Candor - formerly ASAC

12/18/2025

Thank you for a great 2025!

Our mission tasks us to create economic security and to work across justice movements to create belonging for ourselves and other individuals with those identities. Disability Justice leads our every conversation at CANDOR. CANDOR’s programs have focused on education, advocacy, and belonging for 1...

12/12/2025

At CANDOR we celebrate that Disabled bodies, minds, and lives have inherent wholeness. That’s why we do this work, because we know our embodied experiences have value, worth, and wisdom. CANDOR’s programs have focused on education, advocacy, and belonging for 15 years.

Your support is absolutely necessary for our work to continue. Without recurring support from individuals like you, we cannot sustain this crucial commitment to our mission. Thank you to everyone who has made a difference in our CANDOR community in 2025, you were the kindling in our fire!!

Please share this post, or consider making a donation. Link in bio

Slide 1: West End Free Market & CANDOR Farm: Disabled livelihoods growing, sharing, and sustaining community-based food systems that challenge chronic scarcity. Picture of person sorting food in boxes and another picture of people tending to weeds in an open field. Logos of partners beneath: Blue Cross Blue Shield, Farmer Foodshare, West End Community Foundation, Inc., Root Causes, Happy Dirt, Duke Campus Farm, Duke Health, ReNourish.

Slide 2: Part & Parcel: Interdependent employment designed BY and FOR Disabled people that also supports community in reducing its environmental impact. Pictures of bulk good bins, a person using a wheelchair reaching for a spice jar, a person processing jars, and a picture of staff gathered together.

Slide 3: Torchlight Residency: Creating access, development, and opportunity for young Disabled artists. Pictures of students holding up art work, people looking at art on the walls of a gallery, and close-up of paintings. Logos of partners and sponsors: Durham Public Schools, Durham Parks and Recreation, CassilHaus, UNC School of Social Work

Slide 4: CANDOR 2025 Review of Community Education & Advocacy: EPIC X CANDOR, Insights from Black Autistic Adults for Families and Educators, Embers & Echoes, a truths-telling event for Disabled Poets and Storytellers, 2025 Conference: Resourcing in Radical Resistance//Restoration, and Collaborations: PRIDE, Durham, NC, Jubilee Home, and Benevolence Farm.

12/06/2025

Alice Wong's 2014 partnership with Story Corp, the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), grew into a presence on social media that created comfort for many of us. More than just trending hashtags and , we owe to her magic mind. Whole communities sprung from these social hours held online, these were modern day salons, where she cultivated and curated disabled voices, centering us, bringing the multiply marginalized unwaveringly to the front. For many of us this was our first experience with Disability Justice, which changed how we approached not only others, but our own selves.

As artist, philosopher, activist, cultural leader, and editor, she said of her groundbreaking book Disability Visibility, in which she gathered narratives of disability justice from other writers, “this book is a Valentine.”  It was a valentine to the everyday passions of her fellow disabled people, whom she felt were every bit as interesting as her own.  This is how she felt we would best achieve justice – elevating one another – she was achingly humble. She also spoke openly about how she used its introduction to challenge both journalism and publishing fields as a whole, with “rage as comedy”.*

Many of us saw ourselves in her emotional appeals, the ruthless truths she spoke, and the advocacy strings she held together, naming the medical racism, eugenics, and ableism that disabled people were facing before, during, and after the pandemic.  In losing her, we have lost a policy advocate, beacon, and a fierce dreamer.  The stunning agony and beauty of her legacy is that she believed we can change the landscape of justice with our collective rage, joy, and creativity, in just pushing our stories out, together.  

Alice Wong’s love letter to us was her belief in the comedy of it all, except for when it wasn’t funny, when our collective stories were the deepest well of our power. We can probably believe that with her passing, she would invite us to still listen, very closely, to the water.

*both in her 2020 interview with W Kamau Bell " 

12/03/2025

CANDOR: December 2025 Newsletter

Staff, Board, and Volunteers Gather at CANDOR Farm

12/02/2025

Invest in Disabled Futures this Giving Tuesday!

Despite the number of Disabled people in the United States increasing to 26% from 20% in just five years, federal resources and programs are being reduced or completely discarded. We are facing collective grief and capacity fatigue like never before. This context is one we’re all facing. It is now...

11/05/2025

The disruption in SNAP benefits is an act of neglect that disproportionately harms Disabled people, Chronically ill people, and our Elders. It’s the predictable result of a system divesting from equity and justice. Disabled people already face the highest rates of food insecurity and the most barriers to access: income caps, physical inaccessibility, unreliable transit, cost of medicines, therapies, and care, and isolation. 

This is going to mean skipped meals in already compromised bodies. This is going to mean choosing between food and needed medicine. This is going to mean the prescriptions that are required to be taken with food will have nothing to go down with and foods that regulate blood sugar may not be in the pantry. This is a removal of dignity. This is a threat to life itself.

CANDOR has also always worked alongside other food justice organizers in Durham. Through our West End Free Market, which focuses on supporting our Disabled and Elder neighbors, we have distributed over 250,000 pounds of food, reaching 500 unique households, feeding thousands.

