Helena was invited to speak to the educators of New Jersey at a professional development conference. Her keynote was on disability rights and inclusion – a topic she is known for world-wide. Helena shared her birth story, how her early medical trauma led to multiple non-apparent disabilities, the problems she faces as a disabled student in school, and told stories of those educators that championed her disabilities to provide her a fair and equal education.
Helena was invited to do the Sunday morning talk for Disability Awareness Month and share with this local congregation on the topic of disability justice. She also – in her new role as Youth Poet Laureate of the city of Long Beach shared two new poems. One poem was titled “Neurodivergent Activist Poet” and spoke on the topic what it is like to be neurodivergent in the poetry community. The second poem, titled “I Don’t Know This God of Yours” was her critical look at evangelicalism as an activist and atheist.
Disabled Disrupters is a national youth disability justice coalition based in the United States that aim to lift up disabled people’s social, political, and economic rights through advocating for legislation that centers on equal access for the disabled and neurodivergent community. Founder Kira Tiller invited Helena to speak on an experience she had during an active shooter drill at her high school and how the school segregated her into a small room by herself for math and then didn’t inform her of the active shooter drill. Since Helena was keynoting to the New Jersey Education Association on the same day, she made a video that they shared at the Disabled Disrupters Town Hall as a way to introduce the important topic of how schools fail to prepare for disabled kids during emergency drills.
Helena and her two fathers were invited by the NEA to be on this esteemed panel of disability scholars and activists to speak to intersectional activism in the work of disability rights and inclusion. This moderated critical panel discussion navigates the complexities of intersectionality within the sphere of disability and explores the best practices for culturally responsive and sustaining collaboration among educators, students, and families. This session aims to foster an in-depth understanding of how various social identities overlap with disability and how these intersections impact students’ experiences in schools.
4GIRLS inspires and empowers middle school girls to identify themselves as authentic, confident, and resilient, preparing them for real-life success. Helena was asked to keynote to 100 middle school girls on the theme of girls being limitless.
In Helena’s ongoing relationship with The National Education Associate, she was Invited by the New Jersey Education Association to present and host a conversation on disability rights, the children who show up in our classrooms, and the larger issue of identity and how it impacts each of our lives, both personal and professional.
Helena was invited to Keynote for this conference and address the conference themes of working with students with disabilities, reforming school discipline, healing harm in school, history of the N-word, and LGBTIA+ issues.
Helena was featured as the key voice in this conversation about this new field of study. The purpose of the conversation was to advance the theoretical and pragmatic understanding of Critical Special Education research. A focus of this conversation was to advance the vision and advocacy of scholars of color and members of culturally diverse communities and the object of the conversation is to collectively define what critical special education is and how it can leverage scholarship from the field of special education and existing critical disability fields, like DisCrit and Disability Studies in Education.
Sponsored by the Allegany College of Maryland, WVU Potomac State College, and Eastern West Virginia Community & Technical College, Helena was invited to give a keynote address to the Presidents of the Community Colleges of Appalachia. She addressed the power of youth voice, the power of storytelling, the power of women, the power of the outsider, and the power of intersectionality. “Our collective liberation is bound up with each other.”
Helena was invited to keynote at the MTEA by their President and asked to cover four important topics: (1) Make schools inclusive for children with disabilities, (2) Be an anti-racist educator, (3) Be affirming of all families, and (4) Be affirming and stop bullying. President Amy Mizialko said, “This message from Helena is impactful and brought us to tears. Helena is powerful. Helena hit on relevant points of teaching intersectionality with race, anti-racist teaching, homophobia, and bullying. She appealed to us as teachers to get in the way of negative behavior displayed, as she put it, ‘right under our noses.’”
Helena was thrilled when local feminist icon Zoe Nicholson invited her to give an address at the 2023 Women’s Fair & ERA Centennial. Helena has long been a feminist activist and it was an honor to be included among so many esteemed and veteran feminists in her own beloved city.
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