HEARD

I am applying for Elevate because I went to law school to free a DeafDisabled Black man who was wrongfully convicted, and I have $400,000 remaining in student loans after working for twelve years to successfully free him. As a Black, queer, trans, and disabled person, my law career is deeply focused on my communities, rather than on Big Law opportunities that would allow me to make a large salary that would pay my loans. I need this prize to allow me to continue to do this work for my communities without sacrificing my financial future.

The nonprofit I founded a decade ago, HEARD, is the only organization of its kind. I have served as volunteer director since the organization’s inception–always working additional jobs to make ends meet. HEARD is only this year finally able to pay for staff, and we are deep in building our capacity to function as a staffed organization. The money will help us hire staff ASL interpreters; and the trainings and organizational development you offer will help us build a stronger organization. I want HEARD to be around for another 10 years, and 10 after that, and your help can ensure this happens.

HEARD is a cross-disability abolitionist organization that unites across identities, communities, movements, and borders to end ableism, racism, capitalism, and all other forms of oppression and violence. HEARD supports disabled people and others who experience ableism by rejecting disability hierarchies and rigid definitions of disability, and by recognizing deaf people as part of disability communities. HEARD works to increase our collective capacity to identify, understand, and challenge oppression through grassroots advocacy, community organizing, peer support, mutual aid, education, and research.

HEARD envisions a world where multiply-marginalized disabled people are inherently valued and have the resources, safety and love they need to thrive and live self-determined lives. We dream of a world that honors our interdependence, invests in our healing from harm and trauma, recognizes our potential for growth and transformation, and ensures our collective liberation. There are no police or prisons in the future because our communities have created the conditions, developed and provided the resources, and shared the necessary knowledge to make all forms of policing and incarceration obsolete.

Disabled/deaf people face immense inequity in education, resource distribution, job access, and have incredibly unjust encounters with and outcomes in the criminal legal system. 

For the past decade I have been building a community of deaf/disabled people to support and care for deaf/disabled people who are currently and formerly incarcerated, along with their loved ones. I do this work because I hope to see a world without prisons someday, and in the meantime I believe we must protect the civil and human rights of imprisoned disabled people, and decrease the chances of any more disabled people going or returning to prisons. All people are deserving of civil and human rights, regardless of disabilities or conditions they may have, or any criminal status they have been assigned.

I created HEARD so that deaf/disabled people who uniquely understand our communities can be the ones advocating and showing up for our people who are swept into the prison system. We work on wrongful convictions, help deaf/disabled people and their families navigate a complex array of legal and social services, and educate our communities and supporters about political issues related to prisons, ableism, racism, and more.

There are many organizations that work on wrongful convictions. We are the only organization that serves deaf/disabled communities. In fact, most of the bigger organizations have inaccessible processes that actually screen out disabled people despite disabled people disproportionately being wrongfully convicted. This is not on purpose, but because the people who run those organizations and who create those processes are not disabled themselves, so they do not know how accessibility works for disabled communities.

While we started out focusing on deaf folks, we have grown into a cross-disability organization. That means we work on all kinds of issues facing disabled people. We have also begun training organizations in our field (and beyond) in how to make their services and programs accessible to disabled people.

Our services are unique and highly sought, so our primary goal is to grow our collective capacity to provide those services, and expand our communities’ capacities to do the same. For example, we operate a hotline for incarcerated deaf people who use sign languages. This hotline is only available a few days a week due to our limited capacity. We want to expand this service to keep up with the demand. We also know that, to be relevant, our education materials must come from community members, so we continue to expand our Public/Political Education Team. This team is creating new language for concepts that currently do not have signs (e.g., mass incarceration, ableism, capitalism, abolition). The importance of having language to describe and understand our experiences and larger societal systems cannot be understated. It is impossible to challenge injustices without having access to the language necessary to understand how oppressions play a role in one’s lived experience. We also hope to expand our work to keep deaf/disabled people out of prisons by providing conflict resolution training, counseling services, and a reentry program to ease the transition of formerly incarcerated deaf/disabled people back into the outside world.