Inevitable Foundation co-founders join Pillar Alessandra's On The Page Podcast

Pilar Alessandra: Welcome to On The Page. This is the podcast that answers all of your questions about the craft and business of screenwriting. My name is Pilar Alessandra, and I'm the instructor and script consultant here at On The Page. Joining me today is Richie Siegel and Marisa Torelli-Pedevska. Hello, you guys.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Hello.

Richie Siegel: Hello.

Pilar Alessandra: So nice to have you here. I'm going to tell you about Richie and Marisa. They are co-founders of the Inevitable Foundation, a nonprofit that's funding and mentoring the next generation of disabled screenwriters. Richie's work has been in marketing and research and he's a filmmaker by training. Marisa is an MFA Screenwriting candidate at USC and a recipient of the Jay Roach Endowed Scholarship Award and the Sloan Screenwriting Grant. Let me tell you a little bit about Inevitable Foundation. I think it's super cool. It is a public charity dedicated to closing the disability representation gap in film and TV. Its mission is to fund and mentor professional disabled screenwriters, while building an unrivaled content development pipeline for TV and film and its vision is a world where people with disabilities are valued, both on and off screen. Such a pleasure to have you here, you guys. Thank you.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Thanks for having us.

Pilar Alessandra: I am curious what motivated this? How and why did you start this foundation?

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Richie, I'm trying to think of where to begin in our story because a lot of things had to happen in order for Rich and I to even meet and for the foundation to come into existence. Richie, I'll let you tell a little bit of the beginning of the story.

Richie Siegel: Why don't you talk about Ramapo a little bit? And then that will segue it into everything.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Okay. Yes. It all starts with Ramapo. Yeah. Anyone who knows me knows about Ramapo because it's something I talk about all the time and it's been such a massive part of my life. Ramapo is a residential summer camp in Rhinebeck, New York, where I've worked for the past eight summers and lived for the past eight summers. I actually just got back a few weeks ago. They run a residential summer camp for children, teens, and adults with disabilities, specifically developmental disabilities. I work with teens and adults. My campers are the same age as me. I think just working there and living there for such a big portion of my life influenced the way that I watched TV and movies and questioned what I saw and who I saw and, really, who I didn't see. I didn't see a lot of people like my friends from Ramapo.

I think that pushed me slowly to become a storyteller and just tell stories that looked like the world that I knew and I was seeing. It was a subconscious thing, I think. I don't think I jumped into it years ago, being like, "Oh, I'm going to tell stories of underrepresented communities." It just naturally happened. Richie and I met because Richie's sister is actually a camper and a friend of mine from Ramapo. We met there and we've been there together since the very beginning. That's how we got connected.

Richie Siegel: Yeah. I think in terms of the genesis of the organization, Marisa talks a lot about how Ramapo sparked her interest in writing stories that just included disabled characters in them, not because that was what the plot was or anything, but just because they're in communities and therefore, the people in our community should be in our stories. Marisa was on that path, and I come from the consumer goods space and was running a consulting firm for the last seven years. At some point last year, I kind of was looking for a change and was looking to do something more mission-driven and so, we started talking a lot about her work. We just spent last fall, really, reading up on the disability representation gap, broadly. As many people might know, disabled people make up 20 plus percent of the population here in the country, over 15% of the population globally. It's 60 million people in America. Over a billion, internationally.

But if you look at film and TV, only 2% of characters on-screen have disabilities. Of that 2%, 95% are inauthentically cast and played by able-bodied actors, and less than 1% of writers in the writers' rooms have disabilities. The exact stat for the Writers Guild of America is 0.7%, so you have, basically, a 28 times gap between the amount of disabled writers working in the industry and the amount of disabled people living in this country. When we looked at that set of statistics, we got really stuck on the writers part because any basic understanding of film or television [says] it all starts with the story. So our question was, "Who is focused on solving this problem, really, at a story level?" We spent probably a month or so just looking around and doing a lot of research. There are some other organizations that do good work in this space but they do tend to focus on casting or advocacy, really, as their entry points. We felt that you had to go back to the beginning of where the actual creative process starts if you really wanted to systematically solve this problem.

