A few months ago I attended a fundraising event and when I registered I noted my dietary restrictions: no gluten please. I don't avoid gluten as a lifestyle thing. It sets off my RA, which means, for me, joint pain and fatigue and a flare that can take days to walk back.
When we sat down to brunch, there was a beautiful spread. Pastries. Croissants. Kolaches. And one small, shared potato-and-egg dish. So I ate some potatoes and eggs, and spent the rest of the day feeling like an inconvenient afterthought.
I brought it up with the organizers, and they shrugged. The food was donated, they said, and budget was a concern.
That's it. That's the whole story. Nobody was cruel. Nobody said anything you could screenshot. It was a minor moment at an otherwise great event. But it still stings half a year later.
It's also not the first — or the last — time, my disabilities have felt like an annoyance or the setup for an awkward laugh. But what’s underneath that awkward laugh? What would fundraising look like if we remembered that people are disabled? Not just the people our programs serve, and not just the folks at disability rights organizations. Our board. Our donors. Our staff. The person across the table at the event.
Increasingly the nonprofit sector has become the conscience of society. We're the ones who point a spotlight at those who are left out and yet we build our own rooms around one default body, call it “normal” and rarely notice when we've done it. When it’s brought up, usually by a disabled person advocating for themselves, it’s an outlier we can “fix” next time around. I think that costs us more than we realize, and most of the cost hides in who stops showing up, who never asks, and who we only ever see as someone to help.
The shrug wasn't about money
Here's the part I can't let go of. The food was donated.
I don't know what an invoice would have looked like. But "we don't have the budget" is a sentence that ends conversations. It ended this one before anyone asked whether the problem was money at all.
I don't think it was. I think it was memory. Nobody planning that menu was picturing me. Or, more accurately, they were picturing a guest with no restrictions, no flares, and no need to ask for anything, and they built the whole lunch for that person. That’s the default guest. Not many people actually fit that mold.
I went to an event last year that served tamales. Whoever planned it knew Austin has options that cover nearly every restriction if you're willing to think past the rubber chicken dinner. It wasn't expensive. It was remembered.
We're supposed to be the conscience
We're the ones who set the standard for how a society treats people. Who counts, who gets heard, and how we show up for each other. When something is wrong for people who've been pushed to the edges, a nonprofit is usually the first place anyone says so out loud.
A recent piece from Social Current, published in March 2025, points to a moment of heightened awareness of social issues: as people become more aware of poverty, health care access, and inequality, nonprofits "must redefine their continued and important contributions to these conversations." That's a more modest claim than "conscience," and it's about what the public now expects of us rather than what we've earned.
We're the voice of people who've been systemically excluded. We carry the concerns about ethics, the environment, and human rights. We organize, we push on the status quo, and we're supposed to be the moral watchdogs when the government or the market gets it wrong. Whether or not we asked for it, that's the job description the rest of society has handed us.
Take the Americans with Disabilities Act. Like so many of our legal rights, it came after a fight. The 1977 Section 504 Sit-In and the 1990 Capitol Crawl helped bring the ADA into law. But the people who did that work were, in the language of our sector, "them." Constituents. Beneficiaries. And even as these people fought for basic rights, the sector was fundraising in ways disability activists criticized, like the "Jerry Lewis" telethon of the Muscular Dystrophy Association which is a fascinating and frustrating rabbit hole to dive into.
Our social conscience was built, at least in part, by people we then quickly sorted into other categories. One writer succinctly summarizes much of the pushback: The telethon wasn’t just raising money for one disease. It was teaching a country how to see all of us. An adult asking for a ramp is a policy problem. A child asking for a cure is a tearjerker. The telethon knew which one raised money.
So I want to hold two things. The sector really has been a conscience, and the credit for some of the best of it belongs to people we still don't plan for. And if that's the role we play, then what we do in our own rooms isn't only our business. People learn what normal looks like by watching us.
You're already here
About one in four American adults reports having a disability, according to the CDC. That's roughly 61 million people (2022 data). It isn't a niche group, and it's not the "constituents" side of a few specific nonprofits. It's your board chair's spouse and your best monthly donor and the volunteer who always shows up early. It's probably you. Which means your organization already includes disabled people. It almost certainly includes some you don't know about.
Jen Bokoff described it perfectly in her 2022 article, Time for Philanthropy to Confront Ableism:
"For years, I have been part of and an observer to ableist gatekeeping in philanthropy. From a "go, go, go" work culture to the invitation of proposals and office and event design, the philanthropy sector is not without its share of ableism. I've spent much of my career operating in systems that have not honored what my body needs to be successful, because of both structural ableism and ableism that I've internalized. As a person with chronic illnesses, I didn't know about accommodations I could request or boundaries I could set, because I didn't see them modeled around me. When I once tried to share my experiences with pain, fatigue, sensory sensitivity, and digestive needs at a former team retreat, I was met with disbelief and laughter. The awkwardness sent a clear message: It's easier just to keep it to yourself."
I read that and thought, oh. That's the laugh. Same one.
