Bringing a Disability Lens to Grant Making
Kevin Webb, Director, Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation
One in five Americans has some form of disability, whether defined as a physical disability, a visual or sensory disability or a cognitive or learning disability. That amounts to 20 percent of the national population, making people with disabilities the largest minority group in the country. It is likely that everyone will fall into this group either by birth, accident, illness or aging. Even if it’s temporary, all of us are likely to have a disability at some point in our lives. Furthermore, disability is an equal opportunity experience, one that cuts across all races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic statuses.
Given these realities, most grantmakers are already serving people with disabilities within their portfolios. This makes it especially critical for funders to recognize the disability community explicitly among our priorities and to include people with disabilities intentionally in our programmatic work.
Just as we focus on including people of different ethnic backgrounds and ensuring gender diversity among our priorities, we need to take disability into account at all levels of our work. Inclusion of disability goes beyond elevator buttons and ramps. Inclusion of disabled communities means understanding that disability impacts every aspect of our lives, from transportation to health to employment to housing. In that vein, our aim as grantmakers should be including people with disabilities in all aspects of society and empowering them to live with dignity and independence. Including disability within our diversity priorities as grantmakers also means seeing people with disabilities as a group capable of holding positions of leadership and providing services, not just receiving services.
In the past, funders too often took a curative approach to disability, trying to help people beat their disability or limiting grantmaking to providing health services to people with disabilities. Certainly health is important. But if you look at the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is written as a piece of civil rights legislation. In other words, the law is crafted to ensure that people with disabilities are guaranteed equal opportunity for full participation in society and to ensure that their civil rights are protected. It is incumbent upon us as grantmakers to make sure that we are providing these opportunities.
Bringing a disability lens to grantmaking requires taking into consideration the leadership of your grantees and, as you review grant applications, asking if people with disabilities were involved in the planning and at the table when the program under consideration was being developed—that means asking if people with disabilities serve on the board of the organization, as part of an advisory committee or as part of a program focus group. In other words it means that making sure that somewhere along the way someone who represents the disabled community said, “we need these services,” not just that the potential grantee said, “we think this will work for the disabled.” It means, ultimately, ensuring that people with disabilities are being served in the way they want to be served.
It is also essential that grantmakers support efforts that place people with disabilities in positions where they can change public attitudes and challenge stereotypes and myths. As an example of a program that works to do just that, the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation funds theAmerican Association of People with Disabilities’ Congressional Internship Program. Through this program, youth with disabilities have the opportunity to work on Capitol Hill in Congressional offices on a wide range of policy issues, including but not limited to disability policy work.
To give you a picture of how the Congressional Internship Program operates, imagine that you’re a constituent, you call up your Senator and you want to tour the Capitol building. You get there and your tour guide is a young college student who happens to be blind. The student intern leads your tour through the Capitol building, guiding you by, and accurately describing, all of the paintings and statues not making a single misstep along the way. It turns out she has memorized the layout of the Capitol using modern technology like screen readers to study the architectural plan. Imagine how this would change attitudes not only on the part of Congressional staff who are writing policy but also on the part of the constituents themselves.
This is a true story. In fact, after this student’s internship was over she was hired by the Senator and continues to work on his staff, evidence of the fact that by intentionally including disability in your grantmaking, you can effectively change both public attitudes and public policies.
Kevin R. Webb is a Director at the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation where he manages national grantmaking and corporate employee volunteer programs. Mr. Webb also serves as Treasurer of the Board of Directors of the Disability Funders Network as well as on the Committee on Inclusiveness for the Council on Foundations, the Corps Network Inclusive Crew Advisory Committee, the Inclusion Task Force for the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital, and the Affinity Group for Japanese Philanthropy.