Center for Racial and Disability Justice

SAVE THE DATE for the 6th annual Accessible Juneteenth! 🎉

Join us, the UIC Disability Cultural Center, and the Chicagoland Disabled People of Color Coalition (supported by the UIC Department of Disability and Human Development) to celebrate the Black disability community!

📅 Tuesday, June 16, 4-7:30pm
📍 Access Living, 115 W Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60654

We want to make Juneteenth a fun and accessible experience for everyone, including disabled, neurodivergent, and Deaf people in the African Diaspora. There will be food, performances, and exhibitors at this family-friendly, non-alcoholic event!

More info on performers, food, and access coming soon. Stay tuned for volunteering and exhibiting opportunities!

Today, we submitted a public comment letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in response to the proposed 2028 Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) Quality Measure Set.

Written by Dr. Kate Caldwell and Dr. Hope Sparks, this letter raises concerns that the proposed measure set lacks sufficient equity stratification, lived-experience measures, material-access measures, and accountability mechanisms needed to assess whether HCBS are equitably supporting community living, self-determination, safety, and access to needed services.

Our recommendations include:
• Equity stratification to establish a meaningful baseline
• Reporting beyond geographic stratification alone
• Program, plan, and population-level accountability
• Self-determination, safety, and community as core measures of quality
• Material-access measures
• Co-production in equity-centered measure development

You can read this letter, along with all of our public comment submissions, on our website at https://www.crdjustice.org/public-comment-letters

Introducing the AANHPI Disability Justice Syllabus. 🌺

This syllabus brings together scholarship, art, movement work, storytelling, and disability justice praxis centering Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander disabled experiences across race, colonialism, care, kinship, labor, access, and collective liberation.

We hope this resource supports learning, teaching, organizing, reflection, and deeper engagement with disability justice across AANHPI disabled experiences.

📚 Read the full syllabus at tinyurl.com/AANHPI-Syllabus

Have suggestions for future additions? Reach out to us or share them in the comments!

From protest to hope, from rage to unity, CRDJams is back with our newest playlist: Spring of Discontent. 🎧

Critical songs across genres, grounded in history, built to carry a movement forward.

Press play, sit with it, share it loud.

Listen now at https://www.youtube.com//playlists

⏰ ONE WEEK OUT: Alternative Mental Health Crisis Response Panel

Join us next Thursday, May 21 at 6 PM ET for a virtual panel on the new joint report by Human Rights Watch, Center for Racial and Disability Justice, and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest: ”‘Self-Determination is the Pathway to Liberation’: Alternative Mental Health Crisis Response in the United States.”

At a time when coercive approaches to mental health crisis response are expanding, this panel will discuss why rights-respecting, non-police alternatives are crucial, what they look like in practice, and what it will take to sustain and expand them.

Moderated by Jennifer Mathis (The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law), the panel features Cat Brooks (Anti Police-Terror Project, Mental Health First), Travers Kurr (New Orleans Health Department, MCIU), Christina Sparrock and William Juhn (NYLPI), and Jordyn Jensen (CRDJ at UCLA School of Law).

CART captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided.

Learn more and RSVP now at tinyurl.com/Crisis-Response-Panel-Info

Disability Rights International is collecting input to strengthen advocacy for children and adults detained in orphanages, psychiatric hospitals, and other institutions.

The survey will inform training programs on documenting conditions inside closed facilities, work that exposes abuses and holds governments accountable.

DRI is asking advocates and organizations working in disability rights or human rights to share their input.

Take the survey (available in multiple languages):

Survey on Collecting and Understanding Information About Institutions for People with Disabilities

OUT NOW: Beyond the Golden Gate: IDEA at 50 and the Future of Inclusive Education in California, by CRDJ's Director of Research & Policy, Dr. Kate Caldwell.

Fifty years after the passage of IDEA, the promise of inclusive education remains unfinished. Our new brief, written for Disability Rights California’s IDEA 50th Anniversary Summit, examines inclusion, disproportionality, discipline, restraint and seclusion, and youth policing through a disability justice lens.

Grounded in California data and policy analysis, the brief calls for a future of IDEA rooted not only in compliance, but in belonging, equity, and justice for multiply marginalized students with disabilities.

Read the brief now at https://tinyurl.com/IDEA-50-brief

📅 Save the Date: Alternative Mental Health Crisis Response Panel

Just in time for Mental Health Awareness Month, join us May 21 at 6 PM ET for a virtual panel on the new joint report, “‘Self-Determination is the Pathway to Liberation’: Alternative Mental Health Crisis Response in the United States” by Human Rights Watch, the Center for Racial and Disability Justice, and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.

At a time when coercive approaches to mental health crisis response are expanding, this panel will discuss why rights-respecting, non-police alternatives are crucial, what they look like in practice, and what it will take to sustain and expand them.

Moderated by Jennifer Mathis (The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law), the panel features Cat Brooks (Mental Health First, Anti Police-Terror Project), Travers Kurr (New Orleans Health Department’s Mobile Crisis Intervention Unit, Christina Sparrock and William Juhn (New York Lawyers for the Public Interest), and Jordyn Jensen (CRDJ at UCLA School of Law).

CART captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided.

Register now: tinyurl.com/Crisis-Response-Panel
Read the report at https://www.crdjustice.org/crisis-response-report

Yesterday our incredible fellow Kyanda Bailey and Director of Research and Policy Dr. Kate Caldwell attended the Center for American Progress’s Disability Reproductive Equity Summit, hosted by CAP’s Disability Justice Initiative.

Kyanda spoke on the “Building power and persisting in 2026” panel, alongside organizers and advocates doing critical work at the intersection of disability and reproductive justice. Kyanda is a driving force behind our disability and reproductive justice work at CRDJ.

Some key takeaways and things we’re carrying forward:

Disability and reproductive justice must be rooted in acknowledging and addressing the structures that shape them, like racism, ableism, and economic status. These movements have to center the voices of those most disproportionately impacted, especially Black and Brown people.

Beyond reproductive rights and disability rights, we have to advocate for full autonomy for disabled people. Not just the right to have children, but the right to not have children, and decision-making power across guardianship, adoption, and every choice in between.

Check out our reproductive justice toolkit to learn more at crdjustice.org/repro

🌴 New roots, same mission!

CRDJ's May newsletter is here, and it's our first since officially making the move to UCLA School of Law. Read about our move, our latest reports and briefs, recent events, blogs, public comment letters, and more.

Check out this newsletter at https://mailchi.mp/237f422c9b58/crdj-may-2026-newsletter and sign up to receive future ones at http://eepurl.com/iw6hw6

What do true alternatives to police-led mental health crisis response require?

In Part 3 of our mental health crisis response blog series, Jordyn Jensen examines what a disability justice approach to crisis response requires, drawing on our recently released joint report with Human Rights Watch and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, "'Self-Determination is the Pathway to Liberation': Alternative Mental Health Crisis Response in the United States."

The piece builds from the first two blogs in the series, which examined crisis response as governing infrastructure and showed how crisis is shaped by geography, disinvestment, surveillance, and dispatch systems.

This third piece asks what must be built and supported instead.

True alternatives require more than the absence of police. They require non-coercive support, voluntary pathways, material resources, peer leadership, and community governance.

A different response is already being practiced in communities across the country. The question is whether we will protect, resource, and sustain it.

🔗 Read the full blog at https://crdjustice.medium.com/a-disability-justice-approach-to-mental-health-crisis-response-what-true-alternatives-require-51191a8258ff