How Inevitable’s Co-Founders Turned a Personal Mission Into a Powerful Nonprofit
Marisa Torelli-Pedevska and Richie Siegel on the ways their own experiences shaped the nonprofit dedicated to tackling Hollywood’s disability representation and hiring challenges: "Sometimes people don't realize how personal it is."
Inevitable Foundation co-founders Marisa Torelli-Pedevska and Richie Siegel. Credit: Jason Armond/The Los Angeles Times
By Abbey White
“Sometimes people don't realize how personal it is to me and my experience — that part of why we started Inevitable was what I was going through at the time,” says Marisa Torelli-Pedevska, Inevitable Foundation’s co-founder and head of writing programs. “It wasn't like we picked a random thing. I was graduating from my MFA program in screen and TV writing, and was really thinking about this. I'm a disabled writer, and I didn’t know what the industry was going to look like for me.”
That was back in the fall of 2020. Torelli-Pedevska was gearing up to graduate — and isolating in New York amid the pandemic — when she and fellow Inevitable Foundation co-founder Richie Siegel began conceptualizing an organization dedicated to destigmatizing disability in Hollywood.
In the three years since, the foundation has supported more than 100 disabled writers in Hollywood through five programs, three advocacy campaigns, three research reports and over $1 million in direct granting.
The foundation’s original staff of two — and board of three, including Rebekah Kondrat — has grown to nine full-time employees working across communications, research, fundraising, creative development and operations, with the entire team benefiting from disability-forward workplace policies. The board now also includes Lauren Ridloff, Brandon Sonnier, Andraéa LaVant, and Sinéad Burke.
It’s all been fueled by Torelli-Pedevska and Siegel’s deeply personal connection to their work, the community Inevitable Foundation supports — disabled writers and filmmakers — and the industry allies they initially leaned into, who are still supporting the organization as it continues to grow and pave new pathways for disabled talent.
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Like Torelli-Pedevska, Siegel is not unfamiliar with the entertainment industry. His professional trajectory began at an arts high school in Michigan where he studied his childhood passion of film, and was involved with around 30 shorts before realizing, “I don't want to be a director. I don't want to be a writer. Those for me were just a means to the end to be making a thing,” he says. “And I love making things.”
In college, he pivoted to studying retail, fashion and consumer goods, and after graduating, launched and ran a boutique consulting firm for around six years. “It was me going to business school, in terms of understanding the fundamentals of marketing, operations and strategy,” he recalls. “But I came out of that at the end of 2020 bored. I wanted to do something more mission-driven.”
He and Torelli-Pedevska had already been friends when they decided to team-up, the two connecting via a summer camp in upstate New York, where Torelli-Pedevska was employed, and Siegel’s sister, who is disabled, attended. Torelli-Pedevska identifies as part of the disability community, with Siegel’s connection familial, providing him with a different perspective on navigating ableist systems.
“The way that my sister moves through the world and communicates is normal to me and our family, but the second you step outside that bubble, the looks and the stares start,” he says. “Growing up, I saw how people don't know how to interact with my sister and what to make of her and her potential.”
Navigating spaces that can struggle to understand you, your potential and what you need to reach it is not unfamiliar to Torelli-Pedevska. The writer and Inevitable Foundation co-founder says while in school, she relied on disability support services for accommodations as she worked towards her degrees, but it proved difficult to find more holistic support in places where there were fewer people publicly identifying as disabled.
As she and Siegel were still conceptualizing the nonprofit, Torelli-Pedevska also experienced a health-related incident. Still in school, she had to deftly navigate her course load and scholarship requirements, “pushing myself really hard to do that,” she recalls. “I realized that when you get sick, you can lose everything you worked so hard for.”
That experience followed Torelli-Pedevska into an early career development program, which doubled as her first industry job. “It was really cool, but it was really inaccessible, so I ended up leaving the program — partly because I wanted to be a writer but partly because it was so hard on my body,” she says. “As part of my job, I had to stand in the back of a set for three hours. I once tried to sit on one of the stools there and got in trouble because sitting might make us look lazy or like we’re not working. It was an interesting introduction to the industry.”
