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Agenda Item
3.3 24-0408 Subject: Honoring The Life And Legacy Of Stacey Park Milbern
From: Councilmember Fife
Recommendation: Adopt A Resolution Honoring The Life And Legacy Of Stacey Park Milbern For Her Substantial Advocacy And Organizing Efforts To Advance Disability Justice And Her Indelible Impact On Creating A More Equitable Oakland
As one of the founders of the disability justice movement, along with Mia Mingus and Patty Berne, Stacey Park Milbern was a courageous champion for disabled people in Oakland and throughout the world! Disability justice approaches the issues faced by disabled people through an intersectional lens and seeks to address the root causes of ableism. DJ embraces the social model of disability as a societal construct that forms the basis of the structural oppression we face, while also recognizing the very real medical conditions many disabled and chronically ill people experience — conditions that place many disabled people's lives in jeopardy and which require assistive technologies, healthcare and services that many disabled people must fight for access to. Disability justice requires not only dismantling ableism, but also ending all forms of oppression and state violence that our society has relegated to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, unhoused, incarcerated people, besieged and occupied peoples, immigrants and refugees with disabilities. This necessitates taking this bigger picture into account. Our movement has Stacey to thank for her groundbreaking work in bringing this struggle into the 21st Century. As a disabled Oaklander active in that ongoing struggle since its inception, I enthusiastically support thus resolution!
Stacey was an incredible community advocate and leader. She inspired and impacted so many people with her work for disability justice. We owe it to her legacy to honor her as much as we can.
As the leader of Mask Oakland, and a disabled community member, I had the honor to work with Stacey in the fall of 2019, when we collaborated on the #PowerToLive campaign, the initiative of Stacey and her then recently founded Disability Justice Culture Club. You may recall the setting: after back to back years of wildfire smoke and deaths of mostly older disabled people in extreme wildfires for which PG&E's neglect was later found feloniously liable, their approach to reducing liability in 2019 was to suddenly shutoff vast swaths of customers across the state, putting deadly pressure on disabled people who need #PowerToLive. Stacey attacked this issue head on, one of many she faced in her short but impactful lifetime, and led coalition building across disability and environmental groups as well as a protest at PG&E headquarters to demand accountability for lives lost and threatened. In future years, PG&E refined the shutoffs, and implemented programs to provide power supplies to disabled customers through regional nonprofit partners. While there's still work to be done, Stacey and the coalition she led can take credit for blunting the deadly edge of those policies. Stacey made me feel like I could bring my full being to what might seem like narrow-issue organizing, and brought joy, intensity, relief, humor, compassion, brilliance, clarity, and sass to community organizing. She is an outstanding example of Oakland activism's outsized impact on the state, country, and world.
As one of the founders of the disability justice movement, along with Mia Mingus and Patty Berne, Stacey Park Milbern was a courageous champion for disabled people in Oakland and throughout the world! Disability justice approaches the issues faced by disabled people through an intersectional lens and seeks to address the root causes of ableism. DJ embraces the social model of disability as a societal construct that forms the basis of the structural oppression we face, while also recognizing the very real medical conditions many disabled and chronically ill people experience — conditions that place many disabled people's lives in jeopardy and which require assistive technologies, healthcare and services that many disabled people must fight for access to. Disability justice requires not only dismantling ableism, but also ending all forms of oppression and state violence that our society has relegated to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, unhoused, incarcerated people, besieged and occupied peoples, immigrants and refugees with disabilities. This necessitates taking this bigger picture into account. Our movement has Stacey to thank for her groundbreaking work in bringing this struggle into the 21st Century. As a disabled Oaklander active in that ongoing struggle since its inception, I enthusiastically support thus resolution!
Stacey was an incredible community advocate and leader. She inspired and impacted so many people with her work for disability justice. We owe it to her legacy to honor her as much as we can.
As the leader of Mask Oakland, and a disabled community member, I had the honor to work with Stacey in the fall of 2019, when we collaborated on the #PowerToLive campaign, the initiative of Stacey and her then recently founded Disability Justice Culture Club. You may recall the setting: after back to back years of wildfire smoke and deaths of mostly older disabled people in extreme wildfires for which PG&E's neglect was later found feloniously liable, their approach to reducing liability in 2019 was to suddenly shutoff vast swaths of customers across the state, putting deadly pressure on disabled people who need #PowerToLive. Stacey attacked this issue head on, one of many she faced in her short but impactful lifetime, and led coalition building across disability and environmental groups as well as a protest at PG&E headquarters to demand accountability for lives lost and threatened. In future years, PG&E refined the shutoffs, and implemented programs to provide power supplies to disabled customers through regional nonprofit partners. While there's still work to be done, Stacey and the coalition she led can take credit for blunting the deadly edge of those policies. Stacey made me feel like I could bring my full being to what might seem like narrow-issue organizing, and brought joy, intensity, relief, humor, compassion, brilliance, clarity, and sass to community organizing. She is an outstanding example of Oakland activism's outsized impact on the state, country, and world.