Stacey Milbern

Stacey Park Milbern (May 19, 1987 – May 19, 2020) was an American disability rights activist. She helped create the disability justice movement and advocated for fair treatment of people with disabilities.
Biography.
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 being white and mother Korean. She grew up in Fort Bragg, North Carolina in a military family, as her father was in the United States Army. 
Milbern, a renowned Disability Justice and Civil Rights activist, served in Disability Rights leadership roles since she was 16 years old, including Community Outreach Director for the National Youth Leadership Network. She later founded the North Carolina Youth Leadership Forum and Disabled Young People's Collective to empower youth with disabilities to engage in advocacy and leadership. She was appointed by the Governor or North Carolina to the North Carolina Commission for the Blind from 2006 to 2008 and to the Statewide Independent Living Council from 2004 to 2010. She was instrumental in the writing and passing of the 2007 North Carolina law establishing October as "Disability History and Awareness" month and requiring disability history curriculum to be taught in all schools.
In 2005, Milbern helped to establish the disability justice movement. Milbern graduated from Methodist University in 2009.
She moved to the Bay Area when she was 24, due to the San Francisco area being "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 continued to organize, write, and speak for the movement, becoming the director of programs at the Center for Independent Living, Berkeley. California ranks highly among the states for spending on in-home care benefits, and she was able to obtain Medicaid support for an in-home attendant, enabling her to live independently in Oakland and hold a position in human resources at a financial banking company. She credited that nursing assistance for her ability to remain active in the community and avoid institutionalization in a nursing home. She defended the necessity of Medicaid programs funding home attendant and nursing services against reductions proposed during efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
In 2014, she was appointed by President Obama to the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities. Milbern also advised the Obama administration for two years.
She earned a masters degree from Mills College in 2015.
Milbern advocated for fair medical care for people with disabilities, including both access and biases in the system, speaking against unnecessary surgery. 
In early March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread to the Bay Area, Milbern and four friends formed the Disability Justice Culture Club to distribute homemade disease-prevention kits, including hand sanitizer, disinfectant, and respirators, to residents of Oakland homeless encampments. She raised concerns for collective community well-being and the well-being of its most vulnerable members. She noted her DIY solution as an example of "crip—or crippled—wisdom". She did so despite her own growing health problems. She warned that the pandemic's demands on health services threatened her community's access to dialysis and other life-saving treatments needed by some to survive. Her group also organized mutual aid food and care support for disabled people in need. Milbern died in a Stanford hospital on her 33rd birthday, May 19, 2020, due to surgical complications.