That was really the insight or hypothesis that led us to start the foundation. We officially began in January of this year and created our fellowship program, which is a $25,000 grant, along with a lot of bespoke mentorship workshops, advice that we give to these incredibly talented, professional, disabled screenwriters. We have a pretty big focus on content development so we think the studios are in a much better place in terms of staffing and a lot of the programs that they're running internally to help people really climb that ladder. But our goal that we often talk about is we want to help create the first openly-disabled person to ascend to the level of a Shonda Rhimes or Ryan Murphy or Greg Berlanti or so forth. Once that happens, the path is really clear of how disabled writers can really move up to that level. But if you look right now in the industry, the vast majority of them are really at the upper-low level, lower-mid level. There's this glass ceiling that it's very, very hard to break out of at mid level. That is not a question of talent or skills but really one of barriers and relationships that often keep disabled writers out of the rooms where everything is happening. It's pretty focused on development, pretty focused on breaking these barriers down.

We take relatively concentrated bets where we'll have four fellows this year. We'll probably grow the number quite a bit next year. But it's a lot of money and a lot of time and resources to try and help, basically, create these winners and help them break through the system, which you know probably better than we do, is not the easiest industry in the world, and it's not the fastest in the world. And so, it's a very firm, I guess, holistic focus we take with the program. That's been the bulk of the work. There's some other little things we're doing around it, which we're happy to talk about but the fellowship is our bread and butter, to say the least.

Pilar Alessandra: I have to say something about the fellowship because when I saw your recipients, I got really excited. Kalen Feeney—she is a longtime student of mine, and I'm currently working on Story to Script with Shani Am. Moore. I just want to congratulate you. It makes a lot of sense. They are so talented and so creative, so well done with your fellows.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: They're amazing.

Pilar Alessandra: Yeah. You had created a bunch of statistics. Now, the stats that I saw do go back to 2018 but it's hard to believe that the needle has moved that much in terms of, as you said, that on-screen, among the top 10 TV shows in 2018, 88% didn't feature any authentic characters with disabilities. And among the top 100 films in 2019, 2.3% of all speaking characters had disabilities. 2.3%. So this idea of not only helping writers with disabilities, it’s also bringing better portrayals to the screen, yes?

Richie Siegel: Yeah. It's an interesting balance. When we started, we had this dual mission of fund and mentor disabled screenwriters and increase the number of disabled characters that are authentically created but also portrayed on screen. What we found kept happening was we'd go and talk to executives and they go, "Hey, this is nice, but I don't have any disability stories that I need you guys for right now. I'll let you know." What we kept finding was that this is not unique to underrepresented groups, but we noticed consistently in the disability communities that people assume that disabled writers only want to write about their disability. It's the plot, it's the characters, it's the scene, it's the everything. So much of what we try to do is say that our fellows can write about whatever they want. People tend to write about their identities in some form, but we try to really not pigeonhole them. This spring, we removed the whole “increase the number of disabled characters” from the mission. No one ever asked about it again which was really interesting. It's just interesting in a lot of different ways. We think that will be like a trickle down effect of the work we're doing but I would say it's not an explicit focus, given just that pigeonholing that can consistently happen, unfortunately.

Pilar Alessandra: If you want somebody in the writers' room to say, "Why isn't this person in a wheelchair?" Why can't this person be in a wheelchair, it might be somebody who's in a wheelchair. It's that idea that we only see ourselves in characters. You need more diversity in the room so that people can say, "Yeah. Hello. Look at this cast that we've got here. Look at that character. We just brought this person in. Why this? Why not that?" I would imagine.

Richie Siegel: Go ahead, Marisa.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: No, definitely. I think that there's also this thing that happens when disabled writers try and get jobs, people will say, "Well, we don't have any shows with disabled characters in them for you to write," as if they could only write on shows with disabled characters. Well, how are you going to have people writing these characters if you're not getting any disabled people in the room? It's this merry-go-round thing. Someone just needs to make the decision and say, "Yes, we need disabled writers in the room to write these characters." That's how they're going to get on screen.

