Disability Justice and Tech from a Funder Perspective - Berkeley 2024

[Music] hi um I'm Liz my pronouns are they them and I would say my access needs are met and that's how all of my meetings start for the last two years uh working with um other disabled funders and uh the committee of people who are working on um on uh Distributing uh this grant money to people in Tech who are working on uh disability Justice Focus projects so um I'm working I've been working for the last two years with Borealis philanthropy as their sort of tech and disability Justice uh leason person and program manager um they are a big intermediary funer who work with the huge funders like Ford and um all of those people um who um they get a bunch of money and then they run these nine different very Progressive funds who are managed by people who fit that Identity or that those qualities we're here in Berkeley which is just basically the epicenter or one of the main epicenters of the disability rights movement um from the 70s um Ed Roberts was a Pioneer there honored in the building just down the street from us called The Ed Roberts campus but I also wanted to just bring in that we are here um where the 504 um protests that were Nationwide across the US in 1977 um uh a group of over a hundred disabled people occupied the federal building in San Francisco for a month and it was a huge deal and they basically did that because nobody had the nerve to throw them out um and so was just like imagine a lot of people with very diverse uh needs and uh situations and abilities camping out on the floor um so if you want to know more about that I totally recommend uh the documentary Camp it's fantastic another local guy Jim bre gimre uh worked on that and uh it's his brainchild so we can think of that as a disability Rights Movement they are fighting for rights the rights to education to housing to be in the world to be able to access public services and uh just the public World in general um but we now have sort of a different evolution of that into uh disability Justice and by that we mean a more holistic view of the intersectional status of disability tied in with race and gender and and sexuality and and gender identity and all those other things um and really trying to do real movement building that isn't just based on fighting in a legislature for your rights civil rights so that leads me to now and my fund what the heck do we mean by disability Justice and Tech uh you may not be thinking of of disabled people as inventors as as innovators but that's how I see the people that I hang out with and work with um all the time because um you just see people who have to innovate and have to use technology in a different way like you maybe used your car to get here and you're sitting in a chair and that is a way that technology an off physical object is mediating your your interface with the world um but probably having that chair isn't the thing that made it possible for you to be here so for me that's what made it possible for me to be here and the fact that like Bart has level boarding and elevators and things like that and that is because of the disability rights movement anyway um that's just like a way that I I have to depend on technology in a very crucial way back to this defx Tech I want to talk about our participatory Grant making grantmaking model I think in the first place part of the way that we got the funding to do this from our bigger funders was an attempt at starting a participatory grantmaking process because they were like we've got all this money but we don't see any disabled people applying for our grants maybe if we give you the money you're a bunch of disabled people who are you know into Progressive stuff and maybe you'll know um or you'll have the trust with various communities and uh various people to know how to distribute this money better and part of my goal in this and part of our organization's goal is to shift and distribute power I also um you know I I did mention here I just mentioned tokenization and that's a thing that is just a fact of life life like you know I work at a company and that company is always going to stick me in the front row and be like can we take some photos where you look really diverse and stuff and you know I'm like sure whatever um but but but um I'll I'll take it I'll take it and run I'll be like oh you you want me to come and diverse up your thing then I'm going to I'm going to take it and run and and give you an earful you know um but it is it is effective life and it's something just to be aware of and one way to avoid doing that is partnership partnership ship with organizations Partnerships with groups of people inviting a cohort if you want to say you wanted to apply for the money that that we are offering uh funding for you maybe you want to make something more accessible about the tool You're Building or figure out what it is that you can do that would actually include and serve disabled people of whatever stripe go find an organization of those people who are kind of doing that thing and partner up with them don't just like get one disabled person to like test your website some of our grant and this is kind of answering the what is what does this mean uh here's some of our grantees that demonstrate what we were looking for asima space is a deel and Def Centric arts and culture organization but actually I I think of it as a hacker and maker space but they always describe themselves to funders as a culture organization and I'm like yeah you're a hacker space um so they're a maker space they'll do things like they teach you how to use a 3D printer but you know deaf people are teaching other deaf people how to do it and that's just so necessary and they also make a amazing art and amazing exponential kind of um uh spaces communication first truly amazing advocacy organization um fabulous people so experienced and so rooted in Disability Rights Movement um they're working for speech related disability so people are using AAC augmentive and assistive communication autistic women and non-binary network may be relevant to people here um very interesting beautiful resource guides uh that they provide online and they make a big effort to translate them and make them available in many formats our program work um rather than just giving out the blob of funding we do try to stay involved in a way that isn't invasive or you know testing you uh we do check-ins with the grantees we run programming you know we have talks and discussions that include our uh grante cohort we have book readings and um you know we keep asking them what they need like keep checking in uh someone else mentioned this is the over the life of the grant their needs may change because their project changes and we also try to elevate and promote um these these the organizations work and profiles you may also learn that you have access needs that you aren't thinking of as disability needs but they might be good you might need quiet space you might need you know more time to respond than responding immediately in the moment you know you might hate phone calls I don't know you can integrate disability Justice principles if you learn about them into your tools you can build coalitions and some reading that I would recommend more than a glitch against techno ableism rethinking who Deeds Improvement and also a fantastic report from the center for disability uh centering disability and Technology policy that's uh excellent if you read that you will get a whole education it's like you've gone to the whole 101 class thanks [Music]