Undoing Internalized Ableism Cohort (Summer 2024)

Undoing Internalized Ableism is a 6-week program to equip disabled organizers with tools and strategies to combat internalized ableism and to work through the question: How can this work be collective?

The cohort will participate in 5 workshops on peer support, self-advocacy, collective care, and disability liberation. Accountability groups will provide support and deeper reflection, and there will be 4 collaborative spaces to work on final projects and connect with other participants.

The cohort is facilitated by a team of disabled organizers, some of whom have previously participated in the cohort themselves.

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Internalized ableism is something that every disabled person deals with and for many it is the reason that they don’t identify and/or participate in struggles for disabled liberation. Our movements rarely have a sophisticated approach to undoing ableism generally and almost never have a focus on internalized ableism. Because of this, there are very few structured accessible spaces to do this work collectively. Our goal is for disabled people to support one another so we can effectively contribute to movements without killing ourselves to do so and be able to decide for ourselves how we can push each other to meet the demands of what is happening to us. If we don’t figure out how to make this a part of our fight against ableism, then we will have more generations of disabled people feeling unworthy and/or not engaging with movements altogether. Collective liberation is only possible with the full participation and self-determination of disabled people in our communities and movements.

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Participants will leave with..

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Knowledge:

• Theory of how internalized ableism impacts us
• Able to recognize internalized ableism 
• Understanding disability as a place to organize from
• Have experience of an accessible and supportive space
• How other disabled people work to undo internalized ableism 

Skills:

• Able to discern what can be handled individually vs. what needs to involve community or organizing
• Able to delineate between what you have control of/or not is important 
• Have tools for self-advocacy
• Skills to work with it collectively, in particular addressing it in movement spaces. 
• Peer support skills to navigate hard conversations and feelings

Attitude:

• People not feeling shitty about themselves - shifting blame to systems/oppression 
• People not feeling alone - having more peers who can help engage in it
• Feeling less overwhelmed and being inspired to begin
• Feeling a sense of disabled identity grounded in movement history
• Believe that accessible spaces are possible and have more hope/expectation this can happen

Going beyond:

• Develop a peer community during the workshops
• Create ways to have these conversations in an ongoing way beyond these workshops.
• orgs or work people can plug into including care clinics — have prepared resources for folks

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Who is this program for?

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This program is only for disabled people, however, we recognize that people don’t claim disability identities for various reasons. If you’re wondering if this program is for you, here are a couple of ways of thinking about what disability is: Americans with Disabilities Act definition | World Health Organization definition. We all use different language; that’s fine - what we have in common is that our needs are considered outside of the norm and we’re not being supported to participate.

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Accessibility

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AI captioning will be provided.

Access requests, including interpretation and captioners, can be made during registration or by emailing Dustin Gibson at info@peopleshub.org.  Requests for interpreters and captioners that are made less than 48 hours before the event typically are more difficult to meet. We will try and notify you if we cannot secure requested access.

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Issues with Application?

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If you have questions about this offering or technical needs applying for this series, please contact registration support.

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