im octopissed

Hello everyone! things have been a bit rough with a job lead falling through and a struggle to get any further offers. i at least have to start making payments by the end of this month if i want to stay where i am to the tune of $500 a month and need some sorta help reaching that before its too late. finding work is much harder than expected and i dont want to lose my chance to be away from the abuse and neglect i was trying to escape in the first place. fwiw i also need help with buying food and hygeine products (soap, toothpaste, etc) while i try and get back on EBT. every bit counts and i just want to be okay. thank you for understanding

paypal link

venmo link

bandcamp (buy some music!)

Help a disabled woman who is drowning in debt!!

**URGENT: PLEASE READ/SIGNAL BOOST**

Monday, August 7th: Hello everyone, I’m Gemma, a bi, mentally ill, and disabled woman in desperate need of help, as I'm struggling to keep my utilities on and due to outstanding bills, I'm in the red with my bank and PayPal.

As most of you are already aware from my previous posts, I have been struggling financially these past few years due to Covid-19 and my welfare benefit (Universal Credit) being under continuous reviews, which is due to my worsening mental/physical health and the UK’s controversial changes to how benefits are assessed and assigned. After a lengthy health assessment, I have been declared unfit for work. However, I am still waiting for the outcome of my Adult Disability application, which I applied for back on January 15th!!

I didn't expect to be asking for help again so soon from my previous post, but things have unexpectedly gotten so much worse for me, and due to creditors, fees and late bills, my account is overdrawn by £147.45 & I owe PayPal £42.19. I don't receive my welfare until the 31st, and I could really use some help in paying these and to keep my utilities on.

If anyone could spare any amount to help me, even if it’s just £1/$1/€1, it would save my life, and sharing definitely helps just as much. Thank you so much for all your help!! ❤

£0/£250!!!

However, I've only got $23 to last until Friday to cover food & gasoline, and my gas gauge is hovering a tick above empty. In order to get to work this week, I'll have to go hungry most days. I can probably get a loaf of bread & jar of peanut butter to get me through, but I'd be eternally grateful if anyone can send even a few dollars my way.💗 Reblogs would be deeply appreciated as well.💙

As always, thank you for your understanding, prayers, and unflagging support!🥰

Sorry to ask this again but our last post died and we're in a really rough spot and are in desperate need of help.

We still need food for us, Food for our animals, gas for the car, masks (we need more face masks but the parents are Anti-maskers so they won't buy them for us if they could afford it)

And we still need to desperately get out of this house as well as needing money to send off commissions that we've completed (It's like 14 dollars per package)

135/1,100

Our Carrd Paypal Ko-Fi

Some of our works below(I promise the biggest heart pillow looks better irl it just looks weird at this angle)

We need help with rent after multiple setbacks and it's now 2 days late.

We need to reach the remaining $303.

cshapp: $sailorsylvie

vnmo: Serena-Manning

zlle: [email protected]

pypal: [email protected]

Hi all, 3 unemployable struggling trans girls who's rent and urgent vehicle repairs took everything, here 💙

Bidens new policies wrt EBT mean we don't have money for food! And it is getting sparse.

Can we please get help raising $200 or so for some groceries? Thank you all, eternally, thank you 💙

Venmo: @nakam1492

Cashapp: $kosherdyke

Black disabled autistic enby needs help with August rent and phone bill, I was recently diagnosed with cptsd after an assault and experiencing emotional abuse in a relationship as a result I’ve been experience panic attacks and haven’t been able to work full time. I start a new part time job this week and would be able to pay you back when I get paid! You could leave a note, I understand this is a difficult time for everyone but any help even just spreading the word would be a life saver.

