Education 2024 Hamilton Youth Action Fund Black Indigenous NFP Challenging Ableist Violence, Unjust Punishment & the School-to-Prison-Nexus in Ontario’s Education System Funded Amount: $300000 / Projects / Youth Action Fund / Challenging Ableist Violence, Unjust Punishment & the School-to-Prison-Nexus in Ontario’s Education System Our project will empower Black, Indigenous, and racialized disabled youth facing systemic ableism in Ontario schools. Through consultations, toolkits will be developed to foster community care, mutual aid and self-advocacy, providing resources to youth experiencing suspensions, expulsions, seclusion, exclusions, restraints, interactions with police or other forms of carceral violence in the education system. Project coordinators will engage with a combination of abolitionist, health justice, criminal justice, labour, disability justice and transformative justice organizations/institutions to consult on broader impacts/aspects of structural ableism in education (many of which will likely fall outside of publicly-funded educational institutions). Priority amongst youth will be given to participants who have experienced criminalization (within or outside of public school settings) as a result of structural ableism within the education system. The project will engage with youth/families and gather their experiences on the aforementioned experiences through programming sessions (online or in-person), educational workshops and/or focus groups—depending on need at any given moment in the project. Emphasizing intersectional and anti-colonial approaches, this will be coupled with a province-wide provincial advocacy campaign aimed at tackling carceral violence within schools (i.e. through lobbying, direct action, public education, policy dissemination, etc.).