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At the time Inevitable Foundation launched in January 2021, the industry was focused on addressing its lack of disability representation mostly through front-of-camera solutions. But as Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska were beginning to map out their plans for the nonprofit, the two quickly realized those existing efforts weren’t getting at the root of the larger issue.
“We were noticing so much pressure on the actors with the industry very focused on the on-screen piece,” says Torelli-Pedevska. “And there wasn't really any push at the time to get more disabled voices in the writers room.”
“The existing attention was going towards casting and advocacy as two interventions, but the problems that are trying to be solved by something like casting are actually story problems. The roles were not being written at all, and if they were written, they were probably pretty inauthentic and not created by disabled people,” adds Siegel. “It all goes back to the storytellers, but there was no one supporting them, investing in them, really cultivating those relationships.”
So in the early months of 2021, after the two had formally announced their organization, Siegal and Torelli-Pedevska began talking with disabled writers and other creatives, as well as talent representation, disability activists and nonprofits already working at the intersection of disability and entertainment.
What they discovered was that addressing Hollywood’s underrepresentation issue would also require responding to where there was the greatest need: funding for storytellers. The result was the Accelerate Fellowship, the foundation’s flagship program supporting professional level film and TV writers.
“Right away we noticed a financial need,” says Torelli-Pedevska. “Being a writer is expensive. You wait months or years to get your first paid job. Being disabled is also expensive, which I know from my monthly medical bills. So for us, starting with a huge grant made sense. If we're going to support people, we have to put our money where our mouth is, and support them with significant financial grants that meet or even exceed what's already out there.”
Focusing on more established talent also meant they could help disabled writers get into positions of power in film and TV’s writing pipelines more quickly, resulting in more change sooner.
“Being a writer, you know how long it takes to get to that place of power — 10, 15, sometimes 20 years,” explains Torelli-Pedevska. “If we want to get more people into those upper levels, it's taking the people who are pretty significantly far along and have infrastructure behind them that's not just us — managers, talent agents or they've written on a show — and helping them take their career to the next level.”
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Inevitable has since launched three more programs, beginning with Elevate Collective, which offers smaller $5,000 grants to disabled creatives. At the end of 2021, it launched the Concierge — a personalized service connecting showrunners and creative executives to disabled writers for development and staffing — and in May 2024, opened applications for its inaugural Visionary Fellowship, which gives disabled filmmakers a $55,000 grant to produce a short film.
Amid several years of industry disruption, a pendulum swing of commitments to inclusion and equity, and an ongoing employment climate that can push disabled writers out due to health or inaccessibility challenges, the nonprofit has established several funds, including the Disabled Consultants Futures Fund and Emergency Relief Fund, to help advance and retain talent. It has also produced several major advocacy campaigns — Disability Is Diversity, Hire Disabled Writers, and Greenlight Disability — with hundreds of billboard placements in over 16 cities, to elevate their mission within Hollywood.
Their most recent campaign also arrived alongside the organization’s first consumer research, produced via the foundation’s Research Institute. It also conducts impact-focused data projects, like the Cost of Accommodations Report, aimed at eliminating industry excuses.
That’s alongside the community of collaborators and supporters the foundation’s built over three years with the likes of the Writers Guild of America West’s Disabled Writers Committee, The Blacklist, Easterseals Disability Film Challenge, Humanitas, Caring Across Generations, the ATX Festival, Starz, Disney, Netflix, Lionsgate, and more.
Inevitable Foundation’s approach to addressing Hollywood’s narrative and hiring issues is something that Siegel says will continue to evolve and expand, even as it remains focused on addressing the talent pipeline and daily working realities for disabled writers and filmmakers.
“We knew we didn't want to do all the other things Hollywood was doing because they were being done and they weren't working, in our opinion,” Siegel says of the organization’s approach. “If you look at all the data, it was barely changing, so we’ve said, ‘Let’s try something different.’”
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