One in six people globally live with a disability, and yet only one penny of every 10 grantmaking dollars goes to advancing the rights of people with disabilities. This presents an enormous opportunity for impact. It’s past time for disability rights to receive the attention and resources they deserve from philanthropy—a vital step toward building a more just world.

To address this untapped opportunity, the Ford Foundation recently announced that it will commit $15 million over the next three years to advance disability rights around the world. In addition, the foundation has set a target to ensure that at least a quarter of all of our grantmaking is inclusive of people with disabilities.

While new in scope and urgency, this bold commitment represents a continuation of an idea that has guided our grantmaking for years: The fight for disability rights is integral to every other movement for justice. 

For many of us, ableism has taught us to separate people with disabilities and to see disability rights narrowly and as distinct from other social justice work—as if disabled people are not also workers, women, people of color, or impacted by the unjust and destabilizing effects of a changing climate. 

In partnership with the disability community, the Ford Foundation better understands now how these struggles—in their causes, effects, solutions, and significance—are inextricably intertwined with the broader fight for a better and more equal world. We hope this clear commitment to disability rights as integral to justice will encourage our partners, whether donors or civil society actors, to join us in this fight. 

Our strategy is both disability-specific and disability-inclusive. We recognize that advancing disability rights and justice requires dedicated support, while also ensuring disability is meaningfully integrated across all our areas of work. That’s why we are committing this specific disability funding to advance inclusion within our existing programmatic strategies—whether climate justice, gender justice, civic engagement, or other areas. By doing so, we aim to amplify the leadership of disabled people and strengthen movements that are inclusive, intersectional, and transformative. 

Since we announced our commitment to disability inclusion nearly a decade ago, we have been energized and encouraged by the leadership of our grantees every day—and everywhere from Mexico to Kenya to Indonesia—using art, technology, and policy advocacy to advance their agendas. 

As an example, we look to the Disability Rights Fund (DRF), a grantee dedicated to unleashing the power of the disability rights movement. DRF makes more grants to advance disability rights than any other funder while also strengthening ties to other spaces—such as Indigenous rights, the care agenda, and others.

And we’ve been similarly moved by the work done by Our Collective Practice, a grantee organization of young feminists in the Global South that facilitates learning and connections to update prevailing narratives about the power and potential of girls across the region.

We see our grantees and we see lives changed, communities uplifted, potential realized, joy embodied. And it is these things that push us to do more and think even bigger. 

As we begin this next chapter, we remind ourselves that we do this work because we can witness every day the difference it makes in lives, communities, and movements for justice all over the world. 

Indeed, if our work in this space has taught us anything, it’s that there’s room for everyone in it: Democracy requires accessibility. Racial and gender justice require broad inclusion. Climate justice requires addressing inequity. There is no struggle that does not, in some way, impact people with disabilities on an individual and structural level—and therefore philanthropy risks a great deal by perpetuating the invisibility of disability in our own approaches.  

We’re excited to see where our new commitments lead us. We encourage our partners and friends in the philanthropy space to broaden their conceptions of what “disability grantmaking” looks like. And we invite everyone to join us in pursuit of a better, more just, and more inclusive and accessible world.