What it means to center a body
To center something is to make it the default. The thing everything else gets measured against, without anyone deciding that out loud. We assume an able body is the normal body, and so the able body sits in the middle of every decision we make, sometimes on purpose and mostly not. The room layout. The registration form. The meeting that runs three hours with no break. The board member who gets asked to help set up chairs.
Then everyone else gets arranged around that center in layers. Think of it as rings of access, or lack of it. Someone who can physically get to the event is going to have a better time than someone who can't, say, a person using a wheelchair. But that doesn't mean the event is accessible to the first person either. It just means they're closer to the center, and closeness gets mistaken for inclusion.
And it's never only one thing in the middle. When able-bodiedness is the norm, it tends to show up with whiteness, heterosexuality, being cisgender, and a few other assumptions hanging out in there. That's our default guest, the one we're building for: a white, able-bodied, cisgender donor who shows up and doesn't ask more of us than we're asking of them.
This is also where disability justice comes in. As a framework, it grew out of Black, brown, queer, and trans disabled people who felt sidelined by the mainstream disability rights movement.
Most nonprofits sort people into two groups without ever saying so out loud. There's "us": the staff, the board, the donors, the people in the room. And there's "them," the people we serve. We use words like constituents, beneficiaries, clients, community. Disabled people mostly get filed under "them." If your organization doesn't work on disability, the assumption is that there's nothing to plan for. That's for the disability rights organizations. It's not our lane.
I don't think anyone decided that. It's human. We want to protect ourselves from the unpleasant reality that we could be next. One accident, one stressor, one bad day, and we could lose our able bodies too. And then what does that make us? The other. The them. So disabled people are objects of pity and help, instead of partners at the table with us. Which leaves the question: who gets asked for money, who gets a board seat, and who's seen as the expert in the room?
I'm both: the board member, the sponsor, the monthly donor. But I'm also the "them": someone we talk about but don't always listen to.
Who's not in the room
I can't count the people who aren't in the room. That's the problem with an absence.
But I can tell you who I think we're missing, because "inclusion" gets abstract fast.
Some of them are the guests who read the invitation, wondered whether they'd be able to eat, sit, or get through the door, didn't know who to ask, and stayed home. You'll never see them in the attendance numbers. You'll see a no-show, or nothing at all.
Some of them are in the room and quiet. They're on your board and they eat before they come. They're on your staff and they've decided the retreat will be fine if they just push through. They're the donor who keeps coming to the events and has quietly stopped enjoying them.
And some of them leave. One respondent in the Disability Belongs survey, a disabled executive, put it this way: "As a disabled executive, I have had many issues with trustees and staff members who are not inclusive, do not help, and sometimes 'doubt' the level of my disability."
How many times can you be doubted by the people you're leading before you decide the job isn't worth it? How many events will leave me feeling like an outsider before I decide to stop showing up, and to stop giving?
This has a cost, both short- and long-term. Someone who could have been your next great board member isn't. A donor who would have given more, or given differently, drifts off, and your database logs it as attrition. A staff member with lived expertise about accessibility, who could make your whole fundraising program better, leaves, and you call it turnover.
Rebecca Cokley, writing in "Who Is at the Table" for the Disability & Philanthropy Forum, names the mechanism directly: "It is very likely that your board membership already includes a person with a disability or chronic health condition. It's also very likely that they do not feel safe self-disclosing or expressing access needs."
What we're protecting when we forget
Now zoom out. Why does this keep happening in a sector full of people who care?
The Disability Belongs survey has some answers. It's from 2018, so read it as a snapshot, not a verdict.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) said their organization's leadership has made a public commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Of those organizations, 93% named race as a priority and 87% named gender. 73% named sexual orientation or gender identity. Disability came in at 68%. (And that's counting each category alone. It doesn't tell us how many of those pledges think about the person who's Black, disabled, and queer at the same time.)
Then there's recruiting. Fewer than one in four respondents (23%) said their organization makes intentional efforts to recruit people with disabilities, whether for jobs, internships, volunteer roles, or board seats. Nearly half (46%) said their organization does nothing on that front, and another quarter (25%) weren't sure.
Boards are a good example of how thin this gets. I went looking for real numbers on disability representation on nonprofit boards, and what I found was scattered. BoardSource's 2021 Leading with Intent report puts most of its energy into race, and its disability number comes down to one line: 5% of board members. Candid's 2024 analysis of nearly 60,000 U.S. public charities found that the average board has five members without a disability and fewer than one with a disability.
I think the thinness is the finding. We have real, if imperfect, tracking on racial and gender board diversity, tracking that lets us feel accountable, or at least embarrassed. On disability, as far as I can tell, we're only starting to count, which means we haven't had to answer for it yet.
And events. Just 30% said their public events let participants request things like sign language interpreters, live captioning, or food allergy alternatives. One respondent explained: "We haven't had any requests for accommodation [and] I hope we don't put anything out there that suggests we're not open to it. But we haven't very explicitly invited it."
Read that again slowly. It's the whole loop. If we don't invite requests, we don't get requests. If we don't get requests, we conclude nobody needs anything. And if nobody needs anything, there's nothing to fix, and the status quo gets to call itself neutral.
