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Borealis Philanthropy Launches the Black Disabled Liberation Project

Apr 16, 2024 | Borealis News & Updates, News & Updates

Three Black friends sit in comfortable chairs and supportive recliners during an evening conversation. In the middle, a friend with narcolepsy falls asleep smiling while clouds drift behind her head. Her girlfriend sits to the left, holding her hand while talking to another sleepy friend across the table. This friend cups hot cocoa to their chest. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and there is cozy, warm light throughout the room.
Jonathan Soren Davidson for Disabled And Here — Three Black friends sit in comfortable chairs and supportive recliners during an evening conversation. In the middle, a friend with narcolepsy falls asleep smiling while clouds drift behind her head. Her girlfriend sits to the left, holding her hand while talking to another sleepy friend across the table. This friend cups hot cocoa to their chest. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and there is cozy, warm light throughout the room.

Seeded by a $1 million investment from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Borealis Philanthropy’s Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF) and Disability Inclusion Fund (DIF) are honored to announce the launch of The Black Disabled Liberation Project, a co-funding initiative to resource organizing happening at the critical intersection of disability and Blackness. 

Both a grantmaking commitment and a soon-to-come action and resource hub, the Black Disabled Liberation Project is an offering meant to challenge the historical lack of investment in Black disabled activists—and make clear how the philanthropic sector can center and resource their leadership, wisdom, and solutions moving forward. The funding initiative is the first and only of its kind.

“This project was driven by our teams’ shared belief that any approaches to social justice absent of disability justice will remain unfinished and incomplete,” said Sandy Ho, Program Director of the DIF.

“We know ableism and anti-Blackness are interconnected systems of oppression. This explicitly intersectional funding initiative is an acknowledgment of this fact—and an investment in Black disabled wisdom, ingenuity, and joy.” 

The project began a year ago, when the BLMF and DIF teams came together to align under political education rooted in disability justice and Black radical tradition—and then developed shared values, criteria, and analysis to select its inaugural cohort. Under the guidance of disability justice leaders Yomi Wrong and India Harville, our teams arrived at a group of 10 grantee partners, who will each receive two-year grants totaling $100,000. 

A group of disabled queer Black folks talk and laugh at a sleepover, relaxing across two large beds. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and wearing a variety of sleep scarves, bonnets, and durags. On the left, two friends sit on one bed and paint each other’s nails. On the right, four people lounge on a bed: one person braids another’s hair while the third friend wearing a C-PAP mask laughs, and the fourth person looks up from their book. In the center, a bedside lamp illuminates the room in warm light while pill bottles adorn an end table.
Jonathan Soren Davidson for Disabled And Here — A group of disabled queer Black folks talk and laugh at a sleepover, relaxing across two large beds. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and wearing a variety of sleep scarves, bonnets, and durags. On the left, two friends sit on one bed and paint each other’s nails. On the right, four people lounge on a bed: one person braids another’s hair while the third friend wearing a C-PAP mask laughs, and the fourth person looks up from their book. In the center, a bedside lamp illuminates the room in warm light while pill bottles adorn an end table.

Guided by disability justice principles, these groups are reimagining—or organizing to entirely collapse—systems and environments that reify or evoke anti-Blackness, carceral violence, eugenics, and systemic racism. Through their work in the areas of arts and culture, Black mental health, movement infrastructure and community organizing, and healing justice, these organizers and organizations are leading us all closer to collective liberation, which must necessarily begin with Black disabled liberation:

  • Black Deaf Project: The Black Deaf Project is a Deaf and hearing Black collaborative nonprofit, which creates educational materials, experiences, and trainings rooted in Black Deaf cultures in solidarity with other Communities of Color to build relationships, increase cultural understanding, promote respect, and create pathways to joy and liberation. 
  • Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro: Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro is a Black, Queer, and Femme led organization that centers Black people who are the most impacted and marginalized. The organization works towards Black Liberation through two wings of work: tearing down the old world, and building a new world—working to defund carceral systems, advocating for policies that reduce harm, supporting Black reproductive justice, fostering community engagement, creating art, and cultivating healing and Black joy.
  • Deep Space Mind 215: Deep Space Mind 215 is a Philadelphia-based mental health and wellness cooperative that seeks to invest in community-grown practices, systems, and initiatives that improve and enhance the wellness of the city. The co-op seeks to provide low-barrier pathways for neighbors and workers with lived experience of mental health, neurodiversity, and/or institutionalization to gain practical skills in providing community care both in the community or within institutions.
  • Depressed While Black: Depressed While Black is an online community and a 501(c)3 nonprofit that donates Black-affirming personal care items to psychiatric patients and connects people to Black therapists. This work is guided by the vision of a world where people of African descent heal from severe depression through Black-affirming mental health support and advocacy. 
  • Embraced Body: Embraced Body is a Black, queer, and disabled led-organization focused on performance art that centers embodied Disability Justice praxis for collective healing. Its offerings include workshops, and private sessions, as well as consulting in somatics, implementing a culture and lens of Black access, and dance. 
  • Healing Justice Lineages: Healing Justice Lineages is a body of work—gathered through community engagement, interviews, and research—that provides movement-based context urging community and survivor-led care strategies. These practices and frameworks disrupt and push beyond the ways surveillance and policing of the medical industrial complex and public health system create harm. 
  • Loud’ N Unchained Theater Co:  Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Loud’ N Unchained Theater Co. is a collective of Black & Queer, trans, non-binary, Mad, c/Krip & disabled poets, teaching artists, abolitionists, healers & playwrights whose artistry is committed to Gender, Queer, and Disability Justice practices. The organization is rooted in the lived-experience of navigating the medical and psyche industrial complex while Black, mad, and in chronic pain. 
  • Shelterwood Collective: Shelterwood is a 900-acre Indigenous, Black, Disabled, and Queer-led community forest and collective of land protectors and cultural changemakers. Shelterwood is based on unceded Southern Pomo and Kashia territory, above what is now called the Russian River in Northern California. Through land stewardship, active forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction, community and cultural organizing, and the development of a community retreat center, the Collective heals interconnected ecosystems.
  • PeoplesHub: PeoplesHub is an online hub for movement workers to learn, connect, collaborate, and strategize in and across the disability justice and solidarity economy movements. These strategies are implemented through the organization’s many offerings, such as trainings and popular education-style workshops on radical hospitality, participation, and access. 
  • We Were There, Too: We Were There, Too is a project led by Anita Cameron, a Black disabled lesbian whose leadership has been present at historical moments in both the disability rights and justice movement. Her activism has ensured ongoing liberation from nursing homes and institutional care, especially for marginalized disabled community members with limited access to privilege and advocacy power. Anita’s new project will highlight the contributions of Black disabled people in the disability rights movement, which often gets erased by white, disabled-led disability rights movement leaders.

“We know from experience that Black disabled folks who are leading dreaming and visioning work are either underfunded, or unfunded completely,” said Julia Beatty, Program Director of the BLMF.

“They have never received the resources they need, nor the visibility they deserve. The Black Disabled Liberation Project is our way of stating—with unwavering conviction—that the philanthropic sector must listen to, follow, learn from, and resource Black disabled activists, and with abundance.”

In June, the BLMF and DIF teams will unveil a dedicated microsite for the Black Disabled Liberation Project, which will house the story of how this funding and education project was conceived, research that demonstrates the interconnectedness of ableism and anti-Blackness, and case studies that highlight the manifold ways in which folks are organizing to undo these stubborn and deep-rooted systems of oppression. Importantly, the site will also offer tools, resources, and actions for funders, who we are calling on to make deep, long-term, and trusting investments in Black disabled organizers who are leading us—with love, urgency, and steadfastness—toward new worlds. 

A Black trans person with idiopathic hypersomnia sleeps contentedly on a bed of warm blue and purple clouds. They’re wearing an eye mask and their dark curly hair is wrapped in a colourful sleep scarf. A small purple bat plushie is nestled beside them. Behind the sleeping person is a window, bathing the room in warm afternoon light.
Jonathan Soren Davidson for Disabled And Here — A Black trans person with idiopathic hypersomnia sleeps contentedly on a bed of warm blue and purple clouds. They’re wearing an eye mask and their dark curly hair is wrapped in a colourful sleep scarf. A small purple bat plushie is nestled beside them. Behind the sleeping person is a window, bathing the room in warm afternoon light.

To learn more about the Black Disabled Liberation Project, please connect with us here. To better understand how Borealis can support you in forging connections with—and funneling resources to—the frontlines of the disability justice movements, please reach out to the Disability Inclusion Fund and Black-Led Movement Fund.