Category: Sourced From The Soil: Updates & Upcoming Events

This fall Justice will Join the extraordinary Health Justice Commons team as a facilitator during their Political Education Series! The series will focus on  the Medical Industrial Complex, its impact on people with disabilities and the power of collective care/healing on our own terms.

Enroll today and check out the events page for an in-depth series description as well as  a list of all the phenomenal facilitators, panelists and contributors involved with this offering.

Excerpted from the event page:

What You’ll Learn

• An in-depth understanding of why we refer to the US and global healthcare system as the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC).
• How we got here — a deep dive into the MIC’s hidden history with analysis of our current conditions.
• Medical Apartheid and eugenics, the white supremacist roots and the formation of the MIC.
• How the MIC is entangled with corporate polluters, big pharma, the military industrial complex and chemical corporations.
• How the MIC is inherently carceral and overlaps and is complicit with the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), and how the MIC criminalizes asylum-seeking communities and immigrants, people seeking and providing reproductive healthcare, and youth and adults seeking and/or providing gender-affirming transgender healthcare.
• How movements such as Disability Justice, Intersex + Trans/Gender Justice and are essential for our collective work to transform the MIC and create community-led alternatives.
• The 10 principles of Disability Justice as defined by our partner, Sins Invalid, and how to put them into practice in your life and work.
• Defining collective care and healthcare that truly heals on our own terms and learning tools for disrupting and transforming the MIC that you can practice in your own life, work, and communities.
• New & updated content for those who participated in prior sessions!

Important Details

• Enrollment: Click Here
• WHEN:  Starts Thursday, October 8th and runs through October 29th (four consecutive Thursdays). The time is the same for each Thursday session: 4-6pm PT| 6-8pm CT | 7-9pm ET.
  • Community Action Labs are on Tuesdays: October 13th, 20th, and 27th.
  • The sessions on October 13th and 20th will be from at 4-5:30pm PT | 6-7:30pm CT |7-8:30pm ET.
  • The session on the 27th will be from 4-6pm PT | 6-8pm CT | 7-9pm ET.
• WHERE: Online via Zoom. Attend from anywhere!
• COST: $150 – $350 (partial and full scholarships are available). No one turned away for lack of funds. For a list of payment options, please see below. After you complete the enrollment form, you will receive an invite to join our THINKIFIC learning platform and submit payment.
• SCHOLARSHIP: Full and partial scholarships are available based on participant needs. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. You can request a scholarship on the enrollment form here!
• ACCESS INFO: All sessions will provide ASL and English <> Spanish interpretation as well as live closed captioning. All sessions will be recorded (with participant permission) for the use of participants. Haitian Creole and other language interpretation available upon request.

SeededGround is proud to collaborate with Howard University’s NOAA Cooperative Science Center in Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology (NCAS-M) on MapCraft!

Funded by the National Geographic Society, MapCraft is a participatory mapping project designed for high school students with disabilities in Washington, D.C. The initiative will center student access needs while integrating the National Geographic MapMaker tool with geography education, social mapping, and cartographic techniques.

SeededGround will co-facilitate each of the immersive workshop sessions alongside Dr. Rodolfo Hernandez, Dr. Aara’L Yarber and Dr. Gisou Salkhi. In addition to hands-on classroom-based activities and a trip to the NCAS-M Lab in Beltsville MD, workshops will also allow students to assess air quality and environmental health conditions in their own ward 7 D.C. community.  

Learn more about NCAS-M   

We are excited to now have EMprints featured amongst the student resources on the Center for Campus Fire Safety website! Help us keep students safe by sharing EMprints and encouraging educational institutions to engage young people with disabilities as present/future leaders in emergency management.

Students with disabilities have incredible ideas and can help create practical solutions to fire safety challenges. We must all support their leadership as they are often most impacted by code violations and safety hazards on high school/college campuses.

Check out the Center for Campus Fire Safety for more information and readily available resources.

Our new technical assistance guide with The World Resources Institute, Access Atlas: How to Center Students with Disabilities in the Electric School Bus Transition, offers school districts a practical roadmap to ensure the needs of students with disabilities are met in the electric school bus transition.

All too often, students with disabilities face significant hurdles in getting to school. The nationwide transition to electric school buses is a chance to do better.

In this guide, you’ll find detailed step-by-step instructions for embedding disability-inclusive practices into your school bus electrification process. You’ll also find a set of advocacy and communications recommendations for integrating the voices of disabled students, parents, caregivers, and disability-led organizations into your fleet’s transition.

Whether you’re a superintendent, school board member, transportation director, bus driver, monitor, mechanic, teacher, caregiver or student, this resource has the tools you need to start moving toward accessible, equitable student transportation in your community.

Download the guide today and learn how to deliver a clean, quiet, tailpipe-emissions-free ride to school to those who need it the most.

