About Be Enabled Advocacy Alliance

Who we are

Be Enabled Advocacy Alliance is a disability-led advocacy, programming, and community organization. Most people use the short name BEAA, said as "bee-ay-ay".

We work to grow autonomy and agency for people who are pushed to the edges — and above all for disabled people. Autonomy means running your own life. Agency means having a real say in what happens to you.

What "disability-led" means here

It means disabled people are not just consulted. We set the agenda, do the work, and make the decisions.

Plenty of groups speak about disabled people. Fewer are run by them. That difference shows up in what gets prioritized, what gets noticed, and what gets left out.

How we work

Advocacy

We push for better rules, better services, and better design. Some of that is public. A lot of it is slow work with agencies and providers.

Programming

We run projects that meet a need directly, rather than waiting for a policy to change. The Blue Envelope Project and our Resource Hub & Calendar are two of them.

Community

We build the space many of us needed and never had: somewhere to find support, guidance, connection, culture, and to be believed.

The five areas, and why we refuse to separate them

We work across housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and money security. We treat them as one system because that is how they are lived.

A missed bus becomes a missed appointment. A missed appointment becomes a lapsed prescription. A lapsed prescription becomes a lost job. The parts are not separate, so our work is not either.

Read about the five areas we work on

Our legal status

Be Enabled Advocacy Alliance is a non-profit organization under section 501(c)(3) of the United States tax code. Gifts to us may be tax deductible.

We are still writing up our board, our finances, and our full history for this page.