Pilar Alessandra: Oh, sure. Go ahead.

Richie Siegel: Sorry, to just add one more thing. When we were doing a lot of our research on this in late fall of last year, it was very interesting how much pressure there is on the casting process to solve this. If you know anything about casting, you know that casting is taking place eight to 14 weeks before principal photography. The story's basically locked at that point. It's so downstream in the process and we've talked to a lot of really amazing casting directors and they also are like, "Why is this all on us to figure this out?" I think, also to your question and to what Marisa said, part of the work we're trying to do is almost this preliminary step of, before we get to the point where a casting director will take a disabled actor and cast them in a non-disabled role just because that should happen, we do need more disabled characters basically hard-coded into scripts to create more of those opportunities. Of course, we hope that falls away at some point but it just feels like the industry skipped a step in a lot of ways and went right to casting to solve this and it just didn't make sense. It's not even like we're the biggest experts in the world on entertainment or film or television. It just seemed like a very basic first principles premise of you have to start with the story and if you start to solve it from there, better things will happen, all the way up to getting the projects on screen.

Pilar Alessandra: Now, Marisa, as a writer who just received your fancy awards, the Jay Roach Endowed Scholarship Award, you have a disabled character at the center of that script, yes?

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: The one that won the Jay Roach? Yes. There are multiple disabled characters on that script and something that I really try and do with my stories, and especially in that script, is have more than one character with the same disability because then it's not tokenizing this character and it's also showing how different everyone is. I mean, people are so different from each other. I think a lot of people, especially people who don't know anyone, maybe with autism or whatever the disability is, have this assumption that, "Oh, it's like a personality," as if being autistic is a personality. There are limitless personalities. It's just like anybody else. I really try and show that with any script, no matter what disability the character has.

Pilar Alessandra: I'm glad you brought that up. I do think that writers who don't have disabilities are scared. They're scared to represent characters with disabilities because they're worried it's not in their lane. They're worried they're going to do the wrong thing. They're going to represent. How can you reassure writers who don't have disabilities that this is something they should do and that it's easy to do it?

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Definitely. I think about it as a character first. I think that people can get so stuck on the fact that the character is disabled that they're thinking about it as a disabled character and not just a character with so many layers like any other character. I'd also say, try and write something that you connect with. For example, that story is inspired by people that I know in my life. They weren't completely made up and so, I think it was natural for me to write those characters just because it felt very personal. I didn't say, "Oh, I want to write a story with a lot of disabled main characters." It didn't happen like that. I said, "I want to tell this story," and these people I know in my life inspired that story. But I-

Pilar Alessandra: So first all, expand your life a little.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Expand your life, yes!

Pilar Alessandra: Expand your friend group a little bit. Get to know more people so that you don't go, "I don't know anybody." Well, maybe that's your problem. Let's start there. And then like what you said—I like your answer. Yeah, these are characters. These are personalities that just happen to have disabilities. And every time I read something where somebody has put some physical trait first, whether it's disability or whether it's race, it's so offensive. It's like, "Really? That's defining the person?" What about their personality? What are they actually like beyond that? I'm so glad that you're saying that.

Richie Siegel: The other thing I would just add from a macro level is I think we're really strong believers that the time is now for disabled people to be creating and centering themselves in their own stories. If you look historically, you could think of this in three waves. The first wave was, no one wrote about these characters. It didn't exist in film and entertainment. The second wave was, you had, call it loved ones and/or other acquaintances writing these stories about disabled people but disabled people were not creating them. We're now in this third wave. I don't know how many years into it we are but I think we're early in it where it's disabled people writing stories about the community and the people that they know and love. I think it's really important that that is always the priority.

