"Awareness is great, but how liberating is it to just be yourself?"

That’s how Tiffany Yu (she / her + disability identifier as disabled) wants those with disabilities to feel all 👏 the 👏 damn 👏 time. As the CEO & Founder of Diversability—a student club turned social enterprise with a mission to elevate disability pride—she’s dedicated pretty much her entire life to making sure disabled people know they’re never alone.

Here, Tiffany explains why she’s proud of the lurkers in her community, who her biggest AAPI influence is, and how to be better allies.

What is Diversability?
Diversability is a community focused on breaking the cycle of social isolation for disabled people. We do that through community, visibility, and engaged allyship. Our formal tagline is that we’re on a mission to elevate disability pride. I didn’t want our tagline to just be raising awareness about disability, because that’s great if you know about it. But I actually want people to be proud of who they are in the body and / or mind they’ve been gifted—especially when the rest of the world is telling us to feel shame about that.

The group is made up of disabled people, but also has non-disabled members. Why is that?
The reason we let non-disabled people into our community is because we want to meet people where they’re at on their allyship journey. We also have a lot of disabled people who check out our community, but they’re not ready to join a disability-only group, which would technically force them to disclose when globally 80% of disabilities are not apparent. But something I’m proud of is seeing lurkers who’ve been watching for years all of a sudden go, “Thank you so much for letting me into this group. I’m ready to say I have a disability thanks to all of you. Here’s my story.”

How does Diversability help bring visibility to disabled people within and outside the community?
One of the things I want to highlight is that I don’t believe in free labor. If you’re a speaker at our event, we’ll pay you. If you’re a guest editor, we’ll pay you. Accomplishing our goal is not only about visibility and representation, but asking: How can we give economic support as well? Internally, we’ve been able to build up our team to 10 people who are 100% disabled, the majority of us being BIPOC and 90% women, too. We’re showing that disability employment works.

Was there an AAPI person that inspired you growing up?
I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad recently. He passed away when I was 9 in the car accident where I became disabled, but in the 9 years that I knew him, he was like the epitome of IDGAF [laughing]. He loved being outside and found value and worth in everything. But from a [larger] AAPI perspective, I’m still figuring out what my voice and journey is.

How so?
Michelle MiJung Kim, who is an incredible author, said that a lot of what is encapsulated in the AAPI experience is erasure. I think about the period after my dad passed, when my mom was heavily influenced by her culture and didn’t want us to tell anyone anything that might look shameful to our family. That included being widowed from a car accident and having a visibly disabled child. So in a way, I’m still learning to embrace my race as part of who I am. One of the things I did to show that was get my family name tattooed on my body to honor the journey that my parents had to go on to give me these opportunities.

How can we be better allies?
If you’re creating content on social media, make sure it’s accessible. A good proxy for how to think about that is, if someone can’t hear, what would they need to be able to benefit from your content? Think about your captions. Then diversify your feeds through the lens of disability intersectionality—this idea that our lived disability experiences are different based on our intersecting identities. Some people I love following are Imani Barbarin and Alice Wong. And if you have an opportunity to hire a disabled person, hire us. Let us show you what we can do. We’ve been discounted so many times because of assumptions about our capabilities. Lastly, remember “disability” is not a bad word and it has no look.