Episode Notes:

Learn more:

• Follow Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi

• Discover RespectAbility

Here are topics and research Jennifer refers to, in the order they’re mentioned:

• Disability Impacts All of Us: data and statistics from the CDC

• The Americans with Disabilities Act

• Leaders with disabilities: Amanda Gorman, Greta Thunberg, and Elon Musk

• RespectAbility Labs for Entertainment Professionals with Disabilities

• New GLAAD Report Finds Greater Need for Disability Representation on Screen

• Council on Foundations 2021 Grantmaker Salary and Benefits Report

• Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy (Ford Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)

• Guidestar

• Council on Foundations Pledge

• Kresge Foundation

• RAINN

• National Governors Association and Asa Hutchinson

• Tikkun olam

• Disability-led Nonprofit RespectAbility Receives $1 Million Grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

Interested in more quality content about fostering accessibility? Here are a few Submittable resources:

• The Ultimate Guide to Creating Accessible Submission Forms (Guide)

• Putting DEI Values into Action: A Conversation with CSR Leaders at WarnerMedia (Webinar)

• How Grantmakers Can Reduce Bias in Decision Making (Blog)

• Redistributing Power in Philanthropy: A Conversation with Shaady Salehi (Webinar)

• The Review (Bi-monthly newsletter by Sam Caplan)

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to Impact Audio, the podcast bringing some of the smartest people in philanthropy directly to your earbuds. I’m Rachel Mindell.

Today’s conversation with Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi is incredibly powerful and important. She joins Sam Caplan, Submittable’s VP of social impact, for an in-depth discussion on how philanthropy (and all of us) can better serve the disability community. 

Jennifer Mizrahi is the Founder of RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization fighting stigmas and advancing opportunities so people with disabilities can fully participate in all aspects of community. She served as RespectAbility’s President and CEO from 2013 until 2022. 

There is so much more to say about Jennifer’s life, leadership, and contributions to social good. Please take a moment to learn about Jennifer and about RespectAbility on this episode’s webpage. And before we get started, I wanted to let you know that Jennifer does discuss the intersection of disability with hard topics like sexual violence beginning at around 23 minutes. Thank you for joining us today and I hope you benefit from this episode. I know I did. 

***

SAM CAPLAN: Jennifer, welcome to Impact Audio. Totally excited to have you. I've been following you on LinkedIn for several years. And you always post the most intriguing information and comments about what's happening in the disability community and with your organization, RespectAbility. So I am totally excited to finally have the opportunity to hang out with you. 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Well, Sam Caplan, I am thrilled to be with you because you and Submittable are complete thought leaders, particularly on social change. And so it is just a true delight to be with you today. 

SAM CAPLAN: Well, thank you for saying that. So speaking of RespectAbility, that feels like a great place to start. How about telling us a little bit about this amazing organization that you have had the opportunity to found and to run for several years. 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Thanks. Well, I think our name sums up quite a lot, RespectAbility. When you think about people with disabilities, unfortunately they're largely defined by what they cannot do instead of what they can do. And we're really trying to create a complete paradigm shift. So that people with disabilities are valued and viewed for the contributions that we can make in every single sector. 

I myself am dyslexic. I have ADHD. Almost our entire team from our staff, and our board, and our speakers, and our trainers are people with one different kind of disability, lived experience, or another. We know that solutions are best created by people who know the challenges and the solutions that really work. 

SAM CAPLAN: Yeah. And I want to start with a statistic that I've heard from you and I've come across in doing research on the disability community. And quite honestly, like, this one has just blown me away for many different reasons. But the number is that one in four people have a disability. So 25% of the population has some form of disability. 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Right, Sam. It's actually one in four adults, not one in five people. Because disability is something that the older you get, the more likely it is that you're going to have a disability. So about 12 and 1/2% of students, for example, have disabilities. The majority in America are students who are also members of Black, Hispanic, Asian, Indigenous, or other person of color communities, about 52%, about seven million students. 

