Funding disabled creatives: Takeaways from the Disability Futures Fellowship

At this moment in the arts and social justice sectors, we’re seeing greater visibility of disability culture—led by disabled creatives including artist, composer JJJJJerome Ellis, filmmaker Jim LeBrecht, and writer Alice Wong. 

The Disability Futures Fellowship, an initiative developed in collaboration with the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation and administered by United States Artists (USA), has provided the opportunity to engage with 60 disabled creatives. As this program concludes in 2025, it leaves a lasting impact on funding practices and perspectives, shaped by the insights of disabled creatives and grantmakers. It also provides valuable lessons for other funders committed to supporting disability communities.  

What works, and what’s important in funding disabled creatives? 

Funding disabled creatives advances the arts and social justice. The Disability Futures fellows are working to dismantle entrenched patterns of discrimination that intersect with every contemporary issue, from abolition and education to climate justice. They also show how disability and the drive for accessibility can spur innovation and deepen engagement. Fund across movements and funding areas, bridging arts and human rights frameworks.  

Flexible grant dollars can be paired with tailored technical assistance. Think holistically about how to support disabled creatives. Provide communications, convening, and professional development resources, including financial management and legal support.  

Effective grantmaking centers disabled people in decision making: “Nothing about us without us.” Disability Futures is an effort by, with, and for disabled creatives, who lead all aspects of the research, planning, nomination, selection, and administration of fellows. Disability Inclusion Fund is another powerful example of participatory grantmaking. Resource participatory funds and engage disabled people at every level of decision making. Commit to deep re-education and collaborative re-envisioning of whom and how your organization funds. 

Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism are linked and mutually reinforcing. None of the fellows is defined solely by their disability identity; they all lead multi-issue lives and artistic practices. Consider Kayla Hamilton, who founded Circle O to serve Black disabled artists and other multiply marginalized creatives, and Elliot Fukui, who runs Mad Queer Organizing Strategies impacted by inequality, including disabled people of color, disabled women, disabled immigrants, and LGBTQ communities.  

What isn’t working, and how can funders help address those issues?

Public benefit programs have strict income and asset limits that make it difficult to receive grants and awards. Learn about the policies and advocate for increased limits, for example, Creatives Rebuild New York is working to increase and protect access to safety net programs for disabled creatives within the movement for basic/guaranteed income. Seek grantees’ suggestions and identify subject matter experts who can help develop tailored approaches to limit the loss of benefits. Be flexible with grant disbursement timelines.  

Selection processes typically fail to center disability access, language, and care. Consider, radically, abandoning applications altogether and identifying grantees through nominations, as we did in the second round of Disability Futures. When applications are necessary, use plain language, ensure accessible design, and reconsider application length and deadlines. 

The pandemic disproportionately impacted disabled creatives, driving up mortality rates, decreasing work, and exacerbating health care, social services, housing, and transportation challenges. To meet fellows’ needs, we had to slow down, listen, reframe, support their mutual aid efforts, reduce programming, embrace new technology, and, ultimately, shift to all-virtual offerings. It’s incumbent upon all funders to build reactive capacity into program designs, iterate, and wrestle with how to provide continued relief funding and create onramps for a growing disabled population.  

Arts and culture institutions and systems consistently harm individual disabled creatives by not upholding disability justice values, such as recognizing intersectionality and wholeness. Expand individual artist support to serve disabled practitioners who have been harmed, who typically don’t access funding or employment from organizations, and can’t hold jobs due to lack of accessibility.  

How can funders support disabled creatives beyond offering direct support for individuals? 

Sign the Disability Inclusion Pledge and join Ford, Mellon, and nearly 100 foundations on a learning journey. In addition to grantmaking, signatories commit to disability community engagement, disability-inclusive language, accessible events, inclusion audits and plans, training, staff and board training, and evaluation and measurement.  

Seed mechanisms for co-funding and co-learning at the intersection of arts and disability justice. Ford, Mellon, and USA all benefited from co-learning with one another and the fellows and ramped up investments in disability work. For example, since 2020, 45 disabled creatives have received the United States Artist Fellowship Awards. Consider adapting the DIF x Tech Fund model to reach small disability arts groups and projects not easily reached through national programs, or building on learning from the Nonfiction Access Initiative to scale up financial support for disabled nonfiction media makers.  

Invest boldly in creative and narrative strategy and infrastructure. Entrenched harmful narratives about disability persist, flattening our experiences to victimhood or “inspiration porn” and perpetuating discrimination. The fellows and others are shifting the narrative through diverse, nuanced stories about joy, solidarity, people power, and liberation, but there’s an as yet untapped opportunity to align messaging, amplify stories through media and movement channels, and test for impact. All that requires deep investment. Help build on the momentum of the Disability Culture Lab, a new resource focused on creative campaigning, media relations, culture projects, and policy change grounded in disability justice. Fund cross-movement infrastructure that centers disability. 

These investments and ways of working are crucial to advance a future in which all artists can flourish and to realize a multiracial and disability-just democracy. Let’s work with peers and disabled practitioners to educate ourselves to hold one another accountable.  

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Ford Foundation