Announcing our 2025 Advancing Disability Justice Grant Recipients
Northwest Health Foundation’s Advancing Disability Justice program supports disabled leaders of color, strengthens disability justice understanding within racial justice organizations, and advances our long-term goal of building civic engagement capacity and leadership toward a reflective democracy.
Today, we are excited to announce our five 2025 Advancing Disability Justice grant recipients! These organizations are leading the way in advancing disabled BIPOC leadership in Oregon and Southwest Washington.
We extend our gratitude to The Collins Foundation for their partnership, to our program consultant Shilo George, and to the six regional disability justice leaders who helped shape the application process and determine the final grantees.
The 2025 Advancing Disability Justice grant recipients are:
Photo credit: Disabled and Here
Affect
Affect is a grassroots disabled-led movement that amplifies multiply marginalized people of color and advocates for disability justice. Affect currently runs two programs. The first, Disabled and Here, produces free, widely used stock photos and illustrations of disabled people of color, representing diverse body types, gender identities, and sexual orientations. These images explore themes that celebrate the multi-dimensional lives of disabled people of color, with series such as “Deaf Joy” and “Accessible Dating,” and include interviews with the models featured. The second program, Community Care Awards, distributes microgrants to local BIPOC through open nominations, honoring community members who care for and organize their communities. Across all their work, Affect centers disabled people in their fullness and complexity, rejecting cliched portrayals of tragedy or inspiration and creating space for disabled joy, creativity, and imagination.
Ashby Family LEAD & Engagement Services
Ashby Family LEAD & Engagement Services provides individualized support, programming and services to individuals with visible and invisible disabilities in Clark and Cowlitz Counties. Their staff leadership team and board include disabled BIPOC members, and their programming is co-created with disabled BIPOC participants and community advisors. Since 2022, over 97 participants have completed their three-month LEAD & Mentorship Program. They also offer culturally specific support groups through Voices United Affinity Circles, provide one-on-one assistance navigating services like Medicaid and SNAP through their Benefit & Resource Coordination Hub, host community engagement and cultural events, and are leading a two-year Voices United initiative documenting the experiences of disabled Black individuals. Ashby Family places particular focus on supporting Black disabled community members through targeted affinity groups and partnerships with Black churches, NAACP Southwest WA, and Black-led media.
Black & Beyond the Binary Collective
Black & Beyond the Binary Collective is a Black-led organization building the leadership, healing and safety of Black-African transgender, queer, nonbinary, two-spirit, intersex and asexual Oregonians. Their work centers on addressing the urgent and intersecting needs of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and disabled BIPOC communities, who experience systemic inequities across multiple domains, including housing, healthcare, safety, and economic stability. Their programs include the Umoja Kijana Shujaa youth leadership cohort, the Ubuntu Healing Project, the Housing Safety Fund, and the Night Out for Safety and Liberation annual event. With 90% of staff and 100% of board members identifying as disabled, the collective brings lived disability experience to every decision and program they run. They prioritize community-led solutions in all aspects of their work and are one of the few organizations statewide still enforcing COVID-19 protocols to provide disabled Oregonians a safe space to connect.
Pacific County Voices Uniting
Pacific County Voices Uniting works to exercise political power by raising the voices of those most historically underrepresented in their communities: Black, Indigenous, Mexican/Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, people of color, the LGBTQIA2S+ community, and people living with disabilities both seen and unseen. Led by BIPOC women, with and without disabilities, PCVU is using Disability Justice: An Audit Tool to guide their work in advancing disability justice within the organization. Their Advancing Disability Justice grant will support a two-day learning and planning retreat for their Leadership Circle and team members focused on Disability Justice: An Audit Tool.
The UPRISE Collective
The UPRISE Collective creates spaces and provides support for people with targeted identities to engage in social uplift within their communities. Their work operates “both inside and outside of systems, contributing to collective survival today while supporting spaces in which we are dismantling and reimagining systems for tomorrow.” Founded by two disabled, queer, BIPOC social workers, UPRISE supports BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+, sick/disabled, and low-income communities. As a member-based organization, members actively shape programming and decision-making. The four pillars of UPRISE’s work are Reawakening and Reimagining, The Disability Justice Project, Feed Our People Project and Organizational Learning, all of which incorporate civic engagement and advocacy. These pillars encompass everything from workshops and coaching on topics like disability justice and trauma-informed practices to emergency preparedness for disabled Portlanders to a book club and beyond.