Ep 146 | Tiffany Yu: Empowering the Disabled Through Diversability

Aug 31, 2021

01:03:21

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Episode notes

A note from Talking Taiwan host Felicia Lin:

Tiffany Yu is a disability activist, CEO and founder of Diversability, and host of Tiffany & Yu, a social impact podcast. She’s also on the San Francisco Mayor’s Disability Council, a three-time TED Talk speaker and has a list of many more impressive accomplishments that appear on her Wikipedia page.

She spoke with tremendous vulnerability about her disability origin story, the trauma she’s experienced, dealing with shame, and her continued healing.

Tiffany also shared about the many exciting projects she’s working on for Diversability and in the disability space.

CORRECTION: At x:xx when Tiffany mentioned a TED Tallk “The Danger of a Single Narrative” she was referring to the TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.”

Here’s a little preview of what we talked about in this podcast episode:

How Tiffany spearheaded the Taiwan Necklace Project to raise money for ITASA (Intercollegiate Taiwanese American Students Association)
Tiffany’s disability origin story
How she came up with the idea for her company Diversability in 2009 while a student at Georgetown University
The work that Diversability does
How Diversability went from a side hustle to something fulltime years later in 2017
How Diversability is about improving the lives and well-being of disabled people
How can Diversability make disability a reason to belong and not a reason to exclude
What happened in 2019 that made Tiffany realize that she was experiencing PTSD and how she dealt with it
Tiffany’s thoughts on her first TED Talk
What has changed since Tiffany started Diversability
How Tiffany was able to get the mayor of San Francisco to declare July Disability Pride Month in 2020
How Tiffany has evolved since she first founded Diversability
News about Diversability
The “Disability is not a bad word” T-shirt campaign
The Diversabillity Leadership Collective
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) goal of economic self-sufficiency
How Tiffany has launched an endowment fund at Georgetown University for disability-related initiatives
The comments that Tiffany’s mom made about Diversability in 2018
How Tiffany deals with her mother’s opinion of the work she does with Diversability
Tiffany’s podcast Tiffany & Yu, which she started in 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic
Tiffany’s favorite episode of her podcast Tiffany & Yu
Laverne Cox’s term “possibility model”
The term ableism
How Tiffany enjoys making Tik Tok dance videos
The accomplishment that Tiffany is most proud of
How the Paralympics may be used as a reason not to care about disability
The term inspiration porn
How paralympican Rebecca Meyers’ request to have a personal care assistant accompany her was denied