At the same time, there's nuance to this which is, even if we got disabled writers to 20% of the Writers Guild of America, equal with the percent of the population that is disabled, you still have 80% of the population that actually has a role to play helping to not just close the gap, but actually go beyond 20%. Because, why do we need to stop at where the population is? We should be able to have more characters and so forth. It's a really interesting thing and it's not necessarily a binary outcome but I think we're both really strong believers that non-disabled people should probably not be writing tons of stories about disabled people without either hiring writers in their writers' room—consulting is a very interesting rabbit hole which we can talk about but we're pretty conflicted about that, I think, as an organization, given how often it can actually cannibalize roles for disabled writers when people are hired at non-union, et cetera, to start consulting. It's not a binary, which I think is really important for us to stress, but we're trying to get people jobs and those people are disabled writers. It's really important that, I think, disabled writers are part of the process of any of these stories at the earliest possible point. Because what we often do find happens is, again, the casting eight weeks before principal photography, you hire a disabled person from a team of non-disabled writers and say, "Hey, can you check box all this, rubber stamp it?" And they go, "Hey, there are so many issues with that." And then people go, "Oh, well. We're eight weeks away. Sorry. I got to keep moving. Thanks for...here's 250 bucks." There's a lot here but both sides have to work together to solve the problem. We think it's time to prioritize disabled writers in this process, and that's for the sake of the representation, for the sake of job creation. Lots of reasons to do that.

Pilar Alessandra: That's a good point to get back to what your foundation actually does, which is trying to empower disabled screenwriters, not just talking about how non-disabled screenwriters can write for them. The money side of it. I would imagine there's the bias in the writing room. Bias is always the thing that gets in the way of everything. But then are there any physical barriers on sets, writers' rooms, things like that, that are also keeping people from hiring because they go, "Oh, I just don't know how we would accommodate that"? Is that also an issue?

Richie Siegel: I think accommodation is definitely a piece of the puzzle but I also don't think that it's the full thing. An example would be Kalen Feeney, one of our spring 2021 fellows who's incredible, is deaf. She requires an—It's actually not true. She doesn't require an interpreter. For people to communicate with Kalen, they often need to procure an interpreter, so that costs money. That can often cost $60, $70, $80 an hour. It's not like buying a ramp. It's not a one-time cost. It's an ongoing cost. We're actually working on some research right now to really drill down into what do accommodations cost, what percent of the budget are they actually. For example, compared to how much a show spends on craft services, let's look at these comparatively because it feels so much more expensive and a bigger deal than maybe it actually is.

That said, interpreters cost money, and that's a real line item in a budget and so I think a lot of times when you have deaf or hard of hearing writers that need some sort of communication access service, like an ASL interpreter, that is one reason—that's a way that someone can get to a no, faster. "Oh, it's going to cost this much more just to have them be able to do their job." I'm paraphrasing and impersonating an executive or a producer or so forth, in saying that. At the same time, I don't think it's purely an accommodations thing. I think so much of it is also just relationships and so forth. It's the rooms you're in, the events you go to, the things you have access to. You can trace this all the way back to the core statistic that disabled people are twice as likely to be unemployed than non-disabled people, that it costs 28% more to live a disabled life than a non-disabled life. That has nothing to do with the industry whatsoever. That's just core, realistic stats of what it is like to live a disabled life right now.

I think that you could go down a rabbit hole of looking at all the systems. I would say accommodations are a big piece but I think so much of it is also just fear. It's people not knowing other disabled people, not thinking they're capable of doing the work, that they have equal talent. There’s no accommodation to solve that. That's a stigma and a psychological thing more than it is anything else. But, Marisa, I'm curious of your thoughts too.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Yeah. The only thing that I would add to that is one of the reasons we focus so much on content development is in order to "climb up the ladder” on the staffing side, there's this barrier that is entry-level jobs. A lot of these entry level jobs, whether it's in a writers' room or a PA on a set, they're really inaccessible. They require really long hours. I mean, I can speak a little bit from personal experience of my entry-level jobs out of college. They require long hours. They require a lot of physical exertion, which is not accessible for everybody. I think they just really don't take into account that some people can't do that. And for me, personally, as someone with chronic illnesses and physical disabilities that limit, physically, what I can do especially when it comes to working that many hours and physically exerting myself, it's not always realistic. I think that these entry-level jobs are like this gate right into the industry. I mean, how are you going to get more disabled people into the industry if that first level isn't even open to them? And so, I think we really wanted to focus on content development, because it's almost a way to come in from a different place while also creating your own content and telling your own stories but not necessarily having to climb up the "ladder."

