Accessibility, Advocacy, and Awareness: Key Drivers Behind Our Pledge for Disability Inclusion
This blog post, authored by Diana Morris, Executive Director of the Onion Foundation, is shared here with permission from the foundation. It offers valuable insights that we believe will resonate deeply with those on the disability inclusion journey.
Like the Onion Foundation, numerous foundations across the country have embraced equity and disability inclusion as core values. Yet, too many have failed to see ableism — the systemic stigma and discrimination against people with disabilities — as a barrier to these principles.
This is a startling omission given the prevalence of disabilities in the U.S.: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that one in four adults are disabled, and that figure is even higher for people in rural areas, adults over 75 years old, and people living in poverty — three key descriptors of Maine’s population. For people with intersecting marginalized identities, such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, ableist discrimination is compounded.
We believe that, as a grantmaking organization, the Onion Foundation has a responsibility to help dismantle the barriers people with disabilities face, which is why we became one of the early signatories of the Disability Inclusion Pledge in 2023.
The pledge is sponsored by the Disability & Philanthropy Forum, a philanthropic network established by the Ford and Robert Wood Johnson foundations to address gaps in disability representation and funding. By signing the pledge, we aim to hold ourselves accountable to adopting policies and practices that advance disability inclusion.
Activism and Advocacy in the Disabled Community
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 defines a person with a disability as someone with “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.”
But as people with disabilities have gained agency, advocated for themselves, and nurtured their community, many celebrate disability as part of their identities and not something that needs to be “fixed.” Disabilities, they note, may be seen or unseen and may exist at birth or develop later in life.
Rather than focusing narrowly on disability as a clinical problem, many individuals and organizations adopt the World Health Organization’s 2001 definition of disability, which goes beyond bodily impairments to include restrictions on participation imposed by society.
The American Association of People with Disabilities, for example, identifies discriminatory policies in housing, employment, and healthcare sectors and aids people with disabilities in advocating for their rights in these and other spaces. In Maine, groups like Disability Rights Maine help people living with disabilities gain equal access to societal opportunities and drive change so that members of this community can engage fully in all aspects of their communities.
The growing community of disability activists have adopted author James I. Charlton’s slogan “Nothing About Us Without Us” and have led the way toward identifying both the external biases that limit opportunities and the practices and policies that result in greater equity and meaningful inclusion.
Taking Steps To Drive Change
In 2022, our team at the Onion Foundation took stock of our work and renewed our commitment to equity and inclusion. Conducting this work and signing the Disability Inclusion Pledge — which focuses specifically on foundations and philanthropy-serving organizations such as the Maine Philanthropy Center (also a signatory) — drove us to implement key changes to our core program areas and ways of operating.
Environment Program
As an important first step, we articulated our prioritization of people living with disabilities as a key component of the Environment Program’s Equitable Outdoor Access strategy.
The central goals of this strategy are to enable individuals to:
- Experience nature directly
- Benefit from the well-being the environment engenders
- Develop an ethic of care for the environment
To advance these goals equitably, we broadened our focus to include not only people with disabilities, but also their family, friends, educators, and caretakers. Companionship with or responsibility for an individual who is disabled means that they, too, confront barriers to enjoying the great outdoors.
Prioritizing outdoor access for this community is compelling to us given that 29% of Maine’s population lives with a disability and that the state offers an abundance of natural habitats for all people to explore. The organizational strength of the conservation movement, its ability to drive change, and the presence of nonprofits committed to removing barriers served as additional inspiration for the adjustments we made to our Environment Program.
A number of our grantees are taking action as well. Many of the land trusts we support through our partnership with Momentum Conservation are using assistance from Maine Trail Finder to make their trails more accessible. Importantly, they’re also clearly communicating the physical characteristics of those trails so people living with disabilities can plan their outings with confidence. Other grantees, such as the Adaptive Outdoor Education Center, are modifying equipment and programs to make the outdoors accessible to all.
Arts Program
While our Arts Program doesn’t explicitly solicit proposals focused on people living with disabilities, it centers inclusivity by increasing access to arts education and arts engagement programs.
Using grant funding from the Onion Foundation, for example, the Data Innovation Project at the University of Maine has designed a tool to help arts organizations collect reliable data on audience and program participant demographics. The tool will enable arts organizations to determine who attends their events and programs and why. Critically, the project team will train arts organizations on analyzing data to identify whom they aren’t engaging as well as what changes would encourage more participants — particularly people with disabilities and others from marginalized backgrounds — to attend programs.
Some of our grantees have made programmatic and operational changes to explicitly comply with the requirements and the spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act. These include offering sensory-friendly performances (events that adjust lighting and sound), ASL interpretation, and flexible pacing and removing some safety concerns for people with physical or cognitive disabilities. In fall 2024, the Arts Program will host a conversation with our grantees so they can share their experiences working with audiences with disabilities and we can learn more about their ongoing needs for providing accommodations.
Operations
The foundation has historically offered request-based accommodations for grant applications, report forms, and webinars. But signing the Disability Inclusion Pledge accelerated and provided a blueprint for acting on our commitment to disability inclusion and equity.
The Disability & Philanthropy Forum, which uses the pledge as a didactic advocacy tool, offers numerous webinars, articles, reports, and videos to accompany a foundation’s “learning journey.” All Onion Foundation staff and trustees are members of the Forum, drawing — independently and together — on its many resources to assess our policies and practices relating to internal operations, external communication, grantmaking, and educational programs.
We’ve also established written policies to guide our practices, systems, and communication around core elements of the Disability Inclusion Pledge, including:
- Disability community engagement
- Disability-inclusive language
- Accessible events and facilities
- Inclusive grantmaking processes and systems
- Website accessibility
- Staff and board training
For example, we chose cutting-edge software to make our revamped website accessible and have added person-first language to our style guide, advising our team to use the terminology that individuals feel best describe their identities. Approximately 6.5% of our 2023-2024 grantmaking has focused on people living with disabilities, and we expect that number to increase in the years ahead.
The Journey to Inclusion Continues
Signing the Disability Inclusion Pledge is one key way we’re implementing three of our core values: equity; inclusion and diversity; and accessibility and transparency. Doing so has raised our team’s awareness of the barriers that contribute to ableism and has pushed us all to reflect on our own practices. By listening to people with disabilities, we’ve been able to adopt policies and practices that they recommend.
Embedding inclusivity into our grantmaking and operations and supporting the work of disability advocates across Maine is a journey. And while we may often come up short, we’ll continue working hard to ensure our systems, procedures, venues, and activities are truly accessible to all. We encourage our grantees to do the same and, as always, we welcome suggestions for how we can improve.