But the overall population is about 61 million people in America. The thing is that most disabilities they're non-visible. People think disability, oh, that's somebody who uses a wheelchair or who's blind. But it's mental health. It's chronic health. It's dyslexia and ADHD like I have. It's a whole wide range of things. 

The CDC defines it as someone who has a condition that is a barrier to everyday living. And we all know the disability rates are going up during the COVID period because issues around mental health are going up. And also because COVID means that people who frankly have regular care, like going in for their cancer test or whatever, are not getting those regular tests. And as a result, we're seeing more and more other disabilities move forward. 

SAM CAPLAN: Yeah, so at 25%, why do you think that disability is continued to be viewed like through this lens of disability being a stigma. Like, why do we continue to do this? 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Well, Sam one thing is that it's a reinforcing cycle of damage. Because of the stigma, a lot of really talented people with disabilities, they're still in the closet. I like to remind people that the disability community is a lot like the LGBTQ community was 20 years ago. 

If we think about the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, if we think of some of the fundamental gay rights movements that started over 50 years ago, these are things that were really public civil rights movements 50 years ago. But the Americans with Disabilities Act was only founded and passed 30 years ago. So we are kind of behind the eight ball, 20 years behind some of the other civil rights movements. 

So that's one reason is people are in the closet. You look at who are some of the most talented people in the world. Amanda Gorman, who is my favorite poet, has multiple disabilities. You look at Greta Thunberg on climate change who's autistic. You look at Elon Musk who's both autistic and he has bipolar condition. If you look at so many people who are shaping our society and our world, it is people with disabilities. Most of them are in the closet. So that's a piece of it, Sam. 

Another piece is that the disability movement, the way that it was sort of founded is highly problematic. In other words, what happened was you basically had white two-parent families who then had a child with disability A, B, C, or D. And they would band with other white two-parent parent families who had a child with A, B, C, or D. And they would form an organization about that one disability. 

And so we have all these silos, blindness, or spina bifida, or autism. The collective impact of all the disabilities didn't really bond together and work together, number one. Number two, people of color were largely left out of the conversation. And I think most importantly, the entire frame of the conversation was the fear of the parents, what's going to happen to my adult child with a disability when I die? 

So the entire movement was based on social safety net instead of authentic voices of people with lived disability experience who take their own power and agency, and want skills and jobs in a better future, not only for themselves, but everyone around them. 

One of the things that we're doing that we're very, very focused on is changing how people view and value people with disabilities on screen. And so we're working very intentionally in partnership with Hollywood, with Disney, with Netflix, with WarnerMedia, Sony, and others to create authentic portrayals of diverse people with disabilities on screen. 

This year alone, we worked on more than 200 different productions. We've been involved in Emmy winners. We've been involved in blockbusters. And we're hoping that people would see a completely different view of what disability means in the future. 

Because the fact is that accurate portrayal of disability is a complete moneymaker for Hollywood if they do it right. Why? Because there's a built in audience for it. Not only do 61 million people in America alone have a disability, 1 and 1/2 billion people around the world. 

SAM CAPLAN: So revenue and money being such a motivating factor, do you think that that's something that can help us begin to achieve real equity in the world of the disability community? 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Absolutely. And by the way, I think that's true for all marginalized communities. That there are many studies that show that diversity helps the profitability of companies and the productivity. Because the better you know your customers, the better you are connected to your community, the better your innovations are going to be. But listen, Sam, by definition, people with disabilities have to innovate every day. Because by definition, there's something that other people do where we're blocked. And so we constantly every day have to come up with workarounds. 

It's interesting because Accenture did a major study and showed that companies that include people with disabilities, the retention of their staff is better. And this is extremely relevant during the Great Resignation, where there is a huge premium to either recruit or retain top talent. 

That it really shows that including people with disabilities, which includes meaning that if they want to work from home because they're blind and they can't drive, that they've allowed people to do that. That every time they're using Zoom, that they put captions on their Zoom, which, by the way, is free and instant on Zoom and on Microsoft Teams, and so many other products now. So that people who are hard of hearing can fully participate. Companies that are doing that, they're completely outperforming the companies that aren't doing it.

