#FundDisAdvocacy Twitter Chat, Disability Advocacy and Philanthropy

Join the Twitter chat with DREDF Development Director and A Crip in Philanthropy blogger Ingrid Tischer and Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project on Friday, October 12, 2018, 4 pm Pacific: #FundDisAdvocacy.

They are delighted to have the following guest co-hosts:

Noorain F. Khan, Program Officer, Office of the President, Ford Foundation

Ryan Easterly, Executive Director, WITH Foundation

Irma Herrera, Board Member, van Löben Sels/RembeRock Foundation

The goal of #FundDisAdvocacy is for us to learn how we can work together to effectively address unconscious bias when an advocacy funder says, “We don’t do disability.”  In conversation with advocates, funders, the disability and philanthropy communities, and civil and human rights allies we hope to challenge funders to support disability advocacy along with their current priorities on inequality, social justice, civil rights, and poverty. Preview the chat’s questions.

An Open Letter to Advocacy Funders: Disability + Ableism = Structural Discrimination
In percentages of advocacy funding worldwide, foundation funding for disability advocacy dropped 23% between 2011-2015 and disabled people were the only group to see a decrease. Disabled people aren’t even top recipients for healthcare advocacy funding, as health care is the area that many people assume disability is synonymous with. Instead, disabled people ranked fourth in total global funding in 2015. Women and girls received about $20 million more in grants, with children and youth in the overall lead.

I think I know one reason why disability advocacy is so underfunded. When it comes to funding for disability civil and human rights advocacy, decision-makers in foundations too often seem to lack an understanding of how ableism results in structural discrimination, however “aware” of disabled people they are. But I’ve never encountered a foundation that lacked a basic understanding of how sexism, for example, results in structural gender discrimination, and how that discrimination creates the need for actionable, urgent advocacy on issues affecting women and girls.
 
That will only change when my saying the word “disability” to advocacy funders no longer seems to trigger an immediate, unstoppable association with clinical or quality of life projects that effectively “disables” any conversation about advocacy or, even worse, unleashes the trope that disability = charity. It will change when a shared understanding of ableism allows us to have the kind of conversations I had when I sought funding for advocacy to combat gender discrimination.

I’ll be candid: I had gotten so demoralized in the past two years that I stopped expecting much in the way of foundation funding. Despite established relationships with True North Foundation, Herb Block Foundation, The California Endowment, Special Hope Foundation (now WITH Foundation), and The Mayerson Foundation, I stopped expecting much in the way of foundation funding. 

I had simply lost my grit for trying to get beyond the courteous finality of, “Sorry, we just don’t do disability,” from civil and human rights funders. That failure’s on me. I stopped being an activist.

But I slowly, skeptically, started to have some hope following the Ford Foundation’s still-recent evolutionary leap in acknowledging its own gap in funding for the fight for disability civil and human rights. When our organization was awarded its first Ford grant last year, it was a pivotal moment in our nearly 40-year history.

That said, Ford can’t single-handedly fill the sector’s gaps, much less its canyons. Just as any foundation funder is wary of becoming my sole source funder, I am wary of Ford becoming the sector’s sole fix-it funder for the lack of disability rights advocacy. Ford’s action should be a lodestar to follow, not a signal flare that the work is done. 

If a foundation wants to transform the world with disabled people, its work must begin with repositioning disabled advocates as leaders who bring assets, rather than only a collection of needs.
These are the transformational changes I would like to see funders make within their own foundation community:

  • Significantly increase funding for disability civil and human rights advocacy
  • Create accessible entry points for hiring politicized disabled staff who reflect the diversity of the disabled population in areas that include class, income inequality, and experience with living on public benefits
  • Compensate and credit the multiply-marginalized disabled people who contribute to your work, particularly disabled women of color
  • Require that disability-related advocacy work you fund be led by disabled advocates and organizations governed by disabled leaders
  • Require that disability-related advocacy work you fund be fundamentally intersectional in approach, not only when it’s considered politically “safe”
  • Foundation metrics that are developed with disability as a factor and variable
  • Increased disability cultural fluency in the philanthropic sector, in general, including the effects of structural poverty caused by benefits and their income limits
  • Increased understanding of how damaging the charity model is to advancing disability rights
  • Dismantling of barriers in the philanthropic sector itself that make it impossible for a disabled fundraiser to both succeed professionally and contribute disability cultural fluency

I don’t expect to have my funding requests granted. I do expect an equal opportunity to make my funding case for disability advocacy. The first step is understanding the disability community–and the activists who embody it–not as charity, personified, but as justice, denied. Partners. Social justice co-conspirators.

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