Interesting and Fun Facts about Stacey Park Milbern, an American Disability Justice and Civil Rights Activist

Search engine giant Google celebrates the 35th birthday of renowned Disability Justice and Civil Rights activist Stacey Park Milbern in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month on May 19, 2022. Here are some interesting and fun facts about Stacey Park Milbern.

Here is a look at the life and work of Stacey Park Milbern.

Personal

• Birth date: May 19, 1987
• Birthplace: Seoul, South Korea
• Died on: May 19, 2020 (aged 33)
• Death place: Stanford, California
• Father name: Joel
• Mother name: Jean (Park) Milbern
• Nationality: American
• Education:
  • Methodist University (BA)
  • Mills College (MBA)
• Known as: Disability rights activist

Interesting Fact about Stacey Park Milbern

1. Stacey Park Milbern was an American disability rights activist. She made the disability justice movement and advocated for fair treatment of people with disabilities.

2. Milbern was born at the U.S. Army Hospital in Seoul on May 19, 1987, with congenital muscular dystrophy (CMD). She was mixed-race, her father is white and her mother is Korean. She experienced childhood in Fort Bragg, North Carolina in a military family, as her father was in the United States Army.

3. As a child Stacey Park Milbern depended on her family as guardians, yet when she started to recognize as queer, she dreaded her evangelical Christian parents’ judgment and planned to move out, a decision more troublesome by her requirement for help in daily activities such as eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom.

4. Stacey Park Milbern was born on May 19, 1987, in Seoul, South Korea, and was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. All through her life, as memorialized by the New York Times, while Milbern was in favor of accepting help from parental figures, she didn’t regard her differences and disabilities as something to keep her down, yet as challenges to transcend.

5. Experiencing childhood in North Carolina in a moderate family accompanied difficulties of its own, particularly for somebody who is recognized as queer, as Milbern herself partook in an interview with The Atlantic. Instead, she put her focus on moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, realizing that the region was one of the most available regions in the country as well as a hub for disabilities activism.

6. Stacey Park Milbern, a resident of Oakland, California had a long history as a leader and activist. At 16 years old, she was an influential leader within the North Carolina Youth Leadership Network. Because of her work (in partnership with other NC advocates) the state started including disability history as part of its secondary school curriculum.

7. Milbern started serving in disability rights leadership roles at 16 years of age, including as Community Outreach Director for the National Youth Leadership Network. She later was a founder of the North Carolina Youth Leadership Forum and Disabled Young People’s Collective to enable youth with disabilities to participate in advocacy and leadership.

8. Stacey Park Milbern was selected by the Governor of North Carolina for the North Carolina Commission for the Blind from 2006 to 2008 and the Statewide Independent Living Council from 2004 to 2010.

9. She was instrumental in the writing and passing of the 2007 North Carolina law establishing October as “Disability History and Awareness Month” and requiring the disability history curriculum to be instructed in all schools.

10. In 2005, Stacey Park Milbern assisted with establishing the disability justice movement through discussions with other disabled queer women of color activists.

11. Stacey Park Milbern began serving on incapacity rights commissions while her youngsters were and were instrumental in empowering go a North Carolina legislation in 2007 expecting that incapacity record curriculum to be instructed in faculties. She criticized Jerry Lewis’ once-a-year muscular dystrophy telethon as categorizing “disabled men and women as very little much more than the objects of pity.”

12. Stacey Park Milbern was brought up in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and received her BA from Methodist University in 2009, and her MBA from Mills College in 2015. In the wake of moving to the Bay Area, she joined the program management team at the landmark Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, where she helped advance the mission of full social and political equality for all people with disabilities.

13. Notwithstanding her numerous community impact projects, Stacey likewise functioned as an Accommodations Management Consultant at Wells Fargo.

14. At 24, Stacey Park Milbern moved to the San Francisco Bay Region, a location central to the disability rights movement. She continues to be active in the motion, with a particular aim of protecting health treatment for people with disabilities. In 2017, she fought proposed cuts to Medicaid, the governmentally funded system that provided in-property attendants and approved her to live on her person.

15. Stacey Park Milbern moved to the Bay Area when she was 24 because the San Francisco region is “one of the most accessible places for people with physical disabilities”. The Bay Area had been the historical center of the disability rights movement, and there she kept on getting organized, writing, and speaking for the movement, becoming the director of programs at the Center for Independent Living, Berkeley.

16. California ranks highly among the states for spending on in-home care advantages, and Stacey Park Milbern had the option to acquire Medicaid support for an in-home attendant, enabling her to reside independently in Oakland and hold a position in HR at a financial banking organization.