Pilar Alessandra: Don't you think this would make a better work situation for everyone too? If people had breaks and sit down time and better hours, and all of these things that you have to either muscle through or pretend it's okay? We could, instead of, as you said, “accommodations”,  changing these rooms may work, just holistically. It might work for everybody. I always listen to podcasts like this, and I think, "Ooh, I haven't thought about this. I've never thought about this." Kalen was a really big lesson for me, as a teacher. Because when she told me an interpreter would be needed, it wasn't an ask. It was an expectation. I really admired that and at the same time, was like, "Oh, what? What? Huh? What do I do?” And so, I was looking into it. And yes, the cost was tough and also a certain licensing of interpreters too. It's not like your buddy who learned sign language on YouTube which, of course, was my first go-to. I reached out to a friend after this and said, "Isn't there a creative arts organization that has interpreters for deaf writers?" That just seemed like such a no-brainer to me.

Richie Siegel: We're building this right now.

Pilar Alessandra: I love that. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's great. Again, it's a no brainer. It makes sense. So Is that part of where the foundation is eventually going to go? Is it where you are right now?

Richie Siegel: Kalen... It's funny to talk about her because she's not here, but I think... has taught us all so much in a lot of different ways. The whole premise of communication access, I think, has been a big through line. We, by default, cover all the interpreters for any meetings she has with us or internal sessions. But what we found consistently is that there is this gap where in general meetings and professional development settings, such as working with you, going to networking events, there is, generally speaking, no person on the other side of the table who is able or willing to pay for that cost often. There's a huge power imbalance. Working with you is very different than working with USC. A college has ample resources to hire interpreters versus if you're running a sole-proprietor business or whatever it is, as an individual consultant, it's real money, and we can acknowledge that. It’s real money.

We're in the middle right now of building out a fund that will provide free interpreters and other communication access services to deaf and hard-of-hearing screenwriters and showrunners in those sorts of settings. At the same time, this is not for studios and production companies to use to hire interpreters for their productions. That is a cost they need to bear and we will not be funding that. This is specifically for incredible deaf and hard-of-hearing writers and up-and-coming writers to take advantage of this. We're really focused on filling a gap and I think this will be our first pilot program of how do we tackle an accommodation or a barrier that we actually think we can help really solve and I can imagine this will happen in a lot of other areas. But in a sense, communication access, given this ongoing hourly cost of it, is probably one of the largest costs out there in terms of accommodations.

You can buy a ramp. You own the ramp, It's a one-time cost. There are a lot of other things like that but these are these ongoing variable costs that make it just more expensive for everyone. Interpreters often have a lot of training. There is even a subset that has entertainment expertise. There's a subset of that that is on set. There are all these different levels of it. And depending on what the situation is, it requires different expertise. We are building that fund now and the plan is to have all the studios and production companies, the streamers, the agencies, and the management companies, all pay into that because we're, in a sense, filling a gap that they should be filling, without subjecting everyone to their expense reimbursement situations which are generally quite cumbersome. We're working on that right now but a lot of people have said, "Why does this not exist?" Hopefully, we're going to bring that to existence.

Pilar Alessandra: Thank you. I think that the work that you're doing is so good but it's also so practical.

Richie Siegel: I think there've been a lot of moments where we're like, "Why does this not exist? This is seemingly quite obvious." I think that's happened enough that you start to go, "Okay. I think we're onto something," when that happens. But yeah, we know that feeling.

Pilar Alessandra: I think so much of what we thought “wasn't normal,” whether it's a representation of gay characters, has become more—nobody blinks. The more disabled writers there are in the room, the more disabled characters are going to be on screen, the more this conversation will become moot, I would hope. It was something that you actually wrote, which was, "If we achieve our vision, this organization will no longer need to exist." I thought that was pretty cool.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: That's the goal, to self-destruct.

