The Basics of Yopp
New to Yopp? You’ve come to the right place!
I’m here to introduce you to the many important aspects of Yopp and offer some suggestions of articles to read that accurately represent our goals and specialties.
What is Yopp exactly? Why does it exist? What do the writers and supporters of Yopp hope to accomplish? What can you do to help us get there?
Learn about Yopp’s proposal for a new way to teach social justice and how you can get involved in that project.
Yopp makes a point of covering a wide range of social justice related issues but one of its specialties is describing the experiences behind disability and chronic illness.
The majority of Yopp’s content is written by creator and editor Kella Hanna-Wayne whose life experiences managing multiple illnesses, chronic pain, and an invisible disability, brings new depth to these widely misunderstood topics.
Yopp’s other most common topic is mental health: Yopp offers informative, first-person accounts of managing mental illnesses such as depression, processing trauma, and recovering from previous abuse.
Guest writers are key component to Yopp’s work. No single person can express the experience of every form of marginalization, which is why you’ll find articles from people with a wide variety of backgrounds on Yopp.
The article linked above is by regular guest writer Denny Upkins. You can read more of the articles he’s written or Yopp here.
All of Yopp’s writers are marginalized and paid for their work. Learn more on our submissions page.
The backbone of this blog is Yopp Academy: A collection of educational articles that break down basic social justice concepts and demonstrate how they apply to virtually any form of marginalization.
Yopp Academy articles are organized by level of difficulty like classes in a university: Level 100 is the most basic, which you will need to learn in order to proceed to Level 200 etc. The article above is a greater starting point and contains many recommendations of other articles to further your self-education process.
A special thing that you will find on Yopp on a regular basis is compilations of useful resources for specific topics. In this case, guest writer Lucy Merriman wrote an amazing 5-part series entitled, How to Lend a Hand in a Mental Health Crisis, which is filled with valuable tools, advice, and specific external resources to utilize.
The 4-part “Explaining Privilege” series is potentially one of the most useful and widely applicable sets of articles in Yopp Academy. It looks at how privilege works across many demographics and backgrounds.
Yopp’s articles rarely respond quickly to current events but instead cover more widely applicable topics that continue to be relevant to developing social justice events over time.
In recent years, Yopp has also acquired a collection of resources regarding Dissociative Identity Disorder. Our primary writer, Kella, was diagnosed with this disorder in 2020 and will continue sharing her experiences living as a system in articles on Yopp.
Until recently, Yopp didn’t have a comment section. But now that we do, we ask that everyone who’d like to participate in the discussion read over our Comment Policy first, to ensure our comments stay as safe and productive as possible. Thank you!
At Yopp we're dedicated to providing educational material for social justice that emphasizes the individual experience of lived oppression and helps you understand the whole picture instead of memorizing do's & don'ts.
