Why Does Philanthropy Keep Overlooking Disability Funding?

Foundation pledges to support disability-focused work haven’t led to significantly more investments. During National Disability Employment Awareness Month, let’s right that wrong.

By Richie Siegel

Timothy A. Clary, AFP via Getty Images

Manager Shray Campbell, left, and employees Josh and Noah, serve food at Café Joyeux in Manhattan. The French restaurant chain, staffed by people with autism and Down’s Syndrome, is setting up shop in a U.S. job market that is virtually closed to people with mental and cognitive disabilities.

Imagine you live in a community that has just one food bank serving people within a 50-mile radius. Despite its mission to address food insecurity, the food bank only distributes to soup kitchens and homeless shelters established when it first broke ground 10 years ago, even though the area’s population and needs have grown significantly. While the initial clients remain well served, none of the shelters, soup kitchens, and other social services launched in the last decade are eligible for its resources.

An equivalent experience is happening to disability-focused nonprofits when it comes to philanthropic funding. Disability was not historically a priority for philanthropy, so it was rarely part of foundations’ original strategic plans. And since it wasn’t a priority at the beginning, many funders now consider it too challenging to incorporate without compromising their existing grantees.

This catch-22 shows up in the data. Just one penny of every 10 grant-making dollars in the United States goes to disability rights and social justice, according to a 2023 report by the Disability & Philanthropy Forum. That’s a wildly inadequate level of investment for a group that makes up more than a quarter of the U.S. population.

Making matters worse, most of those funds support medical- and charity-focused organizations that view a person’s disability as a problem to be solved and often eradicated. The Disability & Philanthropy Forum study found that 94 percent of foundation giving for disability goes to medical treatment and support services. By contrast, just 4 percent seeks to advance disability rights by supporting social justice nonprofits that see the inaccessibility of society as a large part of what actually disables people.

A Time for Action

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month — a time to take stock of the state of disability inclusion and grant making within philanthropy. As president of Inevitable Foundation, which invests in disabled writers and filmmakers and uses storytelling to destigmatize disability and mental health, I’ve zeroed in on three primary areas where funders should direct their attention.

Acknowledge the false dichotomy. Since it was introduced in 2021, nearly 100 foundations have taken the Disability Inclusion Pledge, spearheaded by Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, former co-chair of the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion. The signatories made a commitment to include the disability community in their social justice and equity and inclusion efforts, and, critically, in their grant making by 2023.

At first, those involved in disability work were optimistic that the tide would finally turn on chronic underfunding. But the leaders of multiple disability organizations have told me their initial optimism has started to fade as funders regularly insist that they only have the capacity to invest in previously established funding areas — most of which never included disability.

The conversations, according to these leaders, go something like this: To support your organization, we would have to compromise or divest from our existing grantees who are working in racial justice, gender equity, and labor rights.

But this perspective doesn’t consider that disability intersects with nearly every issue area and identity. The vast majority (71 percent) of grants for U.S.-focused disability rights and social justice focus on disability only, failing to acknowledge how ableism intersects with racism, sexism, ageism, and other forms of discrimination.

To rectify this problem, grant makers should embrace what the Ford Foundation calls “disability-inclusive” grantmaking. That means incorporating disability into existing funding areas by intentionally including people with disabilities in the “design, activities, budget and/or implementation” of their programs. Such an approach is likely to produce far better results for all the populations grant makers care about — not just those with disabilities.

Give program officers more flexibility. Decades of underinvestment have left disability nonprofits without adequate resources. Among the 1,000 largest U.S. foundations, just 110 grants went to disability rights and social justice organizations in 2019, the latest year for which such data is available. The median size of those grants was $50,000, according to the Disability & Philanthropy Forum study. To address this shortfall, foundation program officers need more flexibility today, not in five years, to invest in these nonprofits.

But too many funders take years to learn about a potential new program area before making investments. I’ve heard from program officers who have been doing research and participating in internal training about disability for years, while their leadership team is still deciding whether to invest in this work. Meanwhile, mass-disabling events such as the Covid-19 pandemic have only increased the size of the disability community that would benefit from such investments.

Beth Brown, managing director for mental health and wellness at the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, recommends a different approach. She says foundations should recognize that grantmaking is itself one of the best forms of learning, since it provides real-world feedback on whether funding is making a difference. She calls this “investing in learning” as opposed to “developing a strategy and then investing.” It allows grant makers to learn faster and move money to nonprofits so they can get to work sooner.

Foundations that make multi-year grants also need to allow for some flexibility to respond to funding gaps. As beneficial as multi-year grants are to grantees, they make it even harder to incorporate disability funding when budgets are locked in for two to five years. One program officer recently shared that the foundation’s funding was fully allocated for the next three years, and suggested checking back near the end of the decade — critical lost time that will only compound the work and investments needed.

A simple solution is to set aside funds beyond multi-year grants to support new program areas or organizations that need help quickly. A path could then be put in place for these new grantees to receive multi-year funding if their work is producing the desired results.

Hire more people with disabilities. Recent research shows that disabled employees have higher levels of motivation, innovation, loyalty, problem-solving skills, and ability to identify creative solutions — all attributes bolstered by their experiences and challenges in and outside the workplace. Yet a 2022 Disability & Philanthropy Forum report found that only 37 percent of Disability Inclusion Pledge signatories had tried to recruit disabled staff members in the past year.

The nonprofit field as a whole has a long way to go when it comes to hiring people with disabilities, according to a new report from Candid. Roughly 15 percent of nonprofit staff and 10 percent of nonprofit leaders identify as having a disability, compared with 26 percent of the U.S. population. The problem is particularly evident at large organizations. Just 3 percent of nonprofits with budgets of more than $25 million have CEOs with disabilities, compared with 20 percent of those with budgets under $50,000.

Bringing people with disabilities onto grant maker’s program and executive teams is one important step toward what the Ford Foundation calls “disability-specific” grant making. Working in tandem with disability inclusive grant making, it ensures that dedicated funding goes to organizations that focus exclusively on disability issues and that this work is staffed and led by people with disabilities.

To hire and retain staff with disabilities, grant makers need to give them the tools to succeed within the bureaucracy and politics of private foundations. That means offering employment benefits that cover their full accessibility needs, such as ASL interpreters and other communications support, ample flexibility to accommodate unexpected medical situations, and policies that normalize remote work. Additionally, foundation boards should include trustees with disabilities to ensure that funding recommendations in this area aren’t overruled by non-disabled leaders.

In an interview with Candid, Sandy Ho, executive director of the Disability & Philanthropy Forum, put it this way: “When we, disabled people, are supported by an inclusive workplace culture, it means our lived experiences and communities are reflected in the work,” and “our collective perspectives are valued within an organization.” Workplace policies and cultures, she noted, need to “support the career trajectories of future leaders and CEOs with disabilities."

Grant makers often tell me that disability is not part of their strategy. My response to them: If your work focuses on improving the lives of people on this planet — the stated purpose for most funders — then disabled people are part of your strategy. You just haven’t made room for them yet.

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