This is the fourth interview in our “Inclusive Philanthropy: Foundations and Disability Rights” series, where we explore how philanthropic foundations support disability rights and disability advocates.
We interviewed Rophiat Bello, who shared the work of the Foundation for a Just Society, a private foundation which funds local, national, regional, and global organizations and networks with an emphasis on four regions: Francophone West Africa, Mesoamerica, South and Southeast Asia, and the US Southeast. The Foundation advances the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people and promotes gender and racial justice by ensuring those most affected by injustice have the resources they need to cultivate the leadership and solutions that transform our world.
Editors’ note: The European Disability Forum edited certain terms in this interview in accordance with the usage on our website. Some disability-related terminology was adapted to EDF’s common use. No responsibility should be attributed to the interviewee.
Question: How is the Foundation for a Just Society advancing disability-inclusive development? Can you tell us some of the main programmes you support?
Answer: The Foundation’s disability grant-making focuses on achieving both disability justice and disability inclusion. For us, a disability justice framework goes beyond disability inclusion (ensuring people with disabilities have rights and can participate) to centre intersectionality. We believe it is necessary to analyse and address the ways ableism and other systems of oppression (capitalism, racism, and sexism) amplify and reinforce one another. A disability justice framework centres the perspectives, lived realities, and leadership of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) with disabilities, including those who experience oppression based on caste, ethnicity, descent, gender and sexuality. Our disability justice analysis is heavily influenced by our grantee partners that focus on disability rights and work at the intersection of disability and gender justice (such as the Disability Rights Fund, Women Enabled International, Creating Resources for Empowerment and Action – CREA, and National Indigenous Disabled Women Associate Nepal – NIDWAN). We are always listening to and learning from them.
Over the past two years, our grantees have pushed us to reflect on our disability justice grant-making across our portfolios, to develop strategies to make our grant-making more inclusive of people with disabilities and to become a disability justice oriented organisation in our policies, practices, and operations. Across our programs, we currently support several organisations of persons with disabilities across our regional portfolios with multi-year grants that support general operations. We also provide additional accompaniment grants, as needed.
But we also want to go further.
Following the leadership of feminist disability justice activists, we want to make sure that we embed disability justice in all our work, and we are striving to prioritise disability justice across all our grant making, especially in our Global portfolio.
Internally, we formed a small task force to help us become a more disability justice oriented organisation. The task force has coordinated and organised trainings and provided resources on disability justice for staff. Our human resources team is revamping our policies to ensure a disability-inclusive lens. Our grants management team is also thinking about ways to make our grant-making systems accessible and inclusive. In a few months, we will be relocating our office to a new location that is wheelchair-accessible and disability-inclusive. This progress has been encouraged and, in many ways, shaped, by our grantee partners as well as peer funders who are leading on gender and disability justice.
While we have made some important strides, we still have much to do to ensure that our organisation has a culture that centres disability justice and has more disability-inclusive policies, practices, and operations. We also want to ensure that our grant-making is both more accessible to people with disabilities and is reaching more representative organisations of persons with disabilities.
Question: The GLAD Network is a coordination body for donors supporting disability-inclusive international development and humanitarian aid. What are the benefits for the Foundation for a Just Society of being a member of this network?
Answer: Our grantee partner, the Disability Rights Fund, recommended the GLAD Network to us, and we joined it in 2022.
The Foundation for a Just Society does not bring an aid and development lens to our work. Rather, as a feminist funder that supports movement building and lifts up the leadership of those who have been most affected by injustice, we utilise an intersectional analysis in our work, and that is an approach we aim to share within the GLAD Network.
We both contribute to and benefit from the collective efforts of members to promote cross-sector collaboration and partnerships between different stakeholders. We are also able to contribute the various perspectives of our regional portfolios on disability justice. Our work in different regions of the world has taught us that disability justice and inclusion is nuanced and that it’s important to acknowledge different regional contexts and social movements.
We appreciate the opportunities to exchange strategies with GLAD members on challenges to advancing disability justice at the global level. Collaboration within the Network also allows us to strengthen institutional practices and identify funding gaps and areas of opportunity for cross-movement collaboration. It has also been a space for us to learn from organisations of persons with disabilities working at other intersections, such as climate justice and economic justice.
Question: How does the organisation involve and collaborate with persons with disabilities (and their representative organisations) when deciding which actions to support?
We provide multi-year, general operating support grants to our grantee partners because we understand the challenges and limitations of restricted funding. We believe that transformational change happens when movements have flexible funding to determine how best to use and allocate resources and to be able to change course if that is needed. In addition to this funding, our funding to organisations of persons with disabilities, we also provide accompaniment support when needed, particularly for organisational development and institutional strengthening efforts.
We engage in thought partnership (editors’ note: sharing ideas and experiences with other organisations to overcome complex challenges) and collaborate on philanthropic advocacy efforts with our grantee partners. For example, earlier this year, we co-hosted a panel at the International Funders for Indigenous Peoples conference with several Indigenous grantee partners, including NIDWAN, to highlight perspectives from Indigenous movement leaders advocating for climate justice, disability justice, and queer liberation.
Question : How do you see support for disability-inclusive evolving in the next few years? What are the topics and regions that your organisation is focusing on?
Answer: As an organisation, we want to continue building a culture that is disability-inclusive and disability justice oriented. We also want to ensure a disability justice lens in our operations and programming. For example, we are conducting a series of staff trainings on disability-inclusive language, the history of the disability rights movement, and ableism. We also hope to increase support for disability justice grantee partners and ensure that disability justice is part of our grant-making analysis at the global level. As we continue to engage in the GLAD network and collaborate with disability justice grantee partners, we hope to share more about our experience and analysis to support other funders on the journey to centre disability justice. Lastly, we are witnessing other private and public foundations, including many feminist and women’s funds, examine their operations and grant-making to ensure that they also centre disability justice. We are heartened to see that others are also beginning to invest time and effort to shift institutional and programmatic practices as part of broader Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice efforts.