And what's interesting is that the Council on Foundations just yesterday or last couple of days released another study of who works in foundations. And it found that only 8% of foundations have even one person with a disability on their staff, even one person. Some foundations have 1,000 people on their staff. 

If a foundation has 100 people on their staff, if they were representative of society, they would have 25 people with disabilities on their staff. And yet only 8% have even one person with a disability on their staff. And this is really undermining philanthropy's ability to really solve problems in our country on a whole range of issues. 

SAM CAPLAN: I'm so glad that you brought up philanthropy and the disability community. Jennifer, what does philanthropy look like in terms of funding disability organizations and programs and policy? 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: So Sam, things have been very good with the Ford Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson, and others creating this disability philanthropy roundtable. But with all the thousands of foundations out there, there are fewer than 60 foundations that have signed the pledge to be inclusive. The studies that we have done and we're about to repeat the study show that the vast majority of foundations and nonprofits are literally not even accessible to people with disabilities. 

In other words, putting captions on videos is now automatic. If you take your video and you put it on YouTube, for free instantly, captions are generated. They're not perfect, but they're generated. If you're on Zoom or you're on a meeting, you can turn the captions on. You can set up your website to be screen reader accessible for people who are blind, who have low vision. 

You can choose to do all of your events in venues where a person with a disability doesn't have to either be excluded because they can't get in the building or they have to go in the entrance of the dumpster because that's the only place where there's a ramp. And they can actually go to the bathroom. And there's actually an aisle that's wide enough to get to the buffet that they can actually eat. Like everywhere else, the majority of nonprofits that are being funded by philanthropy are literally not even accessible to people with disabilities. And this includes many foundations themselves. 

So sometimes we hear, well, no one with a disability who is blind has applied to work at foundation A, B, C, or D. And then you find out that their application portal is not accessible to people who are blind, or that their video introducing themselves to their audience has no captions. So it's really ableism. And it's really prejudice. And people don't see it yet. 

SAM CAPLAN: One thing that I'm stuck on a little bit, Jennifer, is this idea that in philanthropy over the last 24 or 36 months, there has been a tremendous interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

And listening to everything that you're saying, especially around how few people with disabilities work in philanthropy, like the letter that's missing out of DEI is the A for accessibility, right? So if I put you in charge of DEI for one of these major grant makers, what are the first couple of things that you would do to improve that situation? 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Well, there are some very specific processes that are proven to work. The first is to commit publicly to doing it. And so signing on to this disability philanthropy pledge is a great idea. You need to do it with the head of the organization, the CEO and the presidents of the organization. It needs to be communicated very clearly to every member of the team. It needs to be in the diversity statements. If you go to the diversity statements on the websites of most foundations, the word disability isn't even in it. If you look in so many ways, it's missing. 

The second thing is to understand what ableism is, and to recognize it because most people don't know what it is. And when they see racism, they know what it is. But when they see ableism-- like maybe it's an annual report that shows a group of 50 adults and not a single one of those adults has a white cane, not a single one uses a wheelchair, not a single one has down syndrome, but it's 50 people. 

Maybe once someone should ask a question, like, were any of those people able to get in the room of this organization, right? What are you conveying in your photographs and in your messages of your organization? So you need to see and recognize the ableism. 

The third thing is that you need to have a point person who is sort of the one neck to grab who's going to be responsible for making something like this move forward. I mean, there's a lot of things that people—everyone will nod their head and say, yeah, we should do that. Yeah, we should do that. But then nobody is held responsible and accountable. So you need to know who that one person is. And then that person should really have a committee. And that committee needs to include people with disabilities who want to be disability advocates and who really know the issues. 

Really the fourth thing is to set these SMART goals, these specific, measurable—really these goals that we can achieve in a specific time frame. We really need these SMART goals. And we need to hold people really accountable to them. We need to have an audit to go through soup to nuts. Is our website accessible? What are our onboarding policies for on-board staff? 

