"Like the butterfly, the soul transforms—rising from its earthly shell into light and freedom, gently reminding us that love never dies, it only changes."

The Peer Self-Advocacy Program and the California Memorial Project hosted its 23rd annual Remembrance Ceremony on Monday, September 15th, 2025. It is an opportunity to inspire and empower us all with hope for a future that will cultivate awareness, acknowledgment, appreciation and respect for our peers with mental health, intellectual, and developmental disabilities who lived or currently live in state institutions – who are often unseen, unheard and forgotten.  

Not long ago, our peers who were locked away in California state hospitals and developmental centers were buried in mass or anonymous graves, in dirt and disarray upon their death. Their identity was erased and replaced by numbers, as if they never existed. Our peers who currently live in locked facilities and state institutions are hidden from our view, their voices silenced, their humanity overlooked.

Today, in California, we face the daunting reality that more of our peers are being placed in locked facilities with new laws that promote involuntary hospitalization and forced medication as a solution to our civilization’s “problems.” In the wake of CARE Court and Proposition 1, our state is weaponizing institutionalization to restrict our freedoms and remove our peers with disabilities from our communities – to make them disappear and segregate them from society.  

This is why it is important that we come together at our Remembrance Ceremonies, either virtually or in person, as we seek to raise awareness, honor, recognize and restore dignity to our peers in the past and in the present. By celebrating on this day, we seek to create a future beyond stigma, discrimination, neglect, mistreatment, ignorance and judgment.  

Our Remembrance Ceremonies took place on September 15th, 2025.

California Memorial Project 23rd Anniversary Remembrance Ceremony (Spanish)

For more information contact PSA@disabilityrightsca.org.

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California Memorial Project