She never set out to be a disability advocate, Tiffany Yu tells her audience in the introduction of her book, “The Anti-Ableist Manifesto: Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World.”
When Yu was nine years old, her life changed. It was November 1997. On the way home from dropping off her mom at the airport for a business trip, Yu’s dad had a seizure and lost control of the car that held him, Yu, and two of her siblings, causing the car to fly across the empty highway.
As a result of the accident, Yu’s dad passed away. Among the injuries she sustained from the accident, Yu was left with a traumatic brachial plexus injury, meaning her right arm was paralyzed permanently. Decades later, she was diagnosed with a mental health-related disability, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The path to accepting her disability wasn’t always clear. Back then, disability pride was a foreign concept to many. But after pivotal moments in high school, college, and her early career Yu realized there was value in her experience as a disabled person. Today, she’s the CEO and founder of Diversability, founder of the Awesome Foundation Disability Chapter, creator of the Disability Empowerment Endowed Fund, host of “TIFFANY & YU”, a social impact podcast, as well as a content creator, author, and (one of our favorite) Mochi Magazine alumna.
In 2009, Yu started the first student-run disability club while at Georgetown University. She called it Diversability.
Diversability’s origin story was actually inspired by Taiwanese American solidarity. “I spent a long time not really acknowledging my Taiwanese American identity. It really only was [when] I was 18 years old that I started identifying as Taiwanese American,” she says. “Once I started doing that, the number of friends that I made [and the] community, history, culture I got connected to, made me realize that depending on how you look at it, disability could be this health…
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