Pilar Alessandra: But you did just start. For writers who are listening and would like to apply for the fellowship, what do they do? Where do they go, and what are you requiring?

Richie Siegel: Definitely. We have, I would say, a relatively straightforward application process. The one thing I would add, which is super important for us, is we do not charge application fees and have made a commitment to never charge them. We believe really strongly that we should not be taxing this community for an opportunity that they desperately, frankly, deserve. There is no cost to apply. There's a short eligibility questionnaire which asks a few questions. After you fill that out, assuming you're eligible—I think 99.9% of people who apply are eligible—you'll get access to the full application. That asks a bunch of multiple choice questions about your name, demographic, past experience. You submit a writing sample—a 30 minutes, 60 minute or a feature. You submit a resume, a biography, a personal statement about two different questions that we ask and then, a list of other projects that you're working on. That's really it.

We've done a lot of work to build this really thorough but also really involved application process where Marisa and I really see ourselves as more facilitators of it and we actually have different committees of all disabled storytellers and screenwriters that are reading the projects and actually picking the fellows. That's been super important to us to take, in formal terms, what is called a participatory grant-making model and really put it in the hands of these incredible people in the disability community to actually pick the fellows and really have some really fascinating and meaningful discussions about applications, about the representation in the projects. I think Marisa and I learn a lot every time we witness those as well. We had to build, basically, a process from scratch though because we want to both assess the maturity of the representation within each project, as well as the candidate specifically, given our fellowship is really for a person more than any specific project because it's such a long-term bet on basically trying to help someone build a thriving career.

Those learnings have been really interesting but it took a good amount of thought, I think, to find a process that we don't ask what your medical condition is. It's really more identity-based. It's about the person. I think it also just delivers a level of respect of we're going to treat these people like real, talented writers because they are talented writers and we don't need to get into anything more specific or question anything. There's a level of trust in it, I guess, that I think is really important as well.

Pilar Alessandra: So when it comes down to the actual samples, you're looking at samples in terms of the storytelling, the character work, the dialogue. So they still have to be excellent samples, right?

Richie Siegel: Yeah. This program is probably 70% business-focused, 30% writing-focused. The basic skill sets of how to write and tell stories have to be a given before you come into the program. But to your point, the first step of our process is we read the first five pages of every script, like an executive would. Do we want to keep reading? Yes or no. That's the only question. You said “realistic” before and I think we really pride ourselves on the realism at which we've built and really structured the program which is meant to mirror how content is developed and really how the industry works, of course, with additional considerations to barriers and so forth that do hold people back. But we are really not interested in theoretical mentorship or exercises and very realistically focused on results which is really selling projects, getting our fellows jobs, helping them build thriving careers. It's all that matters at the end of the day for us.

Pilar Alessandra: Now, there's a monetary reward, as well as the networking reward. Was it $25,000 for your fellows, right?

Richie Siegel: Yes.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Yeah.

Pilar Alessandra: I know that you've said, "And we think that the money is going toward..." Is the money specifically supposed to go towards certain things?

Richie Siegel: Marisa, do you want to take this, or do you want me to?

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: No. I can take it. Yeah. The money can really go towards anything, truthfully, because, like Richie said, it could be 28% more to live a disabled life. It takes a lot to write. I mean, as a writer, I know it takes a lot to write and if you're working part-time or, my god, full-time, it's going to be really hard to have time to actually develop your samples or develop yourself as a writer. And so, we really wanted to give a grant that was sizable enough and that was going to be impactful enough so that they could focus on that, their career, their writing, and not deal with the distractions that come with just being a person, especially having disabilities. It can go towards anything. It can go towards living expenses, moving into a more accommodated house, really anything.

Pilar Alessandra: Oh, yeah. Go ahead.

