Stacey Park Milbern Cause of Death: Korean-American For years, Stacey Park Milbern fought tenaciously for those with disabilities. Her death occurred on May 19, 2020. She worked for equal rights for those with disabilities and was a pioneer in the movement for disability justice.
Stacey Park Milbern Cause of Death
As she neared death, her health deteriorated. She was able to remain hidden from the COVID-19 pandemic despite her kidney cancer’s rapid progression. On May 19, 2020, the day before her 33rd birthday, Milbern passed away at a Stanford hospital due to surgical complications.
What Disability Stacey Park Milbern Had?
Milbern was born in 1987 at a US Army hospital in Seoul to a white father and a Korean mother with congenital muscular dystrophy. Growing up in an evangelical Christian family in North Carolina, she embraced and welcomed aspects of her identity that stood out, particularly her sexuality.
Stacey Park Milbern Contribution To Community
She described herself as “just your average gay disabled Korean girl living in the south” on her blog, where she also published poetry and highlighted the rights of people with disabilities. She was able to walk as a child, but after switching to a wheelchair, she decided to support those who have mobility issues.
Milbern started working for disability rights commissions when she was still a teenager. She played a key role in the 2007 passage of a law in North Carolina requiring the study of disability history in public schools. She claimed that in Jerry Lewis’ yearly telethon for muscular dystrophy, “disabled people are little more than the objects of pity.”
At the age of 24, she made the choice to go to the San Francisco Bay Area, the epicenter of the struggle for disability rights. She stayed involved in the movement and worked particularly hard to ensure that individuals with disabilities have access to health care. She battled against Medicaid cuts in 2017 because it gave her in-home caregivers at no expense to her family, allowing her to maintain her independence.
Milbern contributed to the launch of a grassroots campaign to assist people with disabilities who were affected by the blackouts after the 2019 California wildfires forced Pacific Gas & Electric to cut power to thousands of homes. This included providing them with crowdsourced survival information and connecting them with rides and housing. In
When the COVID-19 epidemic struck the Bay Area in early March 2020, Stacey and four of her friends started the Disability Justice Culture Club and distributed homemade disease-prevention kits.
Supplies including hand sanitizer, disinfectant, and respirators were given to the homeless camps in Oakland. She was the cause of growing worries about the well-being of the neighborhood and its most vulnerable residents.
Stacey’s DIY solution is a perfect illustration of “crip” or “crippled” knowledge. She cautioned that the strain the epidemic put on medical institutions threatened to jeopardize the accessibility of dialysis and other therapies that some members of her community depended on to survive.
In addition to these, her group organized the provision of care and food to disabled persons who were in need. Despite her own deteriorating health, she continued to work in pandemic relief.
This year, on the occasion of her 35th birthday, Google paid tribute to her.
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