Oh, my goodness, did we go to GuideStar and actually see if the nonprofits that we are funded, did they fill out all the demographics of their organization? Oh, my goodness, they don't have a single person with a disability on their staff. They don't have a single person with a disability on their board. And they're a disability organization. How is it that a disability organization that is a multimillion dollar organization has no one with a disability on their board, no one on their senior staff who has a disability? It's really shocking. 

Nothing about us without us is the other thing. You have to center it around people with disabilities who have that authentic lived experience. And it's important to have not just white people with disabilities who are cisgender, but a really broad group of people from all racial, ethnic, and all kinds of backgrounds from the disability community. Because there's not one disability community there like any other communities, there are many with lots of different perspectives. And it's really important to build partnerships. 

SAM CAPLAN: You mentioned the disability philanthropy pledge. Tell us what that is. And what does it mean if I am a grant maker and I sign that pledge? 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Well, it says that you're going to make this a priority for one thing. And that you're going to look internally at your own processes. But I would like to see funders go well beyond that. I would like to see funders ensure that in their grant agreements, that every single time they make a grant that the grantee is guaranteeing that their money is not being spent to advance prejudice or ableism. 

The MacArthur Foundation is a fantastic model of how to do philanthropy in an inclusive way. They have in their application a question where they ensure that people explain how they're going to make sure that people with disabilities have access to being part of the solution that this grant will help fund. Not only that, they have a line item in their budget that the grantee can say, look, this is what I'm going to spend. If I need to have sign language interpretation, if I need to have some sort of accessibility, here is the line item for the budget. 

The other thing is to really look at GuideStar. Because GuideStar does have at the bottom of its section demographics about people who are part of the organization. They look at race, they look at gender, they look at LGBTQ, and thankfully disability. Every single organization should have people with disabilities on their team. We're one in four adults. If we're zero of their board and zero of their staff, what does that tell you about the organization? It tells you quite a lot. 

SAM CAPLAN: Yeah, so we've talked about inclusion and accessibility among grant makers, and some steps that they can take to collect the right data to provide accessibility in terms of grant forms. But let's talk for a moment about the funding in general. So if you could wave your wand and redistribute capital from philanthropy, how much more should philanthropy be giving to organizations focused on disability? 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: So Sam, given that I raise money for a disability organization where I'm CEO, I think my answer will surprise you. I think the number one thing they need to do is make sure that the people they're already funding in the work areas where they're already working are accessible to the solutions and talents that people with disabilities can provide. 

Before I would fund disability organizations, even my own, I would say, who are my most long time partnerships with whatever sector I'm working in where I'm trying to move the needle? And I would want to make sure that they are hearing from people with disabilities, that they're accessible to people with disabilities, and that they've invited people with disabilities full access to helping them create the solutions for whatever the issue is that they are working on. That would be my first start. 

SAM CAPLAN: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I mean, we're seeing this all over philanthropy these days, right? It's strange to me that rather than asking for more money, we're actually seeing nonprofits ask for more trust, and for more access, and for more partnership. And I think that coincides with what you're saying. That by providing those things, by really becoming a strategic partner with a nonprofit, you can do more good and generate more impact than by simply giving more funding. 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Absolutely. And I will say that I love to work, for example, with the Kresge Foundation. RespectAbility has a wonderful partnership with the Kresge Foundation because they have signed this pledge with Ford and others on disability inclusion. But they're doing their own sort of education of their team. We came in and did a lunch and learn with their staff that was hosted by their CEO over Zoom. 

We have now placed a very talented young woman with a disability as an apprentice inside the organization who is helping them evaluate their own internal practices, and helping them look at what's happening with their already existing grantees. I love this as a model. It's start in the areas where you have a strength. I will say that RespectAbility does have a training service that we offer trainers and we will help with these evaluations. We will help consult to foundations or nonprofits to help them do it. 

I will also say that my husband and I for the last 22 years, we have been funders also. So this year in our donor-advised fund, we funded over 50 nonprofits, the majority of which were not disability organizations. But almost all the gifts were disability gifts. 