Richie Siegel: Sorry. I'm just going to add quickly, we do find that, I would say, I don't know, 80 plus percent of it probably does go towards living expenses. The fellowship is six months long so it's covering, I don't know, $4,000-ish dollars a month basically in terms of those living expenses. A hope, to Marisa's point, is that if someone's working multiple jobs, they could pair those back or as needed to really focus. But the other part is actually really on the professional development. We also help subsidize hiring people like yourself, the script consultants and so forth, to help our fellows really progress their work. Going to events, conferences, taking trips, writing retreats, anything really under the sun that also will help make someone a better writer and better prepare them as well. But we don't really care what they spend the money on, assuming it's not a list of restricted activities like lobbying or sending money to places where there are economic sanctions or stuff like that. But as long as most people abide by those rules, which they always do, again, this is a program for adults, and so we give them the money, we trust that they'll spend it as they need. That's it.

Pilar Alessandra: Where do you get your money and is there a way to donate to you?

Richie Siegel: There is a way to donate. It's all on the website. Yeah, anyone who wants to help support our work, we're very grateful for. The approach so far is we really focused on these $25k grants. We felt that was the right number to start with. I think maybe over time, we actually can increase that number just as we continue to scale up as an organization. But that was going to take a lot of just resources, for lack of a better term, to really help fund that. We've been focusing mostly on a major donor and institutional strategy, so a lot of that is foundation. Some of it is corporate. Warner Media, for example, was the first of the studios to fund us. They did that in a 30-minute meeting, which was quite incredible. We're working now on getting the rest of the industry on board to really get behind this work which is incredibly important to us, given it's so industry-specific. And then, there've been a few other individual donors that have really stepped up and supported it. I don't know. It's incredible to watch what a Bernie Sanders does with $30 donations at a time. We've had to take a little bit different of an approach just because you need a little bit of a war chest to do this work but we've been really humbled by the support so far. Yeah. We'll raise double what we thought we would this year which is quite amazing for a first-year organization. We're trying to put as much money as we can into the hands of the disability community. It's actually a metric we're tracking internally in our accounting software so we'll be able to see at the end of each year, how many dollars are going towards the community. That's really important to us as well.

Pilar Alessandra: What is the website? Is it inevitablefoundation.com?

Richie Siegel: Inevitable.foundation or inevitablefoundation.org. They both go to the same place.

Pilar Alessandra: Okay, great. I don't know if you've mentioned this or if it's just obvious, but why “inevitable”?

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: Rich is looking at me because he knows that I like to talk about this one. When we first came up with the idea to start the organization, we wanted a word that, first of all, had the word “ability” or “able” in it that was very subtle. People usually don't realize that it has the word “able” in it. But we, more importantly, wanted something that had forward motion to it and had this sense of this change in the industry, it's happening with or without you. You, being the decision makers, the networks, the streamers, and you can get on board or you can watch it happen. It is inevitable. This is going to happen with or without you. We feel it has that forward motion to it.

Pilar Alessandra: I love that answer. That's great. That is great. I want to ask you one more thing before I let you go. It was in the slides that you sent me. It says, "Project development fellowships bring projects to market that increase visibility of disability-specific issues with kids programming, police violence, mental health, workplace discrimination." Also, it's a reminder of these are the kinds of stories, too, that may be influenced, potentially. It's definitely not a “have to.” It's a possibility.

Richie Siegel: Definitely. What you're alluding to are our content development fellowships which is actually a separate program from our flagship fellowship. Those have not been launched yet. We're working on them right now. To what you said, these issues out there, these approaches that either are hugely beneficial to the work we're doing, or really intersect with it. Kids programming, for example, we see huge opportunities when it comes to both empowering disabled kids to see themselves on screen, as well as normalizing disability for viewers at a young age who are not disabled. We're working right now on building a program and sometime, either this fall or early next year, we'll launch a separate fellowship that will fund disabled screenwriters writing in the kids and family space, and that will be with a studio partner who will have a first look at all that content.

