Implementing a Disability Justice Framework: A ToolKit

We were so excited to see the release of the “Disability and Access Toolkit” this past month from Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). The toolkit offers a thorough and practical introduction to how organizations can build “the capacity to engage disability activists with relevancy and respect”.

The toolkit, available in full here, is split into three sections:

Nuts and bolts of accessibility: Provides guidelines about specific ways to increase basic accessibility for your chapter and organising. One type of access does not fit all, yet what has proven true is that increased disability specific access benefits everyone and particularly increases the involvement and relevance for people from marginalized communities; there will be no complete liberation without it.

Disability home manners: Here’s an ever evolving list, of ways we can unlearn ableist behaviour, conduct ourselves with some simple home manners and be better allies to disabled and chronically ill folks.

Disability Justice, anti – ableism and access resources: An assortment of resources and further reading about anti- ableism, access,  and Disability Justice.

Wondering what ableism is? Here is a little definition from the toolkit:

 Ableism works as a mechanism of white supremacy, capitalism and colonization by devaluing disabled* bodies and minds as unnatural, invalid and unworthy across the lines of race, gender, poverty and citizenship. It grants credibility and true humanity exclusively to able bodied people and as such plays a central role in determining which individuals or communities are deemed the useless eaters, the dangerous, the unfit, or the disposable.

Let us know if you make use of the toolkit! You can also check out another guide, created by COCo and Accessibilize Montreal, to accessibility in event planning, here.