We're expanding our networks and partnerships with the intention of redesigning the ways we engage in the work of knowing and feeding people, centering relationships, interdependence, and sustainability.

SNAP was already not enough to move folks out of survival, so what we are building is designed to establish community self-reliance, to not only respond to the current crisis, but create stability for whatever comes in the future. When it comes to food, we should all experience abunbance.
 
You can take immediate action by:

Purchase a gift card for Part & Parcel for a SNAP recipient to use - make a donation online and put “SNAP gift card” in the comments section

Donate directly to CANDOR to support the costs of hot and prepared meals, produce/dry goods purchases for the Free Market, or invest in our farm development. 
Donate link in bio
Venmo:

Follow to learn more about physical donations and volunteer options

Volunteer with CANDOR

11/05/2025

Register through link in bio
NOV 12 - 13, 2025
Recordings sent to all who register, watch on your own time!

Living in an ableist society pressures disabled individuals to be a perpetual advocate, silently mask, and live with denied autonomy. On top of that there is an expectation of fitting social criteria perfectly in order to receive humanity, care and consideration from bureaucratic systems that were created to gatekeep resources from everyone. It can be difficult to navigate and engage in community led movements to acquire and preserve our rights with accessibility concerns. The access to rest, joy and play has also been limited to those with societal privilege but they are all important balancers to recover energy. The goal for this two day conference is to share strategies for both resistance and restoration. This conference has been designed by Autistic, Neuro-eclectic, Chronically-ill and Disabled people and centers own-voices presenters.

November 12 Presentations that focus on navigating resistance movements, collective care and ableist bureaucratic environments as a disabled person.

November 13 Presentations, demonstrations and performances that bring to light the importance of resourcing rest, pleasure, and joy in ableist societal systems.

11/01/2025

Response to SNAP Disruption

The disruption in SNAP benefits is an act of neglect that disproportionately harms Disabled people, Chronically ill people, and our Elders. It’s the predictable result of a system divesting from equity and justice. Disabled people already face the highest rates of food insecurity and the most barr...

10/18/2025

CANDOR 2025 Conference: November 13 Presenters

Learn more or register through link in bio

November 13 Presentations, demonstrations and performances that bring to light the importance of resourcing rest, pleasure, and joy in ableist societal systems.

Neurodivergent Rest: Exploring Rest as a Living Dynamic Relationship Shaped by Sensory Needs - Karly Philips

Reclaiming Farm Work: From a Black Disabled Farmer - Abijah Gattis

Disabled Joy and Pleasure as Resistance - Delphine Andrews

Rusk : A relaxed hour of q***r, disabled, science-infused stand-up comedy - Nik Narain

We Deserve to Rest: Reclaiming Joy, Stillness, and Slowness as Disabled Praxis - Rebecca Ingle

End of day open discussions for attendees facilitated by Azrael Burton 

Conference description: Living in an ableist society pressures disabled individuals to be a perpetual advocate, silently mask, and live with denied autonomy. On top of that there is an expectation of fitting social criteria perfectly in order to receive humanity, care and consideration from bureaucratic systems that were created to gatekeep resources from everyone. It can be difficult to navigate and engage in community led movements to acquire and preserve our rights with accessibility concerns. The access to rest, joy and play has also been limited to those with societal privilege but they are all important balancers to recover energy. The goal for this two day conference is to share strategies for both resistance and restoration. This conference has been designed by Autistic, Neuro-eclectic, Chronically-ill and Disabled people and centers own-voices presenters.

10/17/2025

CANDOR 2025 CONFERENCE: November 12 and 13

Living in an ableist society pressures disabled individuals to be a perpetual advocate, silently mask, and live with denied autonomy. On top of that there is an expectation of fitting social criteria perfectly in order to receive humanity, care and consideration from bureaucratic systems that were c...

10/17/2025

CANDOR 2025 Conference: November 12 Presenters

Learn more or register through link in bio

November 12 Presentations that focus on navigating resistance movements, collective care and ableist bureaucratic environments as a disabled person.

Keynote - T Land

Krip-Hop Nation Community-Based Education, Terminology, Theory and Culture - Leroy Moore, Jr

Breaking Form for a Q***r Poetry Revolution - Khalisa Rae

Walking Weathervanes: How Disabled & Neurodivergent Experiences Can Both Seek and Provide Balance During Environmental Crises - Lou Jent

Creativity as Truth and an Act of Resistance - Dr. Amy Scurria

Conference description: Living in an ableist society pressures disabled individuals to be a perpetual advocate, silently mask, and live with denied autonomy. On top of that there is an expectation of fitting social criteria perfectly in order to receive humanity, care and consideration from bureaucratic systems that were created to gatekeep resources from everyone. It can be difficult to navigate and engage in community led movements to acquire and preserve our rights with accessibility concerns. The access to rest, joy and play has also been limited to those with societal privilege but they are all important balancers to recover energy. The goal for this two day conference is to share strategies for both resistance and restoration. This conference has been designed by Autistic, Neuro-eclectic, Chronically-ill and Disabled people and centers own-voices presenters.