On the police violence side, many people don't know that up to 50% of police killings actually involve a disabled person. And if you think about all the names that everyone knows, from George Floyd to Ahmaud Arbery, to... Sorry, I'm blanking on the name of the third person tha I always mention. Sorry. George Floyd to Ahmaud Arbery to Eric Garner, all of them had different disabilities, but that is often not part of the conversation. We're, right now, building a separate fellowship with a few different organizations that will fund BIPOC disabled writers writing on those sorts of narratives. There's a future opportunity to do that on the mental health front. There's a lot of mental health conversation right now but it's very disconnected from disability even though, in our view, mental health is really under the disability umbrella versus the other way around. Criminal justice reform is another one. Workplace discrimination is another one. Over time, probably once or twice a year, we'll spin up these other fellowships that are a little more focused on projects versus our flagship fellowships which is more about people, and want to just have more narratives on screen, on slates that are tackling those sorts of issues. That's what that program is.

Pilar Alessandra: That makes sense. That makes sense. And if you want to see these programs thrive, maybe contribute a little bit on the website. How about that? Are you guys also on social media?

Richie Siegel: We are on social media. I believe on Twitter, it's @inevitablefdn. On Instagram, it's @inevitablefoundation. We don't use Facebook, because who uses Facebook? I think that's everything relevant. We have a newsletter too, which you can sign up for online, but we try not to bother you too much with that.

Pilar Alessandra: Excellent. Excellent. Anything you'd like to add before we start signing off here?

Richie Siegel: I mean, I think the only other thing I would add is we really just encourage people to have conversations and ask questions. So much of this is just the uncomfort and the discomfort that comes from not knowing or fear or stigma or so forth. The more this becomes part of the discourse and, obviously, a lot of the work we're trying to do really encourages that, the more that we'll just start to—again, disability will just become a normal thing and it won't become this fear-based, super medically situation, which is really how a lot of people think about it now. It's probably worth mentioning that there are two different models of disability, which is just interesting for people to think about. One of them is called the medical model, which is about, basically, the medical condition itself that someone has. It's what is disabling them.

The other is the social model, which basically says, "It's the world we live in that is actually disabling the person," which is a very interesting way to think about it. Instead of someone who's a wheelchair user being disabled, it's the steps, the curbs or so forth, that are actually disabling them. It is not whatever leads them to be in that wheelchair. There's a lot of interesting just kind of thinking and theory on that that I think really will start to change how people think about this. I would also add, once you start thinking about this and hearing it, it's really hard to unsee it. One of the most wild things we hear is when we talk to, sometimes, executives or people at companies. They go, "We have such big blind spots about disability," which is using an ableist term to basically make their entire point.

That is so emblematic of just a state of this conversation where it's not that there's anything malicious about that, but once you start to think about what are ableist terms that are in the dictionary or in the modern dialect, you see how pervasive all of this is and how much work it really is going to take to really start to change this. So, every little bit of that helps, and every little bit of awareness helps, but it's hard to unsee. I think a lot of what we are trying to do is just help people see it for the first time and once that happens, they can become an ally or they can do their little part helping change something. The greatest, I guess, parody of this whole thing is disabled people are the largest minority group in the country, yet the least visible. That's the crux of all this as well.

Pilar Alessandra: Thank you. That is such an interesting point. The world is disabling people and screenwriters and TV writers are world builders so it can start here. Thank you so much, Richie. Thank you, Marisa. This has been really helpful. I want to do a little plug for On the Page, okay? Remember that some excellent writers come out of the classes here and consultations, so go to onthepage.tv. The next class is writing TV, and that will be the middle of September. I don't have the dates in front of me. Sorry. I'm such a good business woman. Middle of September for four weeks, four Saturdays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM online, and I would love to see you there. Thank you again to Richie. Thank you to Marisa. Everybody, look into the Inevitable Foundation. It's an excellent foundation that is going to be changing the world.

Marisa Torelli-Pedevska: I would just encourage disabled writers to apply. I think some people may think, "Oh well, I have a disability but maybe I'm not disabled enough." That's a big question that I know a lot of people within the chronic illness community like myself have had. But just know that you are disabled enough and know that you can apply and know that you can embrace that part of your identity.

Pilar Alessandra: I'm going to thank Richie Siegel for being here, Marisa Torelli-Pedevska for being here as well. Thanks to all of you for listening, and have a good writing week.