Who We Are

The Social Work Disability Justice League (SWDJL) is a collective of social workers, educators, and community advocates committed to transforming practice, policy, and pedagogy through the principles of Disability Justice. We are practitioners, scholars, activists, and organizers who believe that social work must fundamentally shift to center disabled people's leadership, wisdom, and lived experiences. We recognize disability not as a deficit to be fixed, but as a natural and valuable part of human diversity that enriches our communities and deepens our understanding of justice, care, and liberation.

We come from diverse backgrounds and hold multiple identities—many of us are disabled, neurodivergent, chronically ill, d/Deaf, or Mad-identified. We are Black, Indigenous, people of color, and white. We are queer, trans, and gender-expansive. We work in clinical practice, policy advocacy, research, education, and grassroots organizing. What unites us is our commitment to reimagining social work through a disability justice lens and our refusal to accept ableism as inevitable in our profession.

Our Origin Story

SWDJL emerged from a growing recognition that while social work claims to champion social justice, the profession has historically marginalized, pathologized, and harmed disabled people. From the eugenics movement to contemporary practices of forced treatment and institutionalization, social work has too often been complicit in ableist violence. At the same time, disabled social workers and allies within the profession have long been doing the work of resistance, building alternative practices rooted in interdependence, collective care, and liberation.

We formed SWDJL because we needed each other. We needed a space where disability justice wasn't an afterthought or a specialty area, but the foundation of everything we do. We needed a community of practice where we could learn together, challenge each other, support one another, and imagine new possibilities for what social work could become. We needed to move beyond individual acts of resistance and build collective power for systemic transformation.

Our Values & Principles

SWDJL's work is grounded in the ten principles of Disability Justice, developed by disabled queer and trans people of color, including Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Leroy Moore, and the Sins Invalid community:

What We Do

SWDJL works at the intersection of education, practice, policy, and movement-building. Our work includes:

Education & Training: We provide annual, online, and free "Unconferences" for social work students, educators, and practitioners on disability justice frameworks, ableism in social work, and transformative practice. We develop curriculum and pedagogical resources that center disability justice in social work education.
Practice Transformation: We support social workers in reimagining their practice through a disability justice lens. We create tools, frameworks, and peer consultation spaces for practitioners committed to anti-ableist, liberatory social work.
Policy Advocacy: We analyze and challenge ableist policies in social services, healthcare, criminal justice, housing, and other systems. We advocate for policies grounded in disability justice principles and led by disabled people's expertise.
Community Building: We create spaces—virtual and in-person—for connection, mutual support, and collective strategizing among social workers and allies committed to disability justice. We prioritize accessibility, care, and sustainability in how we gather.
Knowledge Production: We contribute to social work scholarship and practice literature from a disability justice perspective. We elevate the voices of disabled social workers and challenge the ableist assumptions embedded in social work theory and research.
Movement Collaboration: We build relationships and solidarity with disability justice organizations, disability rights groups, and cross-movement partners working toward collective liberation.

Who We Serve

SWDJL exists to serve multiple communities:

Disabled social workers, students, and educators who need community, support, and resources to navigate and transform an ableist profession.
Non-disabled social workers and allies committed to unlearning ableism and building disability justice into their practice.
Social work programs and institutions seeking to meaningfully integrate disability justice into curriculum, field education, and institutional practices.
Disability justice organizers and advocates who engage with social work systems and need allies within the profession.
Communities impacted by social work systems—particularly disabled people, Mad and neurodivergent people, and chronically ill people navigating social services, healthcare, child welfare, criminal justice, and other systems where social workers hold power.

Our Vision

We envision a world where:

Social work is fundamentally transformed by disability justice, centering disabled people's leadership and wisdom in all aspects of the profession.
Disabled people have the resources, support, and autonomy we need to live full, self-determined lives in community.
Social workers are accomplices in movements for disability justice and collective liberation, not gatekeepers of oppressive systems.
Ableism is recognized as a fundamental axis of oppression that must be addressed in all social justice work.
Interdependence, collective care, and access are valued over independence, self-sufficiency, and normalization.
Social work education prepares practitioners to challenge systems of oppression, not merely to help individuals adjust to unjust conditions.
The knowledge, culture, and leadership of disabled people shape how we understand health, wellness, community, and justice.

We know this vision requires radical transformation—of our profession, our institutions, and ourselves. SWDJL is committed to the long-term, sustained work of building this future together.

Join Us

SWDJL is a collective, which means we grow and evolve through our members' participation. Whether you're a social work student just learning about disability justice, a seasoned practitioner working to transform your agency, an educator reimagining curriculum, or a community organizer building cross-movement solidarity—there is a place for you here.

We believe in "many paths, many contributions." We need people who write, organize, teach, research, create art, build technology, fundraise, provide mutual aid, show up for actions, offer care, and envision alternatives. We need your particular gifts, experiences, and commitments.

Disability justice teaches us that access is collective work. We are committed to building SWDJL in ways that honor diverse capacities, energy levels, and ways of participating. We practice flexibility, patience, and the understanding that our contributions will look different in different seasons of our lives.

Ready to get involved? Click Here

Contact Us: We welcome your questions, ideas, and invitations to collaborate.

