Please join us in creating this community care peer support space.

There is a particular reality around what it means to be disabled and engaged in movement and social justice work.

The space will be animated by questions such as:

What does it mean in our activism, in our movements, in our work and in our communities to be all in?
What sacrifices are inherent, what do we gain, what do we give up and what is expected of us?
Am I worthy, do I have the ability to be in the movement, do I have a place here?

Unfortunately, support groups at home are often not enough. We need expanded possibilities around how we live and work as disabled and chronically ill people.

I’m Disabled, How the Hell Do I Survive/ Resist This? To Exist Is to Resist: A workshop facilitated by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Are you disabled/ chronically ill/ have a condition/ Mad, sick, neurodivergent, Deaf/ Hard of Hearing or some or all of the above? Does the escalation in fascism scare the shit out of you and are you wondering how you can resist in a way that is accessible to your body/ mind? If you are disabled you are already resisting on a daily basis; this workshop will be a space to share and learn about different models of disabled organizing and resistance that have and are already happening, and plot your own.

Bio: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/she) is an older cousin, regular person, memory worker, disability and transformative justice old bytch, and the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled, (co-edited with Ejeris DIxon)Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the transformative justice movemen,t Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Tonguebreaker and Dirty River. A Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. They are a new Philly resident after being a longtime visiting cousin.

January 8, 2025 - 6:30 to /

ASL and Live Captioning will be provided.

This workshop is part of a mini-series of workshops that offer an opportunity to answer the question that many people are asking: “How do I take action where I am?”

These five 90-minute sessions happening in December & January are intended to provide concrete ideas and steps that anyone can take. Each session is facilitated by long-time activists and organizers.

The sessions will be offered as Zoom webinars, but we will not record them. A couple of days before each session, we will email a Zoom link to all registrants. Importantly, these workshops are appropriate for people who are new to activism and organizing. They will not be useful if you are a long-time activist and organizer because you’re already taking action.

For the workshops, we will offer ASL interpretation and enable closed captions. We will have live captions for the January 8th workshop. A tech and access support person will be present throughout the event to attend to any emergent participant needs regarding Zoom and access.

Each workshop is a standalone session, but it’s a good idea to register for Mapping Your Social Change Ecosystem as an introduction so that you can assess your skills and interests in activism and organizing.

Please DO NOT register if you know you cannot attend. This is important. Space is limited. So please don’t register as a placeholder.

These sessions are being offered at no cost to participants BUT this does not mean they are free. There are costs associated with putting together such a program (labor, tech, interpretation costs etc…). If you can make a donation, please do. Funds will cover the costs of ASL. We will donate any surplus funds to REBUILD.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you make a donation, that counts as one ticket so you do not also have to register for a free ticket. It’s either a free ticket OR a donation one.

This mini-series is organized by educator and organizer, Mariame Kaba.

Join us for a powerful online abolitionist webinar exploring why we must dream, build, and fight for a world beyond psychiatry. Rooted in Mad pride and resistance, this session will unravel the violence of the medical model and how it pathologises our natural responses to a brutal world.

Psychiatry, like the prison system, polices difference and marginalisation, cages distress, and criminalises survival. But our grief, rage, and breakdowns are not disorders—they are truths. They are reasonable responses to unbearable conditions and can be paths to healing and liberation.

We need to stop diagnosing what is political, stop sedating what is sacred, and stop demanding placid compliance and wellness as conditions for belonging.

Our panel:

Indigo Daya:

Indigo is a mad, queer, multiply disabled psychiatric survivor who brings lived experience of violence, incarceration, and psychiatric labelling to their abolitionist work. After 18 years in the mental health system—including as a consumer worker—they walked away in 2022, no longer believing in reform that continually harms survivors. Their work now centres on building alternative solutions to psychiatric oppression—ones rooted in collective care, creativity, and justice. Indigo is passionate about epistemic justice, survivor-led initiatives, and using the arts to amplify mad wisdom and resist carceral systems. They work in community with fellow survivors through peer support, co-reflection, and mutual learning, always with a vision toward collective liberation.

Dr KJ Hepworth:

KJ is a queer, disabled activist/scholar, passionate zine maker, artist and teacher whose work centres on making space for access, connection, and mutual care. As the current co-recipient of the Stratford Scholarship, where they are exploring what care could look like outside of psychiatric systems of harm. Their work asks: What would it mean to hold each other in our full humanity, without pathologising pain? Across all of their work, KJ is committed to imagining and building liberatory futures, and creating accessible tools that help communities move toward those visions together.

Mush McLoughlan:

Mush McLoughlan is a white settler living on unceded Wurundjeri land. They are a mad psych survivor and deathsinger (someone who lives with ‘suicide’) and dream of a world free of cages of all kinds; from prisons to psych wards. Mush has a long history of navigating mental health systems, particularly crisis and suicide prevention services. These experiences have shown them the violence of coercive and pathologising approaches—and sparked their commitment to imagining and building radically different ways of being with people experiencing ‘suicidality’ or singing their death song. Mush began doing this work, co-founding and co-facilitating Alternatives to Suicide Naarm and with their 2024 Stratford Scholarship project where they explored deathsongs as a non-pathologising, community-based responses to ‘suicide’.

Tabitha Lean:

Tabitha Lean is a criminalised, Mad survivor and resister. She is a poet, artist, storyteller, disruptor, and troublemaker. Her work emerges from lived experience of both criminal and psychiatric incarceration, and is grounded in collective care, creative resistance, and the refusal of carceral and psychiatric control. She lives and creates at the margins — with love.

Tabitha is a co-recipient of the Stratford Scholarship, where she hopes to open a creative portal of possibility to imagine worlds beyond cages—where communities of care, grounded in radical reciprocity, render coercive psychiatry obsolete.

Our NDIS is under attack. It’s time to unite, fight and show the Australian government that we are not an easy target.

Social and community participation budgets will be cut by 30% - replaced by block funded grants to 'host' us in the community (no idea how we get there)

All support workers providing Assistance with Daily Life will need to be from registered providers - too bad if you like employing the person who showers you directly

300,000 less people will be on NDIS and all participants will be reassessed - too bad if you've already provided all the traumatising evidence before (or three times before!)

Scheme growth will be capped at 2 per cent with a chaotic and unpredictable NDIA determining where and on who the axe will fall

A return to the bad old block funded system - putting the lives of real people in the hands of a few big companies and charities often with horrific track records of abuse and neglect

Huge job losses in the disability and wider sector as the market collapses - Based on data by NDS and per-capita, the cuts equate to a loss of 204,000 jobs spread across the nation - most of them women, in a cost-of-living crisis.  

No word on self-directed registration - meaning people managing their own lives effectively will be forced back into having their lives directed by the whims of companies and charities.

It's easier for registered providers to rort the NDIS - they can bill NDIS direct with no requirement to prove that the support billed for actually occurred.

There are many other plans including huge issues around functional capacity assessments - we will be launching our fact sheets at this meeting. 

We will also be launching our 12 days of action in the lead up to the Federal Budget. We’ll be giving you concrete steps to get involved in the push back against these changes and letting you know what else is happening across Australia.

The meeting will be focused on action. There won’t be an opportunity for individual story sharing but there will be clear and specific ways to be part of the push back with options for people with more or less capacity.