When the survey asked why organizations fall short on disability inclusion, the top answer, from 36% of respondents, was bias, "overt or unconscious." The survey's own analysis doesn't soften this:
When asked to choose one of six possible explanations for why organizations come up short on disability inclusion, the most common response called out as the top reason by more than a third of respondents (36 percent) was "there is overt or unconscious bias about people with disabilities." Think about that: More so than the inherent complexity of the issue or potential legal risks, lack of training to make it successful, or any other unrelated but urgent concerns facing foundations and nonprofits, bias against people with disabilities was cited as the top reason why they are not better integrated into our organizations. By a large margin. Whether brazen or subtle, prejudice is a significant challenge for people with disabilities, including in the social sector.
This is the "us and them" line doing its work. I don't think most of us are hostile. I think we've inherited a picture of who a donor is, who a board member is, and who "the people we serve" are, and disabled people got filed under the last one. If you look at who we recruit, seat, and ask for money, I'm not sure inclusivity has has reached the fundraising department yet.
What we normalize
If we really are the conscience, then what we do in our own rooms matters beyond our own rooms. A corporate sponsor sees who we plan for. A funder sees who we recruit. A donor sees who gets a chair and who's asked to stand. A teenager volunteering for the first time sees who's on the stage and who's setting up the chairs. Every one of those people is learning, without anyone teaching them, what a "normal" event looks like, what a "normal" board looks like, and who belongs at both.
And there's a second audience I think about. The people we serve. The ones we built the whole mission around. If they watch us plan every gala and every retreat and every donor visit around a body that isn't theirs, what do we think they conclude about how much we meant it?
The examples of what the sector can do are real. Campaigns have changed how people talk, and organizers won disability legislation. We know how to shift a norm, because we've done it. The catch is that shifting a norm out there and shifting one in here are different jobs, and the second one is a lot less comfortable.
Why we don't start
I think a lot of us are scared of getting it wrong. It's the race to innocence, the urge to prove we're on the right side. In a sector that's built its whole identity on being the good guys, that urge runs deep. And if the goal is to be one of the good ones, then accessibility becomes a test you can fail. Being a little bit accessible and messing it up feels worse than never claiming to be accessible at all.
Here's where I've landed, for now. We do it within our sphere of influence, and we do it scared. Bringing inclusion into your fundraising is probably not going to be a straight line. You're going to mess something up. You might exclude someone, or annoy someone, or say something that lands wrong. It's not about perfection, it's about progress. I'm sure that somewhere in this article I've said something off-kilter or left something out. I'm publishing it anyway.
The other thing I'd add is to keep questioning your own motives as you go. There's a version of "we're learning and we'll do better" that's real, and a version that's a press-release shrug, where the words stand in for the work. The test is whether anything changes afterward.
Widening the center
Inclusivity doesn't start with a budget. It starts with asking, and then acting on the answer.
Asking is step one. The step I keep seeing skipped is the second one. (I've sat in enough planning calls to know the sentence by heart: what about allergy-free food, what about somewhere to sit, met with a nod and then tabled.)
And I want to be clear about what this is. We're not adding a special accommodation track for "those people." We're loosening the grip of one default so that more bodies count as expected. Here's what that could look like across the fundraising cycle, roughly in the order someone would meet you.
Registration and RSVPs. Put a real line on the form: "What would help you attend and participate fully?" Then tell people who reads the answers and when they'll hear back. A blank text box that goes nowhere is even worse than no box.
Donor conversations. Ask how someone likes to meet before you pick the coffee shop. It takes ten seconds and tells them you're planning for a person, not a prospect.
Event day. Send the agenda ahead, including when the breaks are. Give people somewhere to sit, and somewhere quieter to sit if they want it, without having to explain why. Place accessible seating with everyone else, not by the exit. When you introduce yourself at the mic, describe yourself in a sentence, and read out what's on the slides. None of this costs money. All of it tells people they were expected.
Your board. If you only do one thing, I'd make it this one. Take your last board meeting and go through it like a detective. Where was it held? Would someone with limited mobility or who uses a wheelchair have been able to show up as easily as everyone else? Would someone who's deaf or hard of hearing have been able to fully participate? How long was it, and was there a break? What were the expectations, and where were the friction points?
Then look at what you ask of your board. Were they brought on for thought leadership, and then asked to set up chairs and tables? Someone with an invisible disability might be forced to disclose something they'd rather not, just to explain why they can't. Our default assumption is that everyone can do everything unless they say otherwise, which makes people opt out of able-bodiedness in public. What if we flipped it? What if the expectation was that people would opt in to what works for them, and the standard offer already had options built in?
Assume some of your candidates and current members have access needs they haven't told you about. Say in your onboarding materials that requests for meeting formats, timing, materials, or breaks are normal. Cokley's point is that you're preparing the board as much as you're supporting the person.
Be okay with progress. Someone asked me recently if one of our venues was wheelchair accessible. The answer was, unfortunately, "sort of." I was embarrassed that several of our tools and areas were not accessible, and I'm not sure they ever will be. But I wrote back with the reality: the door was hard to open, those tools were inaccessible, but everything else was accessible, and if