The Social Work Disability Justice League acknowledges that we organize on the stolen lands of Indigenous peoples. We commit to honoring Indigenous sovereignty and building solidarity with Indigenous-led movements for land back and decolonization.

Acknowledgments: The ten principles of Disability Justice were developed by Patty Berne, Aurora Levins Morales, David Langstaff, and the artists and organizers of Sins Invalid. We are grateful for their visionary work and leadership. Learn more at www.sinsinvalid.org

INTERSECTIONALITY

We understand that disability never exists in isolation. Our experiences of disability are shaped by race, class, gender, sexuality, age, immigration status, and other identities. We don't live single-issue lives. The term "intersectionality" was introduced by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how systems of oppression overlap and interact. We center the most marginalized within the disability community and recognize that liberation must address all systems of oppression simultaneously. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, and underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered vast numbers of people "invalid"—and we reject this entirely.

LEADERSHIP OF THE MOST IMPACTED

Disabled people must lead the movements and decisions that affect our lives. We prioritize the voices, wisdom, and leadership of disabled people, particularly those who face multiple forms of marginalization—disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queer and trans disabled people, disabled people who are houseless or incarcerated, disabled people whose ancestral lands have been stolen. "Nothing about us without us" is not just a slogan—it's our practice. Those most impacted by ableist systems must be at the center of creating solutions.

ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITICS

We reject the capitalist logic that measures human worth by productivity, independence, or economic contribution. In an economy that treats land and humans as components of profit, disabled people are "anti-capitalist by the nature of having non-conforming bodyminds." We challenge the profit-driven systems that deny disabled people resources, exploit our labor, and force us into poverty. We envision economies based on interdependence, care, and collective well-being—where each person has inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity.

CROSS-MOVEMENT SOLIDARITY

Disability justice cannot be achieved in isolation. We build solidarity with movements for racial justice, economic justice, environmental justice, gender liberation, immigrant rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and all struggles against oppression. Through cross-movement solidarity, we create a united front. We work to ensure that disability justice spaces are safe for people of color, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and all marginalized communities. Likewise, we push other social justice movements to address ableism and create accessible spaces for disabled people. Our liberation is bound together.

RECOGNIZING WHOLENESS

We honor the full humanity and complexity of disabled people. We value people as they are, for who they are. Each person is full of history and life experience, with an internal world of thoughts, sensations, emotions, desires, perceptions, and unique ways of being. We reject the medical model's focus on deficits and diagnosis, and embrace our whole selves—our pain and our joy, our struggles and our creativity, our vulnerabilities and our power. Disabled people have always been whole, and we challenge systems that deny our wholeness or demand that we be "fixed" to have value.

SUSTAINABILITY

We build movements that sustain us rather than burn us out. We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long-term. We reject the ableist urgency and individualism of mainstream activism that demands constant productivity and presence. We value the teachings of our bodies and lived experiences, using them as critical guides toward justice and liberation. We understand that transformation is slow, deep work—not a sprint but an "unstoppable wave." We prioritize rest, flexible pacing, and practices that allow us to keep going for the long haul.

COMMITMENT TO CROSS-DISABILITY SOLIDARITY

We value and honor the insights and participation of all members of our community across the full spectrum of disability, impairment, and chronic illness. We recognize that disabled people are often segregated by diagnosis, type of impairment, or level of support needs. We refuse this division. We know that isolation undermines collective liberation, and that only by moving together—across all forms of disability—can we accomplish the transformation we require. No body or mind can be left behind. We build solidarity among people with physical disabilities, sensory disabilities, chronic illnesses, psychiatric disabilities, developmental and intellectual disabilities, neurological conditions, and all forms of embodied difference.

INTERDEPENDENCE

We meet each other's needs as we build toward liberation. We reject the myth of independence and recognize that all humans are interdependent—we need each other to survive and thrive. We know that state solutions to our needs inevitably extend further control over our lives, so we turn to each other. We practice collective care, mutual aid, and community support. We ask "What do we need to survive and flourish together?" and build systems of care from there. Interdependence means recognizing that our wellness, safety, and access are collective responsibilities, not individual burdens.

COLLECTIVE ACCESS

We move beyond the disability rights framework of individualized "reasonable accommodations" to a practice of collective access. As Black, brown, and queer-bodied disabled people, we bring flexibility and creative nuance that go beyond able-bodied and able-minded normativity. We create access not as an afterthought or a favor, but as a foundational value embedded in how we gather, work, and organize. Collective access means we all take responsibility for each other's access needs, we experiment and problem-solve together, and we recognize that access is always changing, always emerging, always requiring our collective attention and care.

INTERDEPENDENCE

We understand that no one is free until we are all free. Disability justice is not about securing rights or accommodations just for disabled people while leaving oppressive systems intact. It is about liberating all people from all systems of domination. We honor the longstanding legacies of resilience and resistance that are the inheritance of all whose bodies and minds will not conform. Disability justice is a vision and practice of what is yet to be—a map we create with our ancestors and our descendants, moving toward a world in which every body and mind is known as beautiful, essential, and full of worth.

Who We Are

Our Origin Story

Our Values & Principles

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What We Do

Who We Serve

Our Vision

Join Us

Contact Us: We welcome your questions, ideas, and invitations to collaborate.