Stacey Milbern

Stacey Park Milbern (May 19, 1987 – May 19, 2020) was a South Korean and American activist for disability justice, advocating for fair treatment of those with disability in the United States. She served on the North Carolina Commission for the Blind and the Statewide Independent Living Council, as well as the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities under U.S. president Barack Obama. She also helped establish Disability History and Awareness Month in North Carolina. In March 2020, she engaged in mutual aid to provide food and medical care to homeless and disabled people in the San Francisco Bay Area during the COVID-19 pandemic before dying from surgical complications related to kidney cancer in May of that year.

Early life Milbern was born at the U.S. Army Hospital in Seoul on May 19, 1987, with ullrich congenital muscular dystrophy (CMD). She was mixed-race, her father being White American and her mother being South Korean. in a military family, as her father was in the United States Army. As a child she relied on her family as caregivers, but when she began to identify as queer, she feared her parents' judgment and planned to move out, a choice made more difficult by her need for help in daily activities such as eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom. including as Community Outreach Director for the National Youth Leadership Network. She later was a founder of the North Carolina Youth Leadership Forum. and to the Statewide Independent Living Council from 2004 to 2010. In 2005, Milbern helped to establish the disability justice movement through conversations with other disabled queer women of color activists.

Milbern authored a popular disability-rights blog on WordPress throughout the late 2000s, titled "Crip Chick" (later CripChick.com). She graduated from Methodist University in 2009. California ranks highly among the states for spending on in-home care benefits, and she was able to obtain Medicaid support for an in-home attendant, and hold a position in human resources at Wells Fargo, a financial banking company. She advised the Obama administration for two years. She earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Mills College in 2015.

In early March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread to the Bay Area, Milbern and four friends constituting the Disability Justice Culture Club distributed homemade disease-prevention kits, including hand sanitizer, disinfectant, and respirators, to residents of Oakland homeless encampments. She raised concerns for the well-being of the community and its most vulnerable members. Milbern noted her DIY solution as an example of "crip—or crippled—wisdom". She warned that the pandemic's demands on health services threatened her community's access to dialysis and other life-saving treatments needed by some to survive. Her group also organized a mutual aid campaign, providing food and care support for disabled people in need. Milbern continued pandemic relief work despite her own growing health problems.

Death and legacy

Towards the end of her life, she experienced additional health problems. Surgery to remove her fast-growing kidney cancer was postponed during the COVID-19 pandemic due to shelter-in-place orders. Milbern is depicted on a U.S. quarter released in 2025 as part of the final year of the American Women quarters collection. On October 25, 2025, Milbern was inducted into the hall of fame of Massey Hill Classical High School.