Cross-Disability Solidarity + Cross-Class Solidarity Speech at Toronto Disability Pride 2025: Crip Futures Collection

Disability Pride Month initially started as a single day of celebration in 1990, the year that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in the United States. The city of Boston held the first Disability Pride Day that year. Then, in July 2015, after years of advocacy, the first official celebration of Disability Pride Month was held, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the ADA. Today, we recognize Disability Pride Month as a cultural and political movement built on decades of international organizing, resistance, and care work.

The Catalyst is a blog and community hub for the work of healers, organizers, artists, and storytellers. Throughout Disability Pride Month, artists, writers, activists, and healers were invited to submit their work for our Crip Futures collection. The following speech was delivered at the Toronto Disability Pride March on July 5th, 2025, by Keat Welsh with minor formatting edits for the transcript below by our editor. The speech is otherwise unchanged.

A white person in a wheelchair holding a protest sign that says "tax the rich". Photograph taken by Mika Baumeister and shared for use via Unsplash.

Cross-disability Solidarity + Cross-class Solidarity: TDPM July 2025

Thank you. Hello, my name is Keat Welsh. I am a white mid to late 30s nonbinary person with brown hair wearing a black shirt and jean shorts, and sitting in a black and red power wheelchair.

I am here today as a sick and disabled educator and artist. I benefit from having class privilege as someone who was born into a middle-class family. My whiteness and class privilege shape how I experience ableism. 

Like most of us here today, I have personal experiences of systemic ableism, in particular as someone heavily reliant on the medical industrial complex. I grew up in and out of hospitals. I have a chronic illness that fluctuates and progresses and always needs managing. 

Exactly two years ago today, I was living in the ICU on a ventilator. My bodymind was struggling to survive post-medically induced coma. Now I am up here speaking to you all, and I can honestly say that I am grateful to be alive. 

I feel like I should be up here sharing how I survived, how I have lived with chronic illness and disability my whole life, using this opportunity to share some wise lessons. But how I survived was not just due to some inner strength or determination that I uniquely have, no, we all have that as humans. As disabled humans, we know the determination that life takes because we have no other option but to survive in the minds and bodies we have. 

What I had was systems of support. Community support, family support, financial support, housing support, funded healthcare, and the list goes on. I survived and now feel like I am starting to thrive in part because of having access to class privilege. 

When I was so incredibly sick, when it seemed like there was no hope, no path forward, I thought about accessing Medical Assistance in Dying. But I was able to keep pushing through because I had that support. I think of all the people who aren’t here today, the ones who used MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) to end their lives, and the ones who died unnecessarily young because they didn’t have support.

I am angry 
because I want everyone to have that support. I want to live in a world where resources are abundant and everyone gets what they need without having to prove anything.

I am angry that governments are actively eroding our healthcare and social services. 

I am angry because the feds promised to lift disabled people out of poverty, but have let our communities down. 

So as we try to topple capitalism and as we dream of different worlds, let’s start with small actions.
Let’s commit to community care and sharing resources — like money. 

My individual accountability is about recognizing my unearned advantages and working toward dismantling these systems. It can be daunting and uncomfortable, and scary. It's so big, what could we possibly do as individuals? 

I do many things, but one thing I am recently committing to is sharing my money, and I invite those of you who can to share some of your money, too. Start somewhere; it doesn't have to be perfect. This is about mutual aid, but beyond that, this is about redistribution and reparations. We live in this culture of hoarding what we have, being secret about it. There are ideas about saving for the future because you “will never know”, but what if instead we trusted the community, we trusted our neighbours, what if we knew other people would have our back in the hardest of times? 

I challenge you to take stock of what you have and to name it. Noticing how not all power and privilege are static and may change throughout life, depending on your situation. Right now, I have a few part-time jobs. I have a supportive family who live in another country, but are able to help me out financially from time to time. I have friends who will bring me a meal or let me sleep on their couch. I have stable market-rate housing. Some of you may see these things as a lot, and some may see these things as not enough, especially for Toronto. 

But, for the last 3 years, I have been redistributing 10% of my income each month to mutual aid, organizations, and disabled kin. This is a small way for me to be accountable and ensure mutual relationships within our community that centers interdependence. 

If you are unsure if you have extra to share, the first thing is to start talking about it. I am happy to talk to you. Feel free to reach out to me. You can also check out an organization called Resource Movement who can help you with ways to redistribute your money. 

Money is just one thing — one thing that many disabled people don’t have. So, if you don’t have money, there are still ways you can show up. What can you share? Can we share our homes, our food, our skills, our empathy, our laughter, our tears? Can we push ourselves to think creatively? 

Let’s take care of each other in the face of fascism, in the face of governments dedicated to eugenics through MAID and harming us all around the world within this ongoing (internal and external) global polycrisis. 

Let’s live our values of community care and interdependence. Let’s be accountable to each other. Let’s support each other. We have seen that systems will not save us, we will save us.

Let’s March, and as we celebrate and rage, I encourage you to talk to someone that you've never spoken to before. Exchange numbers with someone and start to build support systems for each other.

Thank you.

Keat Welsh BA, M.Ed is a queer, disabled artist, community activist and educator. They currently work at the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto (CILT) as the IDE+A coordinator. Keat is passionate about building communities of care and striving to create safer, anti-oppressive spaces. Living with both visible and invisible disabilities, they navigate complex experiences through art, activism and community care. Keat frequently speaks on panels at conferences and reviews academic papers. Keat is the founder of Equity Buttons and the Community Resistance Intimacy Project – CRIP. They are also a mental health counselor for queer and trans disabled folks and have had a part time private practice for the past 5 years.

You can connect with Keat on Instagram at: @cripcounseling and @queerkeat.
Keat’s website is https://www.kwelsh.ca/.