drink water, sit down, we’re moving togeth-
er. Anytime there’s a new person we have to orient them to this because
it’s so different. It’s better for our organizing community. It affects how we
do fundraising because we’re thinking about healthcare, retirement.

“DJ really means, I love you! How can I show you I love you? But it’s
slow to build because the world isn’t set up that way.”

Hand In Hand
Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network is an organization
that was founded by and works in partnership with the National Domestic
Workers’ Alliance, linking the rights of domestic workers (which include
personal care/support attendants who work with disabled people) and
disabled people. “Hand in Hand is a national network of employers of
nannies, housecleaners and home attendants working for dignified and
respectful working conditions that benefit the employer and worker alike.”

Domestic work is crucial, skilled labor performed mostly by working

class, poor, immigrant, Black and women of color. Domestic workers were
excluded from the New Deal’s worker protections because of racism; they
cut Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous and other women of color, the vast
majority of people doing nannying, PCA and other care work, out of labor
rights, to perpetuate slavery conditions for Black folks in particular.

Historically, disabled people and domestic workers have often been

pitted against each other. There are histories of domestic workers fighting

46
for an end to subminimum wage and for health insurance and safe work-
ing standards being pushed back on by disabled communities who were
worried that an increase in salaries and domestic workers rights would
negatively impact their ability to access care.

Hand and Hand is a groundbreaking approach, bringing together

disabled people, including disabled people who are caregivers, and paid
care attendants to fight for domestic workers’ rights and the rights of dis-
abled people who need care. In their ten years of existence, they have
had some huge wins, from ending sub-minimum wage for care workers in
many states, to being part of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better
program, which pushes to fully fund in-home care for disabled people and
elders. They have also done cultural work, like their Communities of Care
project and the Home and Community Based Stories Fellowship where
caregivers and disabled people share stories about the warmth and love
they find in working together, to shift the ideas of care from something
people often are ashamed to need to something that everyone deserves.

Disability justice enters into their politics and policies in that they are
building alliances, believing that both overlapping communities can win.

To learn more about Hand in Hand’s work:

https://domesticemployers.org

https://domesticemployers.org/our-work/disability-justice/

https://www.carecantwait.org/communities

Nikkita Oliver’s City Council Campaign & Nikkita4Nine

Nikkita Oliver is a Black queer and nonbinary lawyer, activist, educa-
tor and abolitionist who ran for Seattle’s 9th City Council District seat in
the 2021 election. They built DJ through their “Nikkita4Nine” nine planks
of their platform, from talking about the need to center disabled people

47
in creating community-based climate disaster responses (e.g., wildfire
smoke emergencies, floods, snow), to city planning, to creating abolition-
ist policies (recognizing sweeps of homeless encampments, arrests of
people for consensual and survival sex work and drug use, and Seattle’s
contract with the King County Jail as disability justice issues). As part of
their ongoing work in doing “participatory policy”—creating spaces where
residents of the city’s communities could have opportunities to shape
policy—Oliver’s campaign created a Disability Justice Community Listen-
ing post, saying, “We are creating a space for participatory policy-making
with impacted community. We envision a City that accommodates all of its
residents and their needs. Disability justice, universal design and accessi-
bility is more than meeting minimum compliance with certain legal stan-
dards for physical spaces.”

48
Thank you!
Disability Justice Leaders Collaborative members Rebel Sydney Black,
Saara Hirsi and Nico Serra for reviewing and giving crucial feedback.

Kebo Drew and Max Airborne for agreeing to be interviewed and sharing
their organizational stories and wisdom. (For more information about
work Kebo and Max are involved in: nobodyisdisposable.org, fatrose.org,
and qwocmap.org.)

Participants in our 2021 focus groups.

Laura Nash for layout and design.

Sky Cubacub for allowing us to use their QueerCrip symbol on the cover.

Disabled and Here, Intisar Abioto and Andrea Lonas for many of the
photographs used in collages.

Northwest Health Foundation’s Jen Matheson for organizational support.

The Collins Foundation and Northwest Health Foundation for funding the
Advancing Disability Justice program.

Do you have questions or want to share your

experience using the DJ Audit Tool?

Email us at [email protected].

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