In 2018, Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn Brown applied for the Paul G. Hearne Award knowing that they wanted to create an organization with the sole purpose of financially supporting and redistributing resources among autistic people of color.
“I did not grow up having access to, say, intergenerational wealth. I grew up very solidly in the middle class, and because of that, I knew I had a lot more privilege than some disabled people do because disabled people are disproportionately poor, especially disabled people of color,” they said.
“I wanted to be able to pull resources from community members, regardless of their access to wealth and their financial stability, and hopefully compel those who had greater access to wealth, intergenerational wealth and other resources, to be able to pull funds together to support people materially and immediately in ways that the nonprofit industrial complex does not do, and ways that the state cannot contemplate,” they continued.
Using the funds from the award after they won, Brown created the Autistic People of Color Fund, an organization that to this day remains 100% trans BIPOC autistic-led. It directly serves and supports the autistic BIPOC community, focusing on community care and mutual aid by providing up to $500 in financial assistance to autistic people of color aged 16 and older. This approach directly challenges the nonprofit industrial complex, as it trusts individuals to know their own needs.
“We’ve always known that it’s not new, but in the landscape of the nonprofit industrial complex, it is certainly bold to say that it is actually the people who need the money who know best what to do with it,” Brown said. “They don’t need to be gate-kept or monitored or paternalized in order to determine how best to expend those resources and how to meet their needs, or how to experience and carve out small moments of joy or rest or rejuvenation.”
The Autistic People of Color Fund also collaborates with other organizations to support the lives of transgender people, as well as to address issues such as emergency preparedness for autistic people of color and the needs of rural and marginalized communities.
“Since receiving the Hearne Award, the Autistic People of Color Fund has continued to receive funding support from a number of other granting organizations that likely saw our potential because AAPD saw our potential first,” Brown said. The funding has also allowed the organization to engage in policy and cultural advocacy, with a focus on racial and economic justice, as well as disability justice, which Brown says is something the disability rights movement needs to lean into more.
Disability rights focuses on changing or reforming existing systems, laws, policies or institutions to improve conditions for disabled people, while disability justice is a movement and framework that considers radically transforming culture and society outside of and beyond existing systems, laws, policies, and institutions in order to challenge ableism and to transform social conditions for disabled people, Brown explained.
“I see my role as connected to the disability rights movement as driving the disability rights movement as close to disability justice as it can go, of bringing the voice of disability justice to spaces that haven’t contemplated that sometimes the laws, policies, institutions that they are seeking to change a reform are themselves the source of the problem, and that reform will not eliminate the ableism or the violence, the extraction and the exploitation of those very same systems and institutions,” they said.
In reflecting on advice they would give the next generation of leaders in the disability community, Brown said that they would encourage everyone to never stop learning and growing with each other, and never to stop caring for and protecting one another.
“To paraphrase Assata Shakur, who recently transitioned, that is our duty. It is our responsibility to care for and fight for and protect each other, because we cannot wait for somebody else to liberate us or save us, or decide that they suddenly believe that we are human beings. We are our own liberation,” Brown said.