$0/$500

VNMO

CSH APP

hey folks,

my wife and i are moving this month to escape a really stressful and unsafe situation. we have secured an apartment but we are gonna need all the help we can get. our goal is $2000 to help cover rent, the deposit, and other expenses by the end of August.

cashapp: $sorebay

Tumblr in it's infinite wisdom has turned off link previews for the site I'm using to f*ndraise, thanks guys! Well, the link is

Here

And I have a PayPal link here

I received a lot of help in June but much less since, I've been hovering around the $2,000 mark for a long time so I decided to reformat and explain things a bit more.

I'm trying to fundraise to fix my teeth. This is one of those things we don't think about usually but tooth problems can cause chronic and severe infection leading to

Constant fatigue malaise

extreme pain

bone loss

facial disfigurement

nerve damage

sepsis

heart problems (usually because the infection travelled from the tooth to the heart via the blood stream)

One of my infections was so bad I had to get some of the surrounding bone removed, so it was an extremely close call. At any time an infected tooth can affect the heart via the bloodstream. This can be deadly. I spent months barely able to get out of bed not realising it was because of several latent infections

Besides the health issues my teeth are putting me at risk for, food is part of almost every part of our lives. I can't have dinner with my family. I can't go out to eat with my friends. Every day I have to work out how I'm going to get food into my stomach because I have no molars in my jaw to chew with. I urgently need this work done;

A partial denture, to replace the molars removed from my jaw ($3,000)

Four crowns to stop me losing my four front top teeth ($8,000 or $2,000 per tooth)

At least one, and almost certainly multiple, root canals as well as fillings (at least $1,000)

My dentist is going to email me an estimate this week, but it's almost certainly going to cost $11,000 minimum, probably more

I know it's a lot of money and I'm doing my best to save but it's very difficult as a disabled student with kids. My youngest especially is missing out on things because all our money is going towards this.

But without this treatment I'll suffer more infections, more broken teeth, more extractions, and likely more health complications, and more severe ones

My bio dad doesn't speak to me because my kids are trans and my mother disowned me after she scammed me with a car loan and I refused to continue giving her money. You're all I've got.

Please help me pay for my teeth, no one will ever date me again if you don't (on top of all the health problems and risk of death from tooth infections and all the other issues)

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Ed Roberts was one of the founding minds behind the Independent Living movement. Roberts was born in 1939, and contracted polio at age 14, two years before the vaccine that ended the polio epidemic came out (vaccinate your kids). Polio left Roberts almost completely paralyzed, with only the use of two fingers and a few toes. At night, he had to sleep in an iron lung, and he would often rest there during the day as well. Other times of the day, he breathed by using his face and neck muscles to force air in and out of his lungs.

Despite this being the fifties, Roberts' mother insisted that her son continue schooling. Her support helped him face his fear of being stared at and ridiculed at school, going from thinking of himself as a "hopeless cripple" to seeing himself as a "star." When his high school tried to deny him his diploma because he had never completed driver's ed, Roberts and his mother fought the school and won.

This marked the beginning of his career as an activist.

Roberts had to fight the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation for support to attend college, because his counselor thought he was too severely disabled to ever work or live independently. Roberts did go to school, however, first attending the College of San Marino. He was then accepted to UC Berkeley, but when the school learned that he was disabled, they tried to backtrack. "We've tried cripples before, and it didn't work," one dean famously said. The school tried to argue the dorms couldn't accommodate his iron lung, so Roberts was instead housed in an empty wing of the school's Cowell Hospital.

Roberts' admittance paved the way for other disabled students who were also housed in the new Cowell Dorm. The group called themselves "The Rolling Quads," and together they fought and advocated for better disability support, more ramps and accessible architecture like curb cut outs, founded the first formally recognized student-led disability services program in the country, and even managed to successfully oust a rehabilitation counselor who had threatened two of the Quads with expulsion for their protests.

After graduation from his master's, he served a number of other roles- he taught political science at a number of different colleges over the years, served on the board for the Center for Independent Living, confounded the World Institute on Disability with Judith E. Heumann and Joan Leon, and continued to advocate for better disability services and infrastructure at his alma mater of UC Berkeley.

