Inside Philanthropy: How the Inevitable Foundation Is Cultivating Underrepresented Disabled Screenwriters

By Mike Scutari

In 2013, Marisa Torelli-Pedevska began working at a residential summer camp for teens and adults with developmental disabilities in Rhinebeck, New York called Camp Ramapo. It was an eye-opening experience for Torelli-Pedevska, who had chronic illness since high school but had never interacted with a majority-disabled community prior to her time at the camp.

A few years later, Torelli-Pedevska met Richie Siegel, whose sister was attending the camp, and the pair soon discovered they both had experience in the entertainment field. Torelli-Pedevska had wanted to become a production assistant, but her condition eventually forced her to pivot to the less physically demanding field of screenwriting. Siegel, meanwhile, had studied filmmaking, and rarely saw programs or movies that captured his unique experience of growing up with a sibling with a developmental disability.

He wasn’t alone. According to recent studies, while 20% of the U.S. population has a disability, less than 2% of on-screen characters and 0.7% of writers are disabled.

Looking to make an impact, the pair founded the Inevitable Foundation to address the barriers to entry that disabled mid-level screenwriters face in the industry. The foundation’s offerings include a talent sourcing service, a fellowship program, mentorship opportunities and advocacy. “We bring resources to the table that minimize or eliminate the ability for the industry to make excuses,” Siegel told me.

The foundation launched on January 1, 2021, and has received support from the Ford Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Disability Inclusion Fund, Netflix, Amazon and AMC Warner Media. Torelli-Pedevska attributes its success to its highly targeted mission. “It’s not just disability, it’s not just disability in Hollywood, it’s not just disabled writers—it’s mid-level disabled writers, which is so specific that funders see exactly how we’re creating change.”

A focus on mid-level disabled writers

As leaders of a new organization with limited resources, Torelli-Pedevska and Siegel’s first order of business was to identify ways to generate maximum impact in a landscape where other funders were already working to address the disability representation gap in the entertainment field.

They conducted a landscape analysis and found that existing players primarily focused on casting disabled actors and on advocacy. Siegel considered efforts toward representation in casting an “incredibly important pursuit, but a relatively late intervention when you actually look at how films and programs get created.” Driven by the belief that they needed to intervene much earlier in the development pipeline, Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska turned their attention to disabled writers.

The pair were pleased to discover organizations supporting “baby” or “emerging” writers who were just starting to break into the industry. Again, Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska considered this support a worthwhile endeavor, but also acknowledged that it can take a long time for these writers to get into positions of power, given the intense level of competition and churn in the industry.

Rather than setting their sights on the large number of novice writers who were already receiving support from other organizations, they zeroed in on writers in the middle of the developmental pipeline, where there’s relatively less competition. The goal? Propel those writers to the next level.

The Screenwriting Fellowship

So how does the Inevitable Foundation help give these writers that extra push? Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska’s landscape analysis found that the 0.7% of disabled writers working today generally met two of three criteria—they’ve previously worked on a show or a movie, they have an agent or manager, or they’re in the Writers Guild of America (WGA).

Mid-career disabled writers can get an agent or join the WGA without the foundation’s assistance. The organization’s real value derives from its ability to give mid-career screenwriters the opportunity to find their voice, match them with work opportunities, and help them assume positions of power within the industry.

The Inevitable Foundation’s flagship offering is its Screenwriting Fellowship, which provides mid-career writers with a grant and mentoring workshops with successful disabled writers. The foundation issued a call for applications last April and received over 500 submissions. Fifty-seven percent of applicants identified as female or non-binary, half identified as people of color, and 45% identified as LGBTQIA.

These statistics underscore the foundation’s approach to intersectionality. “This is so important for us because disability is often left out of the diversity conversation—both within entertainment as well as, historically, within philanthropy,” Siegel said, noting that his team makes a concerted effort to remind producers that “disability is not an exclusive identity; it impacts all of the other forms of identity in various kinds of ways.”

The foundation formed committees of disabled storytellers to review applications. “We wanted to make sure that there were a series of checkpoints throughout the process so it wasn’t just a matter of, ‘send a script, and then we tell you if you won,’” Torelli-Pedevska said. If, for example, an applicant introduced a disabled character in the screenplay, committee members would ask questions like, “‘Is this a story that needs to be told right now?’”

Last November, the foundation announced its Fall 2021 Screenwriting Fellows—Shaina Ghuraya and writing partners Greg Machlin and Aoife Baker. Ghuraya and the team of Machlin and Baker received a $40,000 grant and access to six months of bespoke mentorship, workshops and networking opportunities. They joined Shani Am. Moore and Kalen Feeney, the program’s spring 2021 Fellows. The foundation is currently accepting applications for its spring 2022 fellowship. Click here for more information.

Sourcing talent

Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska also found that producers want to hire experienced disabled writers, but frequently claim that they don’t know where to find them. The more they looked into the issue, they realized that producers’ frustration wasn’t due to a lack of information—there was no shortage of databases full of highly qualified candidates.

Rather, the problem was that there were too many such databases, and that the information wasn’t organized in an effective or intuitive manner. “Sorting through 300 names in a database is really difficult,” Siegel said. “It puts the burden on the person trying to make the hire to find the needle in the haystack.”

In response, the foundation created the Content Development Concierge, which provides Hollywood decision-makers with a roster of 20 to 30 mid-level writers and their writing samples and personal backstory. “It’s a really curated list and there’s no way to apply for it,” Siegel said. This targeted approach enables producers looking for, say, a comedy writer, to identify a highly qualified candidate without having to pore over hundreds of candidates across multiple spreadsheets. “It’s a low-lift, high-impact way to solve this underrepresented talent sourcing problem,” Siegel said.

The service also builds networks between writers and showrunners and executives. “You have to be good at what you do, but you also have to know people,” Torelli-Pedevska told me. “So that’s a big piece of what we’re trying to do — connecting the dots so disabled writers can have these important networking opportunities.”

Looking ahead

Another finding from Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska’s landscape analysis was the extent to which physical barriers to access stymied disabled writers’ development. “If you’re a wheelchair user, that means being able to get into the buildings you’re working in,” Siegel said. “If you’re deaf or hard of hearing, it’s having access to interpreter transcriptions. You’re just looking for the opportunity to have the opportunity to get the job.”

The pair found that these barriers remain in place due to the predictable perception that addressing them would be too expensive. Four months ago, the foundation set out to test this thesis and get a better understanding of how these barriers affect disabled talent. The result, a study called “The Cost of Accommodation,” found that these cost concerns are wildly overstated. It encourages the industry to make the requisite investments to create a more equitable playing field. The foundation will publish the report in the coming weeks.

Equipped with this research and experiences of the past year, the folks at the Inevitable Foundation want to continually educate funders—especially those from the corporate world—about the importance of supporting this work. “We’re at this matrix of the disability space, the entertainment space, and the philanthropy space,” Siegel said. “It all mixes together, and I think that’s what’s resonating in multiple circles.”

Of course, grantmakers have limited resources and have to make trade-offs. For Siegel and Torelli-Pedevska, this means reminding funders that supporting disabled writers doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but instead complements broader efforts to build equity and support diverse constituencies.

Looking ahead, the team is developing an Emerging Screenwriting Fellowship to bridge the gap between writers just starting out and mid-career writers. The foundation’s also building out its internal infrastructure to support projected growth throughout 2022 and beyond. “It’s cool to be a year old,” Siegel said. “There’s been a lot of momentum, and we’re excited to see where we’ll be at the end of this year, given the ambitious level of impact that we want to have.”