Arts and Disability

From PEAK Grantmaking: In early 2022, PEAK Grantmaking signed the Disability & Philanthropy Forum’s Disability Inclusion Pledge, a call to the entire philanthropic sector “to recognize that ableism—the systemic stigma and discrimination against people with disabilities—is a core barrier to equity and inclusion,” asking organizations to “commit to a continuing learning and implementation process that will advance systemic change … and serve as models for disability inclusion in the philanthropic sector.”

Today U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) joined Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to announce the first bipartisan, bicameral push in decades to reform the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which has not been updated in nearly 40 years and currently punishes older and disabled Americans for saving for emergencies and their futures.

From the National Endowment for the Arts: Welcome to the Careers in the Arts Toolkit— an online resource promoting equity, access, and inclusion for people with disabilities seeking careers in the arts.

Every day, people with disabilities add significant value and talent across the spectrum of arts careers. They are performers, visual artists, teaching artists, cultural workers, administrators, and more. Yet, historically, people with disabilities have not had access to the same career opportunities as people without disabilities. Reasons for this range from inaccessible facilities to disability benefit earning limitations to misconceptions about the skills and talents of people with disabilities. Through a variety of initiatives, the National Endowment for the Arts has worked to bridge this inequity, for the benefit of not only people with disabilities, but also America’s arts institutions and their patrons.

From Disability Philanthropy: One in four adult Americans and an estimated 1 billion people globally experience disability, but foundation funding for disability only represents approximately two cents of every foundation dollar awarded.

Foundation Giving for Disability: Priorities and Trends offers a first-ever, detailed examination of how U.S. foundations focus their support for disability communities. It serves as a resource for understanding the scale and priorities of current support and provides a baseline for measuring changes in funding going forward.

From the Ford Foundation: "Today, Borealis Philanthropy and the Ford Foundation announced the launch of the $1 million Disability x Tech Fund, the only national fund supporting disability-led groups working to bring about transformational change at the intersections of disability rights, justice and technology."

"The Disability x Tech Fund’s inaugural cohort of grantees is comprised of five disability-led organizations and two individual fellows addressing fieldwide harms that occur when people with disabilities are excluded from the development, deployment and governance of tech. Those include algorithmic bias that undermines access to necessary benefits, biometric surveillance that disproportionately punishes people with disabilities and barriers to participation in the digital economy, among others. The Fund’s grantees seek to address these harms through research, litigation strategies, accessible content creation and interpretation, and frontline community-developed open source platforms."

"At the age of seven, I was involved in a car accident that nearly amputated my left hand. Since the accident, I have journeyed from denying my disability to embracing it," said Molly Joyce for AFTA. "With this progression, I have frequently rethought concepts that are considered critical to what disability is and can mean, such as being weak, helpless, and incurable."

"Philanthropy is no stranger to the ways that ableism is deeply embedded in the perceptions and treatment of disabled people. Historically, many charitable foundations have solicited or made donations intending to 'cure' disabled people, based on the so-called 'medical model' of disability," said Sandy Ho and Jen Bokoff for Stanford Social Innovation Review. "While some of these organizations enabled access to services, much of their work framed disability in a way that contributed to notions that disabled people are in pitiable positions and are in need of fixing—also known as the 'charity model' of disability. Both the medical and charity models portray people with disabilities as objects rather than subjects, which can contribute to ableism and impede the achievement of and access to rights and justice."

From the Kenneth Rainin Foundation: "When artist Ana Teresa Fernández first stepped inside the main studio and gallery of Creativity Explored she discovered magic...What emerged from Ana’s initial visit was a collaborative project “Of Here From There | De Aquí Desde Allá,” which is featured in the above video. The project took place in 2019 and 2020 and engaged nearly 50 developmentally disabled artists to explore ideas of movement and migration. An immersive exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute in March 2020 brought a kaleidoscope of their expressive works to a wider public."

GIA is advocating for policies that increase the amount of assets that people with disabilities can hold while remaining eligible for public benefits because disabled artists – indeed, all workers – deserve to get paid for their work and to build savings, even when circumstances – like a disability – prevent them from working a conventional fixed role or schedule. GIA is advocating for disability justice for artists and for all as part of our valuing of intersectionality.

"For those of us who have participated in a half-century of powerful activism by people with disabilities, a familiar slogan summarizes our call to action: Nothing about us without us." Nikki Brown-Booker writes in the Winter 2022 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.