WITH Foundation is pleased to present Expert Conversations, an ongoing series that features conversations with experts in the fields of healthcare, disability, digital health, and philanthropy.
Sandy Ho, Program Director of Borealis Philanthropy’s Disability Inclusion Fund. She is a short statured queer Asian American woman sitting in a power wheelchair. She is wearing a gray unbuttoned sweater, a blue and white striped shirt, maroon shoes, and red checkered pants. She has short dark hair and glasses, and is smiling at the camera.
Today’s Expert Conversation is with Sandy Ho. She is a disabled community organizer, disability policy advocate, and resource mobilizer with a longstanding commitment to grassroots disability activism and advocacy. She is the founder of the Disability and Intersectionality Summit, a biennial national conference that uplifts and celebrates the lived experiences of disabled people of color. In 2021, Ho was a distinguished Longmore Lecturer with Ryan Easterly and Bridgit Antoinette Evans and in 2015, she was recognized as a White House “Champion of Change.” In 2022 Sandy received a Disability Futures Fellowship supported by Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prior to her role in philanthropy, Sandy was a disability policy researcher at the Community Living Policy Center at Brandeis University where she coordinated disabled-led research to strengthen and improve practices to keep people with disabilities in the community. Sandy is also completing her Master in Public Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. Currently, she is the director of the Disability Inclusion Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. She identifies as a disabled queer Asian American woman. You can follow her on twitter @NotYourAvgHo101
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1) You are the Program Director at the Disability Inclusion Fund, Borealis Philanthropy. Can you tell us more about the work of the DIF?
Time and again, the philanthropic sector has overlooked and missed opportunities to place trust in disabled people to steward their own joy, care, and liberation—and to vision for a better future for us all. The Disability Inclusion Fund (DIF), housed at Borealis Philanthropy, exists to reverse this historical trend and, ultimately, to expand the philanthropic sector’s capacity to hold space for the powerful anti-ableist strategies that comes from disability rights, justice, and inclusion work.
Founded in 2020 by the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy, the DIF resources U.S.-based organizations led by people with disabilities, disabled people of color, queer and trans folks, and disabled people who are closest to injustice, and building a more liberatory and accessible world for everyone. Since its inception, the Fund has moved over $8.7 million in rapid response and general operating fund through 135 grants. Our most recent cohort—selected via a participatory grantmaking process that involved members of the disability community—consists of 49 grassroots organizations across the country, 100% of which are disabled-led, and 73% of which identify as both disabled and BIPOC-led.
In addition to resourcing these grassroots organizers and organizations, the DIF is a bridge between the philanthropic sector and the priorities of disabled-led movements and communities. Our Fund’s principles and practices aim to draw from the disability justice framework, support a movement that envisions joy as necessary and central to collective liberation, and center disabled leadership across our operations and political analysis.
2) Borealis Philanthropy and Ford Foundation recently launched the Disability x Tech Fund. Can you tell us about the Tech Fund?
Many people with disabilities live at the intersections of inequity, bias and discrimination, and we are often siloed from broader equity and justice movements. At the DIF, we fundamentally believe that disabled perspectives, innovation, and expertise will strengthen efforts to advance the shared values between disability and technology justice,including eliminating ableism and its harms from technology, and reconfiguring how technology is developed, regulated, and implemented.
Earlier this year, we partnered with the Ford Foundation to launch the Disability x Tech Fund, which supports disability-led groups working at the intersections of disability rights, justice and technology. The Fund’s aim is to create a world where everyone can use technology to fully participate in our society, free from ableist bias, algorithmic discrimination and other forms of disparate treatment that marginalize people with disabilities.
Our inaugural cohort of grantees includes five disability-led organizations and two individual fellows focused on combating algorithmic bias that undermines access to necessary lifelines; banning surveillance that disproportionately punishes people with disabilities; dismantling barriers to participation in the digital economy; increasing equitable access to essential information, arts, media and culture; and ensuring that people who rely on technologies to communicate can fully participate in our society. These grantees were identified through a participatory process that convened an advisory council of ten disabled technologists whose lived-experiences and expertise in the field directly informed the grantmaking opportunity. The cohort is reflective of their insights and understanding of the emergent work in disability and tech justice.
3) You are the organizer of the Disability & Intersectionality Summit . What motivated you to do so?
