access to funding

A Crip in Philanthropy: Stuff I Know As a Fundraiser Who Has Muscular Dystrophy and Why It’s (Past) Time for MDA to #EndTheTelethon

/ Ingrid Tischer / Leave a comment
1 white woman and 2 white men, all smiling

Long before I became a fundraiser with muscular dystrophy, I became a sibling to two nondisabled brothers. Stuff I Know:  Access to funding is an equity issue. If it’s an honor for kids with disabilities to fund their own health care, then let’s have all kids be poster children. Also: While my lizard brain loves the BS that I, the disabled child, “taught my parents what love *really* is,” MDA telling siblings this during the Telethon is a lousy thing to do. As fundraisers and humans.

Stuff I Know I Know As a Fundraiser Who Has Muscular Dystrophy

With thanks to everyone’s brilliance in the 10/17/20 #EndTheTelethon Twitter protest and to Dominick Evans for leading our response, which you can get in on until October 24, 2020, the day of the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s MDA Kevin Hart Kids Telethon. There’s lots of great writing about problems with the Telethon’s charity model but this post is from the fundraiser’s point of view, as much as it is from a community member’s.

1. The Past is Prologue
I’ve had more than one person angrily ask how I dare criticize this year’s Telethon when it hasn’t even happened yet. Here’s how:
 
I know that part of every well-run fundraising event is what’s called its “post-mortem.” The team examines what worked, what went wrong, and (most importantly) how to keep the problems from reoccurring.
 
I’m worried because early promotion of this year’s Telethon indicates that their last post-mortem missed – or didn’t care about  – one of their biggest problems: Jerry Lewis and his legacy of alienating the very people he claimed to serve.
 
Like most of fundraising, this ain’t rocket science: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior and we have nearly 50 years of insults and stereotypes at the Telethon that were sanctioned by MDA’s culture and leadership.
 
This screenshot shows they’re clearly ok with Jerry Lewis’ misconduct.
Screenshot of the MDA Kevin Hart Kids Telethon that includes "fondly remember the classic moments from the Jerry's Kids Telethon," and "nostalgic footage"

Promoting the MDA Kevin Hart Kids Telethon by promising to “fondly remember the classic moments from the Jerry’s Kids Telethon,” and include “nostalgic footage” indicates that MDA’s fundraising culture has not really reckoned with its internal ableism.

2. Children – including disabled children – are people. (Again – not rocket science.)

CripTip: Don’t bring children on stage and talk about them in the 3rd-person and how they could die at any time. Please note this is equally bad regardless of whether you know that you’re telling the truth or lying about this PERSON.

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Disabled in Development Project Storyteller #1: Sandy Ho

/ Ingrid Tischer / Leave a comment

“The idea of disabled people supporting disabled-led projects resonated with the community organizer side of me that does not often have access to being on the other side of the philanthropic world, as grantors.” -Sandy Ho

Sandy Ho, an Asian American woman with dark curly hair sits in a black power wheelchair. She is wearing a blue tshirt with a superman logo, she also has brightly colored plaid shorts on and black sneakers. Her facial expression is one of outraged protest and in both upraised fists she holds oversized wooden knitting needles.

Multi-colored hexagons“Either I risked losing money because I made “too much” income, or I risked losing it because I didn’t fill out the bottomless pit of forms every year as required by the government. In that sense I internalized money and the concept of philanthropy as something that wasn’t meant for me to access.”

Name: Sandy Ho
Please share how you prefer to introduce yourself:
I’m a disability community-organizer, activist, and disability policy researcher. I’m also the founder of the Disability & Intersectionality Summit, a biennial national conference organized by disabled activists that centers marginalized disabled people.
In 2015 I was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for my work in mentoring for transitional-age disabled women. I’m one third of the team behind Access Is Love, a campaign that is co-partnered by Alice Wong and Mia Mingus, and serve as a Trustee of the Awesome Foundation Disability Chapter.
My areas of work include disability justice, racial justice, intersectionality, and disability studies. I’m a disabled queer Asian American woman whose writing has been published by Bitch Media online.
Your pronouns are:  she/her/hers 
Current Job Title(s) and Organization(s) (if applicable):
Founder and Co-Organizer of Disability & Intersectionality Summit.
Years in philanthropy on both the fund-seeking and fund-giving sides: 
Less than 5 years.

Multi-colored hexagons“More often than not, I am asked to provide some kind of advising around physical access.”  #OurDisabledLaborDay

Number of years in the workforce prior to 2007, when there was a surge into social media? Continue reading →

Celebrate #OurDisabledLaborDay With the Disabled in Development Project

/ Ingrid Tischer / Leave a comment

DiD’s first Storyteller goes live on Monday, 9/2/19 – and all I’m going to say about them is, “They’re AWESOME.”

We’re taking the whole thing easy ’cause it’s Labor Day! Our next Storyteller will follow the next Monday.

The Disabled in Development Project (DiD) is about advancing disability equity in philanthropy and fundraising. Because access to funding is an equity issue.

Our representation matters because access to funding is a critical component in dismantling structural ableism.
Telling our stories matters because we need to make philanthropy more effective and thus more powerful by centering more disabled people from multiply-marginalized communities.
DiD is our storytelling place to both celebrate advances in disability inclusion and to testify to the ableist structural barriers we’ve encountered, and that may have halted our career advancement or forced us out. Tell your truth about our disabled labor to transform philanthropy!
1 in 4 people in the US has a disability. 3% of folks in philanthropy identify as disabled. 3% of funding goes to disability-related work. Which all adds up to the reality that disabled people don’t typically win in the funding arena.

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