In other words, I'm so proud to support RAINN. Why? RAINN is a nonprofit that helps pick people who are victims of incest, rape, and abuse. People with disabilities are seven times more likely to be raped than people without disabilities. I myself was raped when I was 12. As someone with dyslexia, I was 5 foot 10. When I was 12 years old, I could not read or write. I trusted somebody at school who was nice to me at a point when everyone else was bullying me. And I was raped at school. 

Rape is incredibly common for people with disabilities. So it is fantastic to me that somebody who is deaf can contact RAINN and have somebody who is deaf and uses sign language be the person on the other end of the line for a video chat to talk about what to do as a victim of rape. That anyone who is blind has full accessibility to what it is that they do. 

So no matter what the issue is. I mean, I fund food bank services where I live. Guess what, the food bank services, the website is not screen reader accessible. Their videos do not have captions. And so this year I said, OK, great. I'm funding you again. And I want the money to go to fixing this. And if next year it's not fixed and people who are deaf or blind cannot access your food pantry, then you can find another funder, because one in four adults has a disability. And guess what, these are really, really common disability amongst people who are poor and need access to food pantries. 

SAM CAPLAN: So as much as I support and believe in philanthropy and the impact that philanthropy can help generate, like most of the real impactful change comes from government and from policy. I'm super curious to know your perspective.

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Well, first of all, the major disability legislation that has been passed, the Americans with Disabilities Act, IDEA, et cetera, was all bipartisan, all bipartisan. And it is almost impossible to move major policy when it's not bipartisan. And that is a really tough thing in today's society because this is such a toxic time where there's so little bipartisanship. 

This weekend I was at the National Governors Association Conference. It's something I go to very regularly. I love to work with governors. Governors are my favorite, favorite kind of politician because they're really held accountable. If you're a senator or congressman, you can give a million speeches. But at the end of the day, you're less accountable than a governor. And so they're much more willing to be bipartisan and open two real solutions. 

So your governor, Asa Hutchinson, from Arkansas is the current chairperson of the National Governors Association. And he has a national initiative around ensuring that high schoolers have access to computer education. Only 51% of high schoolers in America have access to computer education. 

So where do I come in as a disability access person? OK, great. If we're going to move it out so that the other 49% of America's schools have access to computer education, the 25,000 kids who are blind need to know how to use a screen reader. They need to know how to use a screen reader so that they can use computers. And the kids who are deaf, they need to know how to use the live captioning. And the classes for remote education, 100% of them need to use those captions. 

And so we're able to work with Governor Asa Hutchinson on that. Meanwhile, we're working with President Joe Biden on a whole host of initiatives, which frankly, during a pandemic, access to vaccines has been really important. I mean, if you look at who's dying of COVID, it's people with disabilities, people with underlying conditions. And I will tell you that one of the things I am most proud of is that we are always listening to people with disabilities. 

And so during the beginning of the pandemic, we asked people with disabilities, what's your most pressing need? And 11 million Americans with disabilities use snap. That means food stamps. They cannot eat without food stamps. But guess what, in 46 states, you could only use food stamps in-person. 

So if you were blind, you had to go to the store before there was a vaccine, before there were mask mandates. And you shop using a lot of touch. There was no way for them to access food safely for people with underlying medical conditions, for people who are in a wheelchair who can't just jump out of the way when somebody without a mask on is in the supermarket. 

So we were able to reach out to 100% of the governors, no matter the political party. And say, look, we're not asking for more money for food stamps. We're just saying, hey, it's 2021, at that point in time. Can't we just do online purchase and delivery just like anyone else? Walmart was a partner with us. Walmart was a partner. And Walmart and Amazon were real partners in online purchase and delivery, which saved so many lives without costing any more money to taxpayers. 

SAM CAPLAN: Well, I'm so glad to hear that my former employer, Walmart, was engaged with that. And Jennifer, I think that one area where I would love to talk with you about maybe just to help close our conversation today would be, first of all, to say thank you for sharing some of your own personal story. It's really powerful to hear. And certainly there is so much to be gained from all of us beginning to speak more authentically about ourselves. 