Roberts also took part in and helped organize sit ins to force the federal government to enforce section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which stated that people with disabilities should not be excluded from activities, denied the right to receive benefits, or be discriminated against, from any program that uses federal financial assistance, solely because of their disability. The sit-in occupied the offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco and lasted 28 days. The protestors were supported by local gay rights organizations and the Black Panthers. Roberts and other activists spoke, and their arguments were so compelling that members of the department of health joined the sit in. Reagan was forced to acknowledge and implement the policies and rules that section 504 required. This national recognition helped to pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

“Black Panthers saved the 504 sit-in.” – Corbett O’Toole, participant in the 1977 504 protest in San Francisco

”Along with all fair and good-thinking people, The Black Panther Party gives its full support to Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and calls for President Carter and HEW Secretary Califano to sign guidelines for its implementation as negotiated and agreed to on January 21 of this year. The issue here is human rights – rights of meaningful employment, of education, of basic human survival – of an oppressed minority, the disabled and handicapped. Further, we deplore the treatment accorded to the occupants of the fourth floor and join with them in full solidarity.” – Black Panther Party media release on the protest, from website Disability Social History (click thru to see pictures of BPP news about the success of the protest!)

According to disability rights activist Corbett O’Toole, these advocates “showed us what being an ally could be. We would never have succeeded without them. They are a critical part of disability history and yet their story is almost never told.⁠”

They were running a soup kitchen for their black community in East Oakland and they showed up every single night and brought us dinner. The FBI [guarding the building entrance] was like, “What the hell are you doing?” They answered, “Listen, we’re the Panthers. You want to starve these people out, fine, we’ll go tell the media that that’s what you’re doing, and we’ll show up with our guns to match your guns and we’ll talk about who’s going to talk to who about the food. Otherwise, just let us feed these people and we won’t give you any trouble” – and that’s basically what they did.

Please read up on the Black Panthers' involvement in the 504 movement, they were integral to the occupation lasting as long as it did and were INCREDIBLY ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS! They are more than a footnote in that part of disability history, and I want more people to know this part of their legacy!

Read about Bradley Lomax (and his aid and fellow organizer Chuck Johnson, who I've struggled finding sources on outside of articles on Mr. Lomax :( ) here and here! Together the two were integral in bringing Black Panther Party organizing and activism to the disability rights movement!

I wish there were more information on Mr. Johnson, as his work is dear to my heart as someone who also requires caregiving. ;3; <3 Considering how little information there even was available online for Mr. Lomax just ten years ago I am hoping we get more coverage of Mr. Johnson's contributions to this important part of disability history sooner rather than later. I do not want his activism ignored!

Do not let the full richness of our history be whitewashed! The Black Panthers kept the protestors fed, they HEAVILY publicized the protests in their paper The Black Panther and agitated on the protest and protestors behalf, and paid organizers' way to Washington to pressure the HEW secretary to actually sign the damn act. In turn, the Panthers did this because the Oakland ILC did outreach to them, and helped Mr. Lomax with transportation. This is solidarity buried under focus on the white organizers. Please please please cherish it. Keep it close to your heart, read about it, celebrate it, share it!

Obviously there were more Panthers who helped but I have already lost the first draft of this and I'm starting to fade -- here's two more detailed sources to read for more, and I highly recommend you do!

The Intersections and Divergences of Disability and Race

^ GoFundMe

^ PayPal.me for mousedetective

^ Homeless Help Amazon Wishlist

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If anyone wants to help, these are the main ways you can help! The GoFundMe is to collect money for various things we may need, but it doesn't pay directly (it takes 3 - 4 days for donations to hit my account).

The PayPal link sends money directly to me, so it's the best way to help immediately, like if we need food or gas.

We need to tow the car to the mechanic tomorrow and get the hotel roomat least one more night so the cats aren't in the car while it's being fixed and we need to start saving for a new car.