MacKenzie Scott’s Open Call Awards Give Disability-Focused Nonprofits Breathing Space
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Disability Rights Louisiana personnel at the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Conference 2023. Photo courtesy of Disability Rights Louisiana
In a YouTube video, a seven-year-old boy named Isaiah declares, “I go to school! I go to camp! I do everything!” as he grins and throws his arms wide open for emphasis. His mother, DaNeen Johnson-Hall, recounts the challenging road to getting Isaiah diagnosed with autism at age four and how she didn’t really understand how to advocate for special education services for him at school until she reached out to INCLUDEnyc, a disability rights organization based in the Big Apple.
“It’s really hard when you have a child with disabilities. INCLUDEnyc can help you work through the knots and kinks of everything and kind of just talk it out,” said Johnson-Hall in the video, which INCLUDEnyc posted in 2018.
Isaiah is among the many thousands of people with disabilities that INCLUDEnyc serves each year. In 2023, more than 16,000 were served by the organization, which also offers a helpline as well as workshops that help youth and families develop their self-advocacy muscles to navigate the offerings to which they’re entitled at school, college or in the workforce, according to the group’s Executive Director Cheryelle Cruickshank. The organization, which was founded by three mothers of children with disabilities some 40 years ago, has grown, but it still is strongly aligned with its original mission. “We still are very focused on making sure that families can come somewhere where they feel safe, where they have people who understand what they’re talking about and can support them,” Cruickshank said.
Grounding their work in promoting diversity, equity and inclusion is among the reasons that Cruickshank believes INCLUDEnyc was chosen to receive a $2 million unrestricted grant from MacKenzie Scott as part of her inaugural Yield Giving Open Call,which was recently concluded this March. INCLUDEnyc was one of 26 nonprofits identifying disability as among their focus areas that received support through the open call, which awarded a total of $640 million to 361 organizations drawn from an applicant pool of more than 6,000.
The no-strings-attached gift will allow INCLUDEnyc to attend to core items that have been on hold for a long time. Those include making materials available in the nine main languages spoken in New York City schools, creating a revenue stream by developing a fee-for-service training program for other organizations, and updating its project management platform and program evaluation process, Cruickshank said. When such work is put off for too long, “You can't keep up with the growth of the organization.” And INCLUDEnyc has been growing: In just one year, from 2022 to 2023, that translated to 2,000 more individuals served, 20% more participants attending its workshops and a 4% increase in calls to its helpline.
Disability Rights Louisiana, another recipient of a $2 million gift through Scott’s open call, is also primed to grow its work. It highlighted in its open call application that demand for its civil rights legal and advocacy services had skyrocketed in the last two years by 32%, according to the group’s Director of Development Libby Kiger. She also pointed out that the organization is the only one of its kind in Louisiana, a state where the proportion of people with disabilities is two and a half times greater than it is nationally.
Among Disability Rights Louisiana’s recent victories was winning a class action lawsuit in 2022 against the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, Louisiana. The six-year lawsuit was prompted by letters from prisoners with mental illness “who wrote that they were being forced to beg for food, like dogs, that they were being physically abused, that they were being kept in cells for 23 hours a day and denied mental health treatment,” Kiger said. A federal district court judge who found that such isolation in cells amounted to “psychological torture” ruled that the conditions the prisoners experienced were in violation of the Eighth Amendment and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The group also developed a reentry program that provides disability-related supports to help those exiting the David Wade Correctional Center to deal with the trauma they experienced, find a job and stay in the community. “And so we built that program because it didn't exist,” Kiger said.
Disability Rights Louisiana is now in the planning stages of how to use its award from Scott. The group’s new Executive Director Ranie Thompson said that some of the funds will be used for staffing and infrastructure. But the gift also allows the group to think big. “This is an opportunity for us to be forward thinking and visionaries about how to do the work that we’ve always wanted to do, but we’re restricted from doing in many ways,” Thompson said.
Gifts from Scott — both through her open call and via her regular giving — are often described as “transformational” by their recipients. What that can mean in practice is that with the freedom to spend as needed, nonprofits can become more mission driven and less focused on short-term, funder-dictated projects and metrics. A 2022 report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, for example, surveyed 277 nonprofit leaders who had received unrestricted grants from MacKenzie Scott and found that the gifts allowed them to “go back to their core vision,” and “do not only the scalable thing, but the right thing for equitable outcomes.”
Scott’s backing for disability-focused nonprofits in her open call followed a range of support for such groups over the past several years. Including the open call recipients, a full 144 recipients listed in Yield Giving’s database include “disability” as one of their focus areas. In one of her Medium posts in 2022, Scott also referenced disability directly: “I recently learned a saying used in disability communities: ‘Nothing about us without us.’”
This sentiment also drives other organizations that were recipients of grants in Scott’s open call awards.
Scott’s $2 million gift to RespectAbility will help the disability-led nonprofit further ramp up its work to advance equity in employment and leadership development skills, according to its president and CEO Ariel Simms. Among those it serves are those who are reentering the workplace for the first time as people with disabilities. Simms ticked off a few examples of who that could include, ranging from someone who has experienced a serious car accident or traumatic brain injury to someone coping with disabling symptoms associated with long COVID. “We know the standard workplace is not designed with disabled workers in mind. And that navigation and those advocacy skills take time to develop, especially if you're new to the community and you've been going through your whole life without this identity or experience,” Simms said.
Another $2 million recipient is the Tommy Nobis Center, which helps people with disabilities in 22 states prepare for, find and retain jobs. The bulk of its grant will go into its $5.7 million capital campaign for a new building with classroom space to help people prepare for the workforce, according to its CEO Dave Ward. That, in turn, will put the center in a position to draw other funders to fully pay off the building. “The MacKenzie Scott grant allows us to take all of our fundraising dollars and invest them into our programs,” Ward said.
Unrestricted grants, like the $17.3 billion that MacKenzie Scott has given to more than 2,300 nonprofits to date, according to her website, are still anything but the norm in philanthropy. Jen Bokoff, the director of development for the Disability Rights Fund, which also fundraises and makes grants to organizations in the disability rights realm — and received an $8 million gift from Scott in 2023 — says that restricted grants can cause harm to nonprofits.
“There’s this terrible cycle where some things are funded and it’s a lot harder to get funding for things that really need it,” Bokoff said. (See this article co-authored by Bokoff about unrestricted giving.) On top of that, money that could be better used for executing programs, she said, is funneled into satisfying the often burdensome reporting requirements associated with restricted grants.
In contrast, Bokoff said, unrestricted gifts give agency to organizations in the disability rights space. “We know that we can’t achieve our goals, we can’t work toward our mission without our community leading in everything that we do.” In order to be accountable to the community, she went on, organizations have to be able to take in new perspectives and pivot their approach. “So for us,” she said, “unrestricted grants show trust and they honor that way of working.”
