Urgent Community Support Needed For Youth Organization

 

 

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Urgent Community Support Needed For Youth Organization

via cripchick// blog by cripchick on 12/12/09

Hi beautiful blog readers,

A few of you may have noticed that a lot of my posts are about my experience as an organizer with the Disabled Young People's Collective, a crew of disabled youth living across North Carolina. By "collective" i mean that we share decision making power, rotate responsibilities, and are volunteer organizers working with a shoestring budget. It has been a challenge to become a collective (a lot of this has been around internalized ableist beliefs and disability hierachy) but I am so proud to be a part of DYP because it really teaches me what interdependence can mean and what leadership can really look like.

I am not able to go into too much detail online but the more we radicalize and organize from our own vision for what we want community to look like, the more we have taken financial losses. As a group made up of youth of color, foster youth, queer youth, low-income youth, and youth with disabilities traditionally ignored by the Disability Rights Movement, we are all fighting for self-determination in our own lives and do not have financial resources we can put in ourselves.

Right now, we are in the red and we desperately need to come up with some money so we can meet in January to regroup and figure out how we are going to move forward. Even though we will be sleeping on the floor of a friend's apartment clubhouse, cooking our own food, and carpooling, it still costs a couple hundred to host a meeting that meet all of our access needs.

Our collective has done a lot of amazing work this year (for example, our Disability History Month Initiative where we went into ten 8th grade classrooms to teach about eugenics, institutionalization, self-determination and youth power this past October) and we want to continue it. Please help us make this possible by visiting thedypcollective.org and hitting the paypal button on the left!

This organization has transformed me and I thank you for your support.

In community,

cripchick

PS. Everyone who makes a donation will receive either a button you can rep DYP with, one of our limited 113 page zines that will teach you more than you ever wanted to know about disability rights, a few of our bookmarks highlighting frida kahlo, audre lorde, teddy pendergrass and other amazing disability leaders, or one of the hot DYP tshirts we rock everywhere (this will get you noticed!!). Our website is still under major construction but you can find out more at http://thedypcollective.org

 

 

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