Giving Compass' Take:

• Rachele Tardi and Zachary Turk shares how the Open Society Foundations shifted their application and event practices to be disability-inclusive. 

• How can you make your process more disability-inclusive? What partners can help you make improvements? 

• Learn how states are increasing employment opportunities for people with disabilities. 

To reach and build relationships with neurodiverse grantees, we had to make fundamental changes to the grantmaking process, which typically values speed, efficiency, and very particular ways of being “eloquent.” We had to make adjustments to the application materials themselves to make them more inclusive and accessible, as we describe below. But we also had to move more slowly, not only to accommodate grantees’ access needs, different styles of communicating, and ways of being in the world, but also to accommodate our own relative inexperience. We had to go against some norms of pacing commonly held within traditional workplace culture. It was worth it.

Inclusive Applications

Despite our efforts, we were surprised that a majority of the applicants to our first call did not identify as disabled. Why were intellectually and developmentally disabled activists not applying? In accordance with the disability movement’s principle of “nothing about us without us,” we had already asked the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, one of our grantees, to help us disseminate the call to their contacts and to ensure it was inclusive and accessible. But when we re-opened the call to attract more disabled applicants, we engaged a neurodiverse consultant as well as another who was familiar with the intellectually and developmentally disabled community.

While these adjustments were initially made to attract young people with disabilities, feedback from the other fellows suggesting that adopting Universal Design principles benefitted everyone. But our consultants also helped us learn to see differently, to look differently at applications that we had initially seen as not “polished,” and to focus our attention on what was original and engaging about the applicants’ projects, disregarding language or presentation. We came to understand that many applicants with relevant skills and abilities had no experience with our way of presenting proposals, our grant-making procedures, or our expectations.

When it came to the interview stage, we were mindful of research findings suggesting that interviewers tend to select people they perceive to be culturally similar to themselves. We therefore had two intellectually and developmentally disabled colleagues brief us before the interviews to put us at ease with some of the communication methods of non-speaking autistic and neurodiverse candidates. They instructed us always to address the candidate (never their personal support worker), to avoid judging social cues such as lack of eye contact, to ask concrete questions, and to allow more time for answers. As we came to recognize, the whole interview environment needs to change in order to become more receptive to different communication styles and different needs.

Read the full article about disability-inclusive grantmaking by Rachele Tardi and Zachary Turk at Stanford Social Innovation Review.