Education
Subvert the Dominant Paradigm of Disability/Charity By Letting Me Match Your Monthly Gift for Those Meddling Advocates at DREDF!
Image description: An old-timey drawing from a scene in A Christmas Carol where Bob Cratchit is holding Tiny Tim on his shoulder, who is cheerfully waving his crutch.
My, uh, non-Dickens text is Bob saying, “DREDF’s advocacy means you just might get a frakking wheelchair–maybe even an education!” Tiny Tim says, “I told Scrooge to become a DREDF monthly donor or I’d haunt his ass!”
At the bottom: Dog bless DREDF’s donors – everyone!
Image Credit: Illustration by Fred Barnard
How I love crafting heartwarming holiday cards. Like Tiny Tim subverting the dominant paradigm of disability/charity.
You may not know this, but fundraising is a hotbed of subversion if you’re disabled (like me) and raising money to fight ableism instead of being used as an ableist prop by someone else.
You know what goes great with a paradigm shift? A new narrative.
One where disabled people lead the philanthropic work that affects them. As in:
You let me, a disabled donor, match your monthly gift that will support cross-disability civil and human rights defense led by disabled advocates at DREDF. If you take this action, you’ll be making a gift and helping make philanthropy more inclusive. So it is with real glee that I throw down this match offer to help support DREDF’s 40th year as our country’s leading cross-disability legal and policy defense fund:
If you become a DREDF monthly donor by 1/31/19, I will match your first $40. Ex.: If you give $20 per month, I will match the total of your first 2 months, or $40.
I’ll know it’s a match gift because you’ll include “Nothing about Tiny Tim, without Tiny Tim” in the note field of your online gift.
You may know me as the Queen of Sardonica or as A Crip in Philanthropy but my days are spent fundraising at DREDF where I’m often serious for up to entire minutes at a time.
Our education rights work alone tells you why: “Dickensian” describes schools that lock disabled students in closets, hold them face-down in 4-point restraints, and fail to teach them how to read.
Individual contributions are critical because both impact litigation and policy require a big investment of time and resources, and foundation funding for disability advocacy is scarce.
I’m a DREDF major donor now because I have complete trust in the integrity, independence, and brilliance that the staff (who are not me) bring to disability civil and human rights advocacy.
If you know, like I do, that DREDF has made the world better than it was 40 years ago, please join me in giving a year-end gift. Share DREDF with someone you know.
If a monthly thing isn’t for you right now, no problem. We appreciate every single gift that will fuel our 2019 work to defend those gains and – let’s hope – advance them over the next decades. Together!
THANK YOU AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
A Crip in Philanthropy: The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: This Moment in Disability, Dignity, and Human Rights
An earlier version of these remarks was shared at Congregation Beth Jacob in Redwood City, California on March 3, 2018. I deeply appreciated their welcome when I was invited to address their community by Anne Cohen, an activist, disabled parent, and board member at the organization where I am Director of Development, Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF) or, as Anne has dubbed it, “the ACLU of disability rights.” CBJ’s cross-disability access allowed me to take the first step in organizing community support: communicate.
I grew up with a disability, one that is genetic. I have been a plaintiff in an ADA access case here in California. It involved a bathroom. That required a lot of talking publicly about my using the bathroom. For disabled people like me – physically disabled — being disabled means never knowing where your next accessible public bathroom is. Today. Nearly thirty years after the ADA was passed. And keep in mind those 30 years coincide with my fundraising career in social justice non-profits and their philanthropic allies. Those are whole decades of trying my best to use empathy and imagination to shift that stubborn disability narrative that says I receive but can’t give. That disability is a health thing. That I need a cure when a toilet would be preferable. That I am charity, personified, not justice, denied.
Top 10 Reasons Why Focusing on White Students With Disabilities Is Not Acceptable Policy Strategy. In DC or Anywhere.
I used this very same image for another post and darned if it isn’t perfect for this one, too! Courtesy Fox.
10. Because it’s racist. (In a rush? You can stop here!)
9. Because education policy is entwined with juvenile justice and incarceration policies for students of color with disabilities and, funny thing, disabled advocates of color think those issues are kind of urgent.
8. Because we lack the nanotechnology to measure the moral integrity of erasing students of color with disabilities from the very issue that derails and destroys their lives in vastly disproportionate numbers.
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And Now a Word From the FuckAbilityTM Research Council on the Series #Speechless
FuckAbility™ Research Council to Speechless: You Had Us At “Trash Ramp”
Matt Damon calls on Speechless producers to be more inclusive of nondisabled white male actors
Frankly, the Speechless pilot could end with Minnie Driver’s character pulling a Divine and it would simply convey the amount of shit people with disabilities and their families are expected to eat every day.
(Highway, Heaven) After a cruel, cruel summer that included When Khaleesi Met Romanticide and a profoundly fucked up little number called Don’t Breathe, the autumn winds are blowing our sad, tragic little skirts right up with Speechless.
Tales From the Crip 