The Disability & Intersectionality Summit (DIS) is a national conference that centers the lived experiences of multiply-marginalized disabled people, as told by disabled people, in a setting organized by disabled activists. In 2016 I, along with other disabled activists, created this convening because we saw a need for a space where our stories were being told, celebrated, and amplified by those who also shared our lived-experiences as queer, trans, and BIPOC disabled people. Over the past several years, DIS presenters have ranged from Deaf drag queens, youth with disabilities, frontline activists, and disabled writers. The program has addressed a range of topics, including audism, queering fat acceptance, racial justice and queer liberation, the intersection of immigration and disability justice, and autistic identity in the African diaspora, among others.
In a society that prefers only “palatable” and “inspirational” narratives about disability, DIS aims to challenge those dominant narratives by centering marginalized disabled communities who are closest to ableism and other systemic oppression. Our community came together to build connection and—in doing so—power, through shared lived-experiences that pushed back on narratives that only see disabled people as statistical disparities, needs, or tragic consequences due to life events. Organizing DIS requires intentional disability justice-centered planning processes, something that is typically thought of by other conference planners as ADA compliance. Rather than approaching access as an “accommodation” or a “fix,” it is present in every step of the process, from developing conference proposals to break out sessions. We didn’t always get it right every time, but the point was that we knew we were worth trying to create an alternative space where our stories and experiences are worthy, prioritized, and where we belonged.
Founding DIS has continued to shape and inform my understanding of how change happens. In my work at the Disability Inclusion Fund, it shows up in the ways that we structure our participatory grantmaking process, prioritize BIPOC disabled-led organizations, and also through the breadth of organizations that we fund – which prioritize power building through community organizing, policy advocacy, and narrative change.
4) What issue related to healthcare for adults with I/DD do you feel needs more attention?
Adults with I/DD experience barriers in access to quality healthcare that is rooted in medicalized ableism and eugenics. These biases contribute to the absence of supported decision-making, which can help people with I/DD understand their options, rights, and right to self-autonomy when making healthcare decisions. Key principles of disability justice are collective access and cross-disability solidarity – in the context of healthcare for adults with I/DD, this means we all— including caregivers, allies, and medical providers—have a responsibility to ensure that people with I/DD are leading the ways we are abolishing ableism in our healthcare systems and public health strategies.
For example, People First Wisconsin is a DIF grantee led by self-advocates with I/DD who have organized around improved access to mental health and supports for people with I/DD struggling with substance use. During the early days of COVID-19, People First Wisconsin advocated for the removal of people with disabilities and older adults from nursing and group homes, noting that those who lived in these settings made up nearly half of all of Wisconsin’s COVID-19 deaths in 2020. Another DIF grantee that is led by people with developmental disabilities is Self Advocates Becoming Empowered, whose organizing priorities include ensuring that all people with disabilities have access to life-sustaining care and treatment, and that their decisions are honored by caregivers, family members, and surrogates.
A 2020 study reported that COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death among people with I/DD; a closer examination of the factors that contributed to this outcome is in part due to the kinds of settings and conditions that people with I/DD are more likely to be living in, such as congregate care and group homes. Access to quality healthcare and self-determination in healthcare decisions should not be a privilege that is presumed for some and not for others.
5) What advice do you have for your peers in philanthropy regarding ways they can support disability inclusion and disability justice?
I urge philanthropy to work from the inside out to better understand and align their existing social justice and equity frameworks with the principles of disability justice. Any approaches to social justice that are absent of disability justice will remain unfinished and incomplete. Here are tangible actions you can take:
- Interrogate your philanthropy for ableist practices—from your grantmaking application processes to HR practices, accessibility, and hiring.
- Reimagine your justice-oriented grantmaking to center disability justice; consider this area not as its own bucket, but as living at the heart of every issue area you fund. And once you’ve done so, develop participatory methods of grantmaking, to ensure that you’re aligning yourself with the disability justice movement’s long-held motto: Nothing About Us Without Us.
- Apply an intersectional lens to your work, recognizing that folks don’t live single issue lives, and thus experience layered impacts of ableism, racism, transphobia, classism, and more.
- Develop a willingness to reimagine our grantmaking practices and to reassess what we deem “risky” and why. And a willingness, too, to take risk—to identify work not yet based in evidence, not yet supported by our funder peers, and to say “yes” anyways.
- Make a deepened commitment to disability inclusion work, to shifting power, and to funding for the long-haul, understanding that transformative change doesn’t happen overnight.
Finally, may we dream and act together, and hold all that is possible when we do so from a place of abundance.
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Thank you, Sandy!
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