17. Stacey Park Milbern credited nursing assistance for her ability to stay active in the community and avoid institutionalization in a nursing home. She differentiated her independence and the care she had the option to get in California against her experiences in North Carolina and defended the need for Medicaid programs funding home attendant and nursing services against decreases proposed during efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

18. Stacey Park Milbern advocated for fair medical care for people with disabilities, including both access and biases in the system, speaking against unnecessary surgery.

19. Milbern was particularly interested in the disabilities justice movement, which focuses on bringing voices from a greater diversity of races, genders, and sexual orientations into debates on disability.

20. Having moved to California around 2011, Stacey Park Milbern quickly set off to become part of the disabilities justice movement, while likewise working in HR at a bank.

21. Stacey Park Milbern immediately became through to the front of the movement, in any event, having been designated by President Obama in 2014 to the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities. She advised the Obama administration for two years.

22. Stacey was additionally a co-author of Bernie Sander’s Disability Rights platform and an Impact Producer for NETFLIX’s acclaimed documentary “Crip Camp”.

23. Milbern procured a master of business administration degree from Mills College in 2015.

24. In 2017, Stacey Park Milbern was one of the many voices standing up against proposed plans to replace and repeal the Affordable Care Act that elaborate significant cuts to funding for those with disabilities, including for attendant support. Talking from her own life experiences, Milbern shared how having an attendant was the only way she had the option to go to work every day.

25. At the point when Pacific Gasoline & Electrical shut down power to 1000’s residents because of the 2019 California wildfires, Milbern helped start a grassroots campaign to offer significant help to people with disabilities affected by the power outages by sharing crowdsourced survival facts and generating connections to rides and housing.

26. In mid-2020, as the Covid pandemic inclined up, Stacey Park Milbern was working out of her Oakland property with the Incapacity Justice Lifestyle Club, an association she supported developing, to distribute homemade ailment-prevention kits to the homeless.

27. While performing on the kits, Milbern found that surgery to clean up her quickly heightening kidney cancer had been postponed owing to shelter-in-area orders. She died 3 months later, on her 33rd birthday, as a result of surgical troubles.

28. Toward the beginning of March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread to the Bay Area, Stacey Park Milbern and four friends comprising the Disability Justice Culture Club distributed homemade disease-prevention kits, including hand sanitizer, disinfectant, and respirators, to residents of the Oakland homeless encampments.

29. Stacey Park Milbern raised worries for the prosperity of the community and its most vulnerable members. Milbern noticed her DIY solution to act as an example of “crip—or crippled—wisdom”. She cautioned that the pandemic’s demands on health services threatened her community’s access to dialysis and other life-saving treatments required by some to survive.

30. Stacey Park Milbern’s group additionally organized mutual aid food and care support for disabled people in need. Milbern proceeded with pandemic relief work despite her developing health problems. Surgery to eliminate her fast-growing kidney cancer was delayed because of shelter-in-place orders. Milbern died in a Stanford hospital on her 33rd birthday, May 19, 2020, because of surgical complications.

31. Stacey Park Milbern’s writings, poetry, speeches, and community organizing catalyzed some of the ever-evolving work happening within the Disability Justice and Disability Rights movements.

32. Most recently, Stacey Park Milbern established the Disability Justice Culture Club, an activist collective based in East Oakland that focuses on the requirements of disabled BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).

33. The DJCC serves as a hub for the disabled BIPOC community through events, meetings, meals, and thought leadership. Stacey exhibited love and faith all through her life and battled resolutely for the communities she loved.

34. From advocating for national legislation to building community through the Disability Justice Culture Club — Stacey Milbern generally thought ambitiously and satisfied her values.

35. On May 19, 2022, Google Doodle — represented by San Francisco, CA-based guest artist, Art Twink — celebrates Stacey Park Milbern’s legacy on what might be her 35th birthday in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Stacey Park Milbern Google Doodle

Today’s Google Doodle honors Stacey Park Milbern, a champion of the disability justice movement, as part of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

In the United States, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is seen through the month of May and is expected to pay tribute to the contributions of Asian and Pacific Islanders to the country’s history. There could be no better recent example of the effect even a single person can have than Stacey Park Milbern.

As an element of its Asian Pacific American Heritage Month celebration, Google is honoring the Korean American activist with a Doodle on Thursday — Milbern’s 35th birthday celebration and the second anniversary of her death.

Thursday is likewise Worldwide Accessibility Consciousness Day, which empowers digital accessibility and inclusion for people today with all disabilities.

The Doodle honoring Milbern was commissioned by Google from Art Twink, and it includes a fabulously bold color palette, with elements inspired by Stacey Park Milbern’s life and activism.