Download PDF

This summer Justice joined the Ramp Your Voice 2026 conference to speak  candidly about what it’s like to curate while Black and disabled. She shared some of the unique considerations and successes experienced while creating artistic works  that are  both beautiful and purposeful. Most importantly, Justice discussed how to center communities of color and disabled creatives when curating artistic projects such as EMprints and Portraits & Portals.

Click here to view all of the amazing sessions that comprised this year’s conference!

This month we officially launched the inaugural in-person Portraits & Portals Pop-Up Exhibition! In partnership with the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center,  Portraits & Portals premiered at the center’s annual Natural Hazards conference. We are so proud to share that the exhibition received rave reviews with attendees remarking on the power of infusing disability-centric art into disaster/emergency management. Furthermore, our very own Portraits & Portals storyteller, Dr. Patricia Stukes, represented the exhibition during the conference and lead a masterful workshop on using art to illustrate diverse disabled experiences during disasters.

If you would like to bring Portraits & Portals to your community, campus or city, email us at SeededGround@JusticeShorter.com . Or, visit the official Portraits and Portals website at PortraitsandPortals.com

SeededGround has officially partnered with Pod Access! Together  we will work to develop and launch ‘Amplified: A disability Justice Audio Festival’! As we strive to secure funding to make this extraordinary virtual gathering happen in 2027, we invite you to spread the word that Amplified is on the horizon! If you, or someone you know, would like to join us as a funder, sponsor or partner, please email us directly at SeededGround@JusticeShorter.com.

About Amplified

An EARresistable audio festival that amplifies the artistry of disabled storytellers, producers, documentarians and  podcasters. Imagined and implemented by SeededGround, Amplified is a festival for disabled communities by disabled creatives.

Who We Will Amplify

Inspired by the artistic activism of Sins Invalid, Amplified will intentionally center disabled creatives of color who are queer, trans, sick, migrants, incarcerated  or anyone else relegated to the margins of mainstream movement spaces. This  virtual festival is proudly powered by a praxis of Disability Justice (DJ). Participants are thus encouraged to enter imaginative pieces that explore both a principle and a practice of DJ. In doing so, festival listeners will not only discover talented disabled creators, but will also receive diverse insights on how to live disabled dreams out loud.   

About Pod Access

Founded by Alice Wong, Thomas Reid and Cheryl Green, POD Access understands that “disability touches everything from culture, to economy, to climate. Disability isn’t a specialty topic, but instead is an essential lens for telling stories. POD Access offers aspiring, beginning, and established d/Deaf and disabled podcasters an approachable, easy-going experience to build community, learn about podcasting, and grow an audience. We respect access needs and are led by a disabled team.”

This month Justice Moderated the keynote discussion for the My Dog Is My Home annual Conference. She was joined in conversation by Aimee Gilbreath, President of PetSmart Charities and Brad Kieserman, Vice President of Disaster Operations & Logistics for the American Red Cross. Together they discussed disaster inequities, houseless people with pets, assistance animals, undocumented survivors, pet protections/preparedness and several other timely topics.

To check out this conversation, visit the My Dog Is My Home official website for updates on the availability of conference recordings.

Justice is back in the  Black Policy Lab! This year’s theme is “Black is Human, Too”. Join Justice and hundreds of others who love Black life, culture, history and futures. This 8^th annual virtual gathering is free and filled to the brim with brilliant thinkers, organizers, dreamers and builders.

Justice will serve as a panelist during a session titled, “Unbought & Unbossed”.

Session Overview

Independent voices are disrupting the media landscape—challenging performative advocacy and those who distort the demands of directly impacted communities. This session amplifies authentic, community-rooted perspectives and issues a bold call to reclaim narrative power, accountability, and movement integrity.

Click here to register!

SeededGround is proud to join Drexel University’s A.J. Drexel Autism Institute on a new endeavor that will evaluate approaches for addressing the divide within the autism community around the use of applied behavioral analysis (ABA)-based interventions,

SG will serve as one of 2 facilitative leads on this project.

Excerpts from the official press release:

The effort builds on a collaborative, multidisciplinary, international team of clinicians, researchers and autistic community leaders — co-founded by Dena Gassner, PhD, senior research scientist in the Autism Institute’s Life Course Outcomes Program and Social Connections and Treatment Lab, also a principal investigator of the grant — that has sought to make progress on these issues for almost four years.  

“The divide between those who have found the treatments harmful and those who have found it helpful has not allowed for safe and supportive discourse to find a place of understanding, healing and advocacy for autistic individuals,” said Gassner.

The aim of the project is to examine different ways of bringing these groups – who have disparate experiences, but a common goal of improving the lives of autistic people – together to guide the future of this field. Specifically, the project is designed to study engagement — the ways in which different people come together and feel heard and valued.  This project leverages a community-driven, participatory team science approach to examine different methods for centering autistic people in conversations on the use of ABA for autistic people.

Read the full press release here.