So you and I have something in common. That is that we both grew up in the South Jewish, which has been not only an interesting experience for me, and I'm sure for you, but something that has really shaped me and guided me as I've become an adult and a member of the philanthropic community. So love to hear a little bit about, what was your experience like growing up Jewish in North Carolina? And how did that influence the direction that you took with your career? 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Thanks for asking. First of all, not only am I Jewish, I'm really proud to be Jewish and I'm really involved in my Jewish community. So it's not like it's just like a side part of me. It is a core part of me. There is a philosophy in the Jewish faith called tikkun olam, mending the world. That says it's a moral obligation to make the world a better place according to our faith and tradition. 

We are not expected to fix everything. We are expected to do what we can to make things better. So we're not held to the standard of being able to fix every solution, but we are literally forbidden to desist from trying to make things better. And so that is something that is very important to me personally. 

My father is an immigrant who survived the Holocaust. Almost our entire family was slaughtered because we're Jewish. Other people who grow up with aunts and uncles and a million cousins, my family was almost completely obliterated by the Nazis. And so it was very important to us this issue of prejudice. 

And my father was brought down to Duke Hospital to do cancer research there. And there were 17 Jewish families that started a congregation. My father was the president of the congregation. My mother was later the president of the women's group. My sister was later the president of the youth group. Because frankly, there just weren't that many of us. 

But we went to a school. It was a private school that was founded during a time where there was real segregation. It was founded by Quakers, the friends community, it was a friend school, by people of color, people who were African-American, and largely Jews. And so that was very much our—my childhood was working on civil rights. My parents were very active in civil rights. We did have a cross burned near our house. The Klan targeted us. My parents were very active in civil rights, and it's something I really care about. 

But that doesn't mean that at age 57 as a philanthropist who cares about civil rights that I get it right every time. I will say that I frequently still get it wrong. And that one of the key things is always passing the mic and passing the mic. And one of the things about being somebody with ADHD who's dyslexic is I didn't learn to read until I was pretty old. And I'm always hard for me to resist speaking. And so this concept of passing the mic is not so easy for me. And so I'm still this old dog trying to learn new tricks. And I still make mistakes. 

But I'm very, very proud that RespectAbility that our chair is a person of color who is blind. And he's not the first person with a disability who's a person of color to be our chairperson. And half of our 30-person board are people of color and the majority are people with disabilities. And 40% of our staff at all levels are people of color and 87% are people with disabilities. That doesn't mean that we get it right perfectly in our organization. 

And we're very happy because we just got a major gift from Hilton. And one of the things we're doing, even though we're a very, very small organization, really still a startup, is we're bringing in somebody to be a DEIA person inside our staff. Because 100% of the organization is responsible for it, but somebody has to be the point person who's accountable to move it forward. 

So I think that's part of it. And I'm getting ready to retire from RespectAbility. And so one of the things I'm really thrilled about is that as I start to head towards the door, that internally there will be somebody who is working on every aspect of equity, whether it's racism, ableism, homophobia, anti-semitism. By the way, we have numerous Muslims on our team also. Any kind of prejudice that the organization is completely intersectional and committed to doing the best possible and being a role model for others. 

SAM CAPLAN: Jennifer, I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to pass the mic to you today. Have absolutely loved learning about your background and all of the amazing work that RespectAbility is doing. And I can't wait to see what is coming next for you after you retire and move on to whatever your next challenge is going to be. And thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a fantastic conversation. 

JENNIFER MIZRAHI: Thank you, Sam Caplan. Thank you to Submittable for the really, really important role that you play in social change and philanthropy, as thought leaders and as people who make every aspect of your company something about really making smoother, happier, better improvements of the world is a better place. 

SAM CAPLAN: Thank you. 

Thanks to you for joining us today. There is so much to explore and learn about these topics. We’ve included additional resources for you in the episode notes. Let’s grow and improve together. 

Impact Audio is edited and produced by Jordan Marvin and Laura Steele. Submittable is a cloud-based social impact platform designed to help your team make better decisions and have a bigger impact. We’d love to partner with you to maximize social good and create lasting change through smarter technology—find out more at Submittable.com. And until next time, take good care.