Disability rights groups want funders to boost giving amid decline

New data showing a decline in funding for disability rights in recent years has some nonprofits worried about how funders will prioritize the area. It comes as human rights groups try to regain their footing following the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately affected people with disabilities in many countries.

The Human Rights Funders Network and the philanthropy research group Candid recently released a report showing that private human rights funding for people with disabilities declined between 2017 and 2018 — the last years for which data was available.

People with disabilities also were among the groups to receive the least amount of funding from human rights funders in 2017, according to another report from HRFN and Candid. The group only outranked human rights defenders and sex workers out of a total of eight population categories that received funding.

Emily Harris, senior director at the Chicago Community Trust and a member of the Disability and Philanthropy Forum, told Devex that the numbers were “terribly low to begin with, and seeing them drop at a time when inequity and the disability population is increasing due to COVID-19 is devastating.”

People with disabilities have been among those populations most affected by lockdowns and the reduction of certain services during the pandemic. For example, cash transfers that were supposed to go to people with disabilities and other socio-economically vulnerable groups in Kenya last year were disrupted by government corruption, according to Human Rights Watch.

The United Nations Human Rights Council also recently said that older people and those with disabilities are at increased risk of the adverse impacts of climate change, including the kinds of floods, forest fires, and heat waves that have been happening around the world in recent years.

At least one nonprofit says it hopes the release of data showing the drop in funding will help motivate grantmakers to reverse the trend and direct more dollars toward people with disabilities. That may require funders to get past the ableism and “fear around disability about getting something wrong” that has kept some from getting involved in the issue, said Jen Bokoff, director of development at the Disability Rights Fund. 

DRF is a grantmaking organization that advocates for people with disabilities. The group has provided $38 million in grants to organizations in 38 countries since 2008, according to its most recent data. DRF also receives funding from big donors such as the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.

The Ford Foundation gave DRF an additional $3.5 million in general operating funds last year amid the pandemic. But that hasn’t been the norm in terms of funding trends, Bokoff said. She said that funding for disability rights has largely stagnated over the past few years and that she is aware that, in some cases, funders have actually specified that they don’t want to fund issues related to people with disabilities.

“I think there are a few reasons and one is just that we have this embedded ableism in society,” she said. “I mean it was only last year that there was a widespread racial reckoning when people of color had long understood racism. I think the same is true of ableism, but we have not had that reckoning as a society, certainly not in philanthropy.”

OSF spokesperson David Danzig told Devex that disability rights continued to be among its priorities. Still, he acknowledged that a reorganization announced earlier this year might affect that funding.

“For the last decade, OSF has invested $5 million annually to advance the rights of people with disabilities,” he said. “While we are too early in the process to say what that number will be going forward, we are committed to support work to change discriminatory laws, practices, and attitudes that hinder full equality and inclusion of persons with disabilities in their communities. In our global efforts, OSF is also committed to ensuring that a disability lens is central to our efforts to advance equal justice for all.”

Danzig also said that a goal of restructuring the organization was to provide “more flexible funding options” that would allow it to move more quickly during crises such as the pandemic. Last year, OSF provided emergency funding to organizations leading the push against care rationing in the United States and Europe that discriminated against people with disabilities ill with COVID-19, he noted.

The restructuring will put the organization in a “stronger position” to fund such urgent needs, but it also is likely to lead to greater variation in funding numbers from year to year, according to Danzig.

OSF is among 43 philanthropies that recently signed a pledge to take “action steps” on disability inclusion and report their progress to the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion — a coalition of 17 foundations — by 2023. The Disability and Philanthropy Forum is under the council.

Included within the pledge is a commitment to “establish foundation-wide goals for disability grantmaking consistent with the mission and purposes of our philanthropy.”

The Ford Foundation — a co-founder of the President’s Council on Disability Inclusion — was another signatory.

When contacted for this story, Ford Foundation spokesperson Marc Climaco reiterated the foundation’s support for people with disabilities and noted the additional funding Ford had provided the Disability Rights Fund in 2020. However, he said that data on funding levels beyond 2018 — the last year included in the report from HRFN and Candid — was not yet available.

Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, another signatory of the pledge and a major funder of international human rights and social justice efforts, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.