ABOUT US.
PDX DISABLED SUPPORT
We Are
A group of mostly white, disabled, trans and queer organizers, creating a network of caregivers for self-identified disabled people. Accessing care or medical needs often places black and brown people into systems of institutionalized racism and increased police interactions. All of this has intensified during the Corona Virus crisis.
We are creating a community-based carepod system that centers disabled people.
Many people are unable to access state databases because of institutionalized racism, as well as how structurally awful and ineffective the program is in general, and how low the retention rates of care workers is. Aging and Disability Services (ADS) announced they are not holding trainings, a prerequisite to becoming a caretaker. However, they are issuing temporary provider numbers to people who have lived in Oregon for the past five years and have no criminal record as long as they complete the training within 150 days.
We realize background checks are a form of gatekeeping and are anti-black.
The results of a background check
By the prison industrial complex does not legitimize if someone would make a good care worker or represent a true assessment of someone’s background. We have very limited funds and will be prioritizing paying previously incarcerated care workers upon request. With how difficult retention of care workers is and the fact that many care workers aren’t working right now, this will have dire and deadly impacts on the disabled community, and more impacting to black and brown disabled people. Across the board, disabled people struggle to find care workers who are committed to staying on long term.
Now with the Coronavirus
Our caretaking needs are nearly totally neglected. There is a shortage of care workers. More abled people are beginning to experience what many have been living all this time within a broken system. Because of their privileges and because healthy people will be prioritized under the virus protocol, we are being pushed further to the margins. Additionally, in just one month of the corona virus spreading we have seen how rampant institutionalized racism has led to horrific but unsurprising outcomes. Racist treatment in hospitals and jails which is deadly, has repeated those same patterns of oppression.