User:Jasonnolan/GimpGirl Community

Mission
Taken from the GGC's web site.
 * GimpGirl's mission is to bring women with disabilities together in the spirit of support, positivity and inclusivity. The world of women with disabilities is a complex place, often with no easy answers. We encourage an attitude of self-advocacy and self-efficacy with all of our members and are radically inclusive of all women with disabilities. With the strength of our members and allies throughout the global disability and women's worlds, we use the tools at our disposal to create a place for discourse, humor, art, research, resources, and most of all, community.

Membership
The following members are welcome to come to GGC's weekly support meetings that are held on Second Life/IRC (quoted directly from the GGC website):
 * Anyone who identifies as being a woman with a disability. We try to embrace the widest notion of woman, and include individuals who are intersexed, transgendered, or who otherwise identify as differently gendered. It is important that participants identify with women's issues and are comfortable talking about them from a personal perspective.
 * We don’t care what your disability or health issue is, how severe it is, or how long you’ve had it. While we use the word gimp in our name, which is a reclaiming of a term that was traditionally derogatory towards people with physical disabilities, we welcome people with any type of disability. Again, we just care that you are comfortable talking about disability or health issues from a personal perspective.
 * Similarly, the term girl as we use it refers to a woman who takes a certain irreverent pride in her gender, not to chronological age. All women are welcome here. However, please note that some of the sites we have a presence on have age restrictions (such as Second Life), and we must abide by their terms of service.
 * Please note that you must personally identify with women's and disability issues in real life - it is not enough (or even necessary) for your Second Life avatar to be female or disabled.

Selected Presentations
The staff members try to extend outreach by giving presentations at face-to-face conferences. In October 2008, community liaison Alejandra Ospina attended the Association for Internet Researchers conference in Copenhagen to talk to attendees about the history and technology of the GGC (Ospina, Cole and Nolan 2008). In March 2009, program director Jennifer Cole took part in a panel discussing access to sexual health information on-line at Sex::Tech in San Francisco (Cole 2009). In July 2009 GGC community liaison and research fellow, Katherine Mancuso gave a presentation on building accessible, inclusive on-line communities at the IEEE conference in Boston (Mancuso and Cole 2009). In August 2009, community liaison Liz Henry gave a presentation at the San Francisco Online Community Report August Meetup on how GGC applies the concepts of universal design and inclusion to what they do (Mancuso, Cole and Henry 2009). In November 2009, Cole and Mancuso were asked to present from the disability perspective at the Virtual Praxis II conference put on by The Ohio State University's Department of Women's Studies (Cole and Mancuso 2009). In August 2010, Mancuso participated in a BlogHer 2010 panel to discuss how to build a community around your cause. She also presented at the Second Life Community Convention 2010 (Cole and Mancuso 2010) on weaving together various social medias to support women with disabilities, and participated in panels on accessibility in virtual worlds and using virtual worlds for social good.

Links
http://gimpgirl.com/ GimpGirl Grows Up: Women With Disabilities Rethinking, Redefining, and Reclaiming Community.