Introducing Sins Invalid’s Leadership Team
Hi beloved community,
We’re writing to share an update about Sins Invalid’s trajectory after the transition of our beloved co-founder and Executive Director, Patty Berne in May 2025. First, thank you for helping us honor Patty’s life and legacy, and honor twenty incredible years of Sins Invalid and the 10 Principles of Disability Justice. We can’t wait to share highlights from two decades of performance and movement building work with you in the coming months.
For the past 18 months, we have had powerful conversations about what leadership Sins Invalid needs to steward us through our next phase. And although it hasn’t been easy to both grieve Patty’s transition and move forward towards a new chapter, we knew the key was held within our talented team. This is why we would love for you to join us in welcoming and celebrating our Leadership Team: our very own breana connor, Karina Camarena Heredia, and R Merriman-Goldring. This amazing trio brings a rooted commitment to Disability Justice with decades of experience across Arts and Nonprofit Management, Environmental Justice, and Fundraising. And most importantly, their labor in other roles at Sins has already transformed how we run our programs, connect and seek resources to fund our work, and how we care for one another as a team.
Among their many accomplishments and offerings so far, Sins Invalid Leadership Team has provided continuity of our external programming during this transition period, retained our full 10-member team, implemented a 4-day work week centering collective rest and wellbeing, changed our policies to ensure pay equity, and built more sustainable programming activities. We are excited about what we can collectively build guided by their experience as queer / trans disabled artists and cultural workers. Their work centers a vision of a joyful multi-generational crip community committed to cross-disability solidarity, sustainability, and capitalism harm reduction.
And as we celebrate a new leadership team, we also want to recognize that we are navigating this new chapter for Sins amidst a heartbreaking reality of escalating authoritarianism and an administration that denies the terrifying impacts of human-induced climate chaos. Meanwhile, extreme weather, environmental racism, and ecological destruction disproportionately endanger Black and brown working class crips. At Sins, our commitment to Disability Justice isn’t just theory. It is our survival strategy. We understand that we need each other not only to resist but to build new worlds; to grieve and to dream together. Our commitments and programming in the coming years will be affirmations of these truths and will empower us to be able to celebrate just as much as we grieve.
To support us as we embark on this new chapter, and to bolster the vision of our amazing Leadership Team, please consider making a donation to Sins Invalid today. We exist because of community members like you who show up, witness, and sustain our work. Your support in all its forms keeps our art and movement thriving!
In community,
Sins Invalid
An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility.
Our stories lay a foundation for a collective claim of liberation, beauty, and human rights.
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