It’s been over 30 years since the watershed Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, but people with disabilities still face enormous barriers and inequities in the physical, social and economic spheres. More than 1 in 4 people with disabilities live in poverty, and compared to people without disabilities, they’re less than half as likely to be employed or have a college degree. These problems are often amplified for disabled people of color and disabled people in other marginalized communities.
It was considerations like these that in 2019 led Ford Foundation President Darren Walker and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation President Richard Besser to create the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy, a group of 17 foundation CEOs committed to boosting disability inclusion within philanthropy. One result of that step was the creation of the Disability Inclusion Fund, a $20 million fund supporting U.S. groups run by and for disabled people working for change. Another step was the establishment of the Disability and Philanthropy Forum.
The Disability and Philanthropy Forum was designed as a resource to help the sector learn about the disability community and to increase giving for underserved needs. Perhaps most importantly, it seeks to do this by centering leaders from the disability community in the philanthropic decision-making process.
“Our mission is to increase funding and to increase the participation of people with disabilities in philanthropy,” said Emily Harris, executive director of Disability and Philanthropy Forum. “Our target audience is philanthropy.”
Disability is more than a matter of navigating physical barriers or designing accommodations for specific needs. Disability also intersects with other structural forms of marginalization, including racism and gender bias. This makes disability very clearly a matter of social justice — something many in philanthropy have been giving lip service to for years, and a smaller group have been actually funding. The Disability and Philanthropy Forum aims to help philanthropic organizations recognize and integrate disability as an element of their broader work toward social justice, equity and inclusion.
Philanthropy, of course, has a long history of supporting health needs, including many of the challenges disabled people face. But issues of inclusion and justice are only recently coming to the conversation. As philanthropic organizations seek to understand what that actually means for their work and their organizations, the Disability and Philanthropy Forum wants to be a key resource. One element of that is its Disability Inclusion Pledge. So far, Harris said, the forum has about 70 signatories to the pledge, which she describes as a mix of relatively easy steps and more lofty goals.
An initial step, for example, could be something as simple as including a line on event invitations with a contact for attendees to call if they need accommodations. “It doesn’t sound like much, but once you do that, you are raising the flag saying that people with disabilities are welcome here,” Harris said. A subsequent step might be something a little more challenging, like requiring event sponsors to explicitly accommodate disabilities. And further: asking that pledge signatories refuse to attend any event that doesn’t make the same sort of deliberate accommodations for disability.
The Disability and Philanthropy Forum also provides guidance on language. How organizations refer to people with different types of disabilities matters, and there isn’t always a simple formula or phrase that works for everyone. The forum is currently collecting information and lessons learned from its signatories, such as data on how many people with disabilities work in those organizations, and best practices around recruiting people with disabilities. “They’re starting to include these questions when they ask their grantees about their own diversity,” Harris said.
The philanthropic sector is still early on in its journey toward disability justice and inclusion, and few funders have really foregrounded these causes — the Ford Foundation is one of a few major foundations that has already ramped up giving. And while it would be nice to see more funders create disability rights and justice portfolios, Harris allows that such targeted grantmaking may not emerge in the near term.
“Where we expect over the next several years to really see change is when foundations understand and embrace how to intentionally attach a disability lens to their existing grantmaking,” Harris said. “For example, if you’re funding climate change, how are you intentionally making sure that people with disabilities are at the table and that it’s addressing their concerns?”
That intentionally intersectional lens is something we’ve seen time and again over the past several years as existing funders organize to create new social-justice-oriented, philanthropy-serving organizations and collaborative funding vehicles. Both the Disability and Philanthropy Forum as well as the Disability Inclusion Fund are examples of that trend, and the progressive-leaning funders that make up the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy are involved in a range of others. Meanwhile, the forum is currently fiscally sponsored by the Proteus Fund, another hub for funder collaboration around intersectional social justice causes.
The Disability and Philanthropy Forum has been a promising step along a challenging road for the sector and society at large. The disability community recently celebrated the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but ableism remains a difficult prejudice to excise. True equal rights and justice for people with disabilities is going to require that every social institution — including philanthropy — advance in partnership with the disability community.