Mad Thinking is an initiative dedicated to creating spaces, tools, and opportunities to explore key questions about collective power, solidarity, and organising strategies with the aim of building stronger and more inclusive disability movements. We strive to move beyond single-issue organising, connecting disability activism with other social justice movements, including feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-authoritarian movements.
As Mad people, we are committed to leadership grounded in lived experience. We are especially committed to amplifying marginalised voices within the disability community, particularly those from the global South, those experiencing multiple layers of marginalisation, and emerging activists and advocates.
To learn more about how Mad Thinking came to be, read Why Mad Thinking?
Our Values
Mad Thinking is grounded in disability justice, solidarity, and collective liberation. We understand disability struggles as inseparable from broader struggles against exclusion, inequality, and oppression. We are an intersectional, feminist, anti-ableist, anti-racist, trans and queer inclusive, justice-based space. We resist hierarchical and extractive models of organising and remain accountable to movements rather than institutions.
Our Vision
We envision thriving and robust disability movements, rooted in justice, united in solidarity with other social movements, where power is built and shared, differences are embraced, critical thinking is valued, and organisations and leaders are accountable.
Our Mission
- To create spaces that are rooted in continuous political learning and knowledge sharing between a diverse range of human rights and social justice movement actors.
- To enable and facilitate critical conversations about the disability ecosystem, the key challenges it faces, and possible future directions for disability movements.
- To document and disseminate existing strategies used by activists to enable cross-movement solidarities and to create innovative organising and accountability methods.
- To generate and platform knowledges, ideas, tools, and information from and through human rights and justice movements to serve as a resource for the disability community.
- To support emerging disability activists, organisations, and collectives providing them with access to networks and facilitating the democratisation of inside knowledge about the sector.
- To amplify new voices, leaderships, and values-based methods of disability organising.
We are registered in Geneva, Switzerland, as Association Mad Thinking. We are a non-profit organisation certified as equivalent to a US Certified Public Charity.