The Time for Disability Justice is Now

By Cory Lira & Nico Fonseca

Disability Frontlines Fund Program Staff, Third Wave Fund

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Our largest movements are made up of small groups across the country resisting their material conditions. Whether in living rooms, Zoom rooms, churches, hospitals, DIY spaces, or schools – this is the work that bends the arc of the moral universe towards liberation. Under a fascism that has stepped well beyond our doorstep, we look towards organizations led by and for disabled communities who have historically resisted against systems of oppression, and shaped the very movements they’ve often been excluded from. 

This moment should confirm what disabled communities have been raising for years: life-sustaining and affirming resources should be community-created and led. We have an opportunity as funders to include Disability Justice—not just disability rights—as a core funding priority with all of our work.

We disabled folks exist in every community, within all the groups of people we work to uplift and support, and to move forward without intentional prioritization will only continue to deny our disabled communities the dignity and resources we deserve. The state is quickly escalating attacks on all people viewed as disposable. Because of this, our people are dying as life-affirming resources are defunded, dismantled, and banned faster than we’ve ever seen. 

"We have an opportunity now to let go of any remaining beliefs that the state will keep our people safe. Instead, we must move our money quickly and without restrictions to the communities doing the work to keep us safe, resourced, and liberated."

For us at the Disability Frontlines Fund (DFF), gender justice is rooted in the practice of creatively re-imagining what we’ve been led to believe is the one and right way. Whether that’s the one and right way to have a body, to perform gender, to navigate and reclaim power, to practice care work, or to move together in collective and shared purpose. Disability Justice, like gender justice, asks us not just to question our material condition, but to practice creative and visionary remaking of our conditions while building new accessible futures rooted in community self-determination.

Centering the leadership of those most impacted is a shared principle within gender and Disability Justice. Funders often have the propensity to create funding opportunities that are designed with the communities in mind, yet do so without long-term community involvement or leadership. We believe that we must work to counter that by creatively expanding our definitions of “resourcing” to meet the emergent needs of our grantee partners, fostering regular and consistent opportunities for prospective and current grantee partners to provide feedback, insight, and redirection as the needs of the field change or shift.

Disability Pride Month may be over, but we’re still sitting with all the lessons learned speaking with our DFF grantee partners over the course of the month of July. We connected with three DFF grantee partner organizations—Autistic People of Color Fund, Long Covid Justice, and Liberating Purple Star Collective—about what they are resisting in their work, what they are building, and what they want funders to know. You can check out these conversations below, as well as on our Instagram. You can also support the ongoing resourcing work of the Disability Frontlines Fund at Third Wave Fund by becoming a sustainer today.

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“We need funders to believe in, seek out, and support programs like ours on a long-term basis, especially as social safety nets are being defunded. Even before the current changes, these government programs often left most of our community behind due to inaccessibility, so we are constantly on the frontlines of protecting the lives of autistic people of color (POC) like us. We need the support and resources to step in where our government has long since abandoned disabled POC.”

The Autistic People of Color Fund practices redistributive justice and mutual aid by returning and sharing money directly to and with autistic people of color. They provide microgrants to Black, Brown, Native, Asian, and multiracial people in the autistic community for survival, organizing, leisure, and pleasure. They are committed to the principles of Disability Justice, and their work is grounded in commitment to ending extractive economies and building and sustaining generative economies. Read our full interview with them below and share their story on Instagram here.

Third Wave Fund (TWF): What are you resisting?

Autistic People of Color Fund (APOC Fund): The APOC Fund fundamentally resists the continuous attempt by systems of power and oppression to deprive autistic POC of the economic resources we need to survive and thrive. Our organization resists the economic oppression of disabled POC on two fronts: our core microgrant program and our advocacy work. Through our microgrant program, we offer autistic POC $100-$500 for survival, joy, and pleasure. Through our advocacy and policy work, we detail the structures and resources necessary for disabled people of color to thrive, name current areas where autistic POC fall through the cracks, and actively participate in coalition campaigns against harmful policies such as electroshock therapy.

