Chastened after failing to include disabilities work when it revamped its grant-making strategy to focus on inequality, the Ford Foundation has launched its first U.S. disability-rights program. The move formalizes what have been growing efforts by one of the country’s largest philanthropies.

“There is no justice without the inclusion of people with disabilities,” Ford president Darren Walker said in the organization’s announcement of the program, which has a $10 million annual budget.

Rebecca Cokley — a disability-rights advocate who has achondroplasia, a common form of dwarfism — will lead the new program. Since coming to Ford in January, Cokley has been making the case that any grant maker’s equity work will fall short if it doesn’t address challenges facing the 61 million Americans with disabilities. “If you’re doing anti-poverty work and you’re not explicitly including disabled people, you’re doing it wrong,” she said in an interview before Ford’s announcement. “If you’re doing food insecurity and you’re not talking about disability, you’re doing it wrong.”

Cokley previously worked in President Obama’s White House and was the founding director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

In 2015, Ford had a very public reckoning with its failure to consider disability as it overhauled its grant making to focus solely on inequality. Critics — including advocates, nonprofit leaders, and public leaders such as Tom Ridge, a former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security — questioned how the promise of a comprehensive push for equality didn’t even include the word “disability.” Walker later wrote that Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the president of RespectAbility, sent a “rather scorching email” and called him a hypocrite. “I deserved it,” he said.

Walker apologized and promised change. Today, Ford has embedded disability across all of its lines of work, officials say. It invested more than $50 million toward projects and organizations focused on disability from 2018 to 2020, according to the announcement of the grant program. It also contributed $125 million to social-justice organizations working toward disability inclusion.

With the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Ford has created the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy, which has 17 grant makers. The council, in turn, has launched the Disability Inclusion Pledge, which more than 50 foundations and philanthropy-serving groups have signed. Each commits to reshaping programs, policies, and practices to be more inclusive of people with disabilities.

Mizrahi said she was “thrilled” by Ford’s new strategy and hoped it would spur other foundations to see disability issues as key to efforts to improve opportunities for all Americans. She also praised Ford’s goal to build a pipeline of diverse disability leaders and support groups led by individuals with disabilities.

“It is incredibly important that they have put a stake in the ground to say that people with disabilities should be centered in decision-making and leadership for disability organizations,” she said. The vast majority of disability groups, she added, do not have people with disabilities in leadership roles on staff or boards.

Civil Rights and Disability Rights

How Ford ties equity and disability can be seen in its support of the Center for Democracy and Technology. For several years, the center studied gender and racial bias embedded in artificial-intelligence programs used by, say, companies as they train workers and screen and interview job candidates. Ford backed the center’s efforts to broaden its work to examine A.I.’s risks and discriminatory impact on people with disabilities. Job candidates might fare poorly in automated evaluations of videotaped job interviews, for instance, if a disability affected their speech.

Says the center’s president, Alexandra Reeve Givens: “I knew that the Ford Foundation was going to be open to a conversation about this because they, too, were trying to revisit and challenge themselves on questions of making sure that a focus on civil rights also centers disability rights.”

Ford says it consulted about 200 disability leaders to shape its new program’s grant-making strategy. Initial investments include grants to:

• The Century Foundation to build a national disability and economic-justice roundtable that will help coordinate a disability policy agenda
• The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund to build a national association of disabled journalists
• Access Living of Chicago to expand its work with survivors of gun violence
• Crushing Colonialism to uplift Native Americans with disabilities and their advocacy work through visual storytelling
• MEAction to advocate for recognition of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and for research and education into that condition and long-haul Covid