TWF: What are you building?

APOC Fund: The APOC Fund was established to build out a world where the principles of Disability Justice are visible in all aspects of our reality, and extractive economies are a thing of the past. Within our organization, we uphold DJ principles, primarily: leadership of those most impacted, anti-capitalist politic, interdependence, and collective access. In the work we do, we uphold the principles of cross-movement solidarity, intersectionality, and collective liberation. We have built out mutual aid infrastructure that has redistributed over $300,000 to support autistic POC all over the country, the funds primarily going towards surviving under capitalism. We are also expanding our advocacy relationships across organizations and coalitions because we know that freedom can only exist if it includes all of us.

TWF: What is one thing you wish funders knew about your work?

APOC Fund: Our organization is often one of the only things helping our applicants stay housed and fed. Due to our limited resources, we’re only able to support them for 1-3 months of rent assistance, food costs, and critical healthcare. At the start of the pandemic in 2020 and later in 2023 continuing to now, we received seven times the amount of applications we received during each of our first two years. We foresee this trend continuing to escalate. Our grantees are now, more than ever, applying for survival resources. We are reading less and less applications about wanting resources to experience joy or creativity. This reality breaks our hearts and reflects our own personal situations & those of our loved ones, comrades, and community members.

"It is very important for marginalized folks and our allies to become involved in building strong relationships within our communities. We need to build alternate systems to meet our needs and the needs of our community members; systems that don’t rely on blood or exploited labor. We call on people to consistently act within their values, while doing so sustainably, and replenishing individual and communal hope that collective liberation is possible."

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“We must keep fighting the ever-rising tides of fascism and eugenics. This means that masks & other COVID-protection strategies must be part of our justice movements, because COVID isn’t over, and more pandemics are on their way.”

Long COVID Justice is leading collective efforts to confront the Long COVID crisis, while centering racial, social, economic and Disability Justice. Their work is done by and for chronically ill and disabled people, families and communities. Their work centers BIPOC and LGBT communities, which often face disproportionate rates of  COVID-19, Long COVID, and disability, along with the multiple impacts of pandemics past, present, and future. Read our full interview with them below and share their story on Instagram here.

Third Wave Fund (TWF): What are you resisting?

Long COVID Justice (LCJ): We are resisting the rise of fascism and eugenics, particularly as they manifest via COVID denialism*. As the COVID pandemic continues, denialism is spreading, even within disability and other left movements – which now echo talking points that were coming from the right just a couple years ago. We challenge our communities and governments to address the reality that COVID and Long COVID continue to impact hundreds of millions of people across the globe, and that we need effective healthcare, mitigation tools, policy, and strategy to address these complex issues. We are also resisting siloing or exceptionalizing COVID and Long COVID amongst other disabilities and infection-associated chronic illnesses like myalgic encephalomyelitis. As complex as it can be, Long COVID is just the most recent manifestation of a long under-acknowledged phenomenon of post-infection illness that often drives, worsens, or unmasks a set of understudied complex chronic conditions.

TWF: What are you building?

LCJ: We are trying to build on this moment to profoundly shift the way we approach and talk about chronic illness and disability in our lifetimes and are building more resilient communities in the face of inevitable upcoming global pandemics. We are building a fight for pandemic justice that intersects with our struggles for racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, and other movements. We build collective efforts to confront the Long COVID crisis. We are resourcing people living with Long COVID and other chronic conditions, their communities, and left movements more broadly. Using COVID as a point of entry, we’re bringing newly sick and disabled people including people who are newly politicized around health/disability—into a broader understanding of Disability Justice.

TWF: What is one thing you wish funders knew about your work?

LCJ: One thing we wish funders knew is that we don’t just work on Long COVID! We started LCJ at a time when Long COVID was even more widely misunderstood than it is today, with very few options for medical treatment and support. One motivation for forming LCJ was to build solidarity across disability groups, and to make sure that Long COVID was not exceptionalized in decision-making around policy, research, and advocacy around disability. We do this because Long COVID is not unique, but is connected to other infection-associated chronic conditions, and is part of the disability justice movement more broadly.

"We call for an end to practices and policies that ignore, marginalize, and deprioritize chronically-ill and disabled people, in and beyond pandemics, and invite those who are newly disabled and newly politicized by the COVID pandemic to learn from and join the larger movement for disability and healing justice!"

*Peoples Hub definition: COVID denialism is the refusal to acknowledge the ongoing reality and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, including its long-term health consequences and the necessity of sustained public health measures.

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"Our survival should not depend on whether our stories are inspirational or easy to digest. We are asking funders, partners, and community members to redistribute power and resources to those building outside the systems that have always failed us."

The Liberating Purple Star Collective is a trans-led, Deaf-centered nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering Deaf caregivers and their children, particularly those who are trans, non-binary, or gender-diverse. Their mission is to create inclusive, sustainable support systems that ensure families and their children are seen, validated, and empowered. They offer resources, mentorship, and advocacy services, both in-person in the DMV area and virtually nationwide, to bridge gaps in support for underserved communities. Read our full interview with them below and share their story on Instagram here.

Third Wave Fund (TWF): What are you resisting?

Liberating Purple Star Collective (LPSC): We are resisting vidism, distantism, audism, and phonocentrism—the violent ideologies that equate speech, sight, and able-bodiedness with value, intelligence, or humanity. We reject the supremacy of voice and visibility as measures of legitimacy. Audism is the systematic oppression based on hearing status. Vidism is the systemic privileging of sight and the marginalization of Blind individuals. Distantism refers to society’s privileging of sight and sound over touch—erasing those of us who navigate the world through tactile means, especially DeafBlind people. Phonocentrism upholds the belief that spoken language is superior to sign language and other nonverbal forms of communication, silencing Deaf cultural expression.

TWF: What are you building?

LPSC: The Liberating Purple Star Collective is building accessible space(s) for Deaf trans and Deaf Caregivers that raise them. We are building culturally and linguistically responsive care networks, organizing spaces, and advocating for Deaf and trans liberation all over the U.S., from Washington, D.C. to the most remote parts of the country. All of this work is being done by Deaf and CODA trans youth, Deaf caregivers, and trans families.  Deaf trans and nonbinary leaders make up our board. We only work with interpreting agencies that are owned by trans people. And most importantly, everyone here signs. Access isn't something you think about later.  It's our culture, our language, and our right to be born.

TWF: What is one thing you wish funders knew about your work?

LPSC: We are not ‘hard to reach’—we are systematically excluded by the very communities we continue to love and protect. There are harmful assumptions that Deaf people don’t want support from hearing people, or that we’re ‘strong on our own’ like we’re some island of isolation. That is a myth rooted in hearing people's guilt and avoidance—not in truth. Just like hearing people, Deaf communities carry ideological practices. White supremacy affects all of us. It is time for hearing people to confront audism, distantism, and vidism with the same urgency they fight racism, sexism, fat antagonism, xenophobia, classism, homoantagonism, transantagonism, and ableism.

Most funding models still rely on spoken communication, linear timelines, and white, able-bodied standards of professionalism. That structure erases us. Our work is Deaf-trans-led at every level, shaped by tactile language, access intimacy, and culturally rooted survival. We don’t fit into neat categories—and we don’t want to. Our care work looks like rebraiding a child’s hair, navigating trans youth services/gender-affirming facilities with no interpreters, and hand-signing at midnight when a youth is in crisis. These acts don’t show up in metrics, but they’re what keep our people alive. We are doing the work even when no one is watching.

“Our existence as Deaf, Disabled, and Sick trans people is not an access issue—it’s a political issue. We are resisting systems that pathologize our bodies, treat our communication as ‘inconvenient,’ and label us as burdensome due to the need for interpreters, time, & accommodations. These systems criminalize our ways of navigating the world—when in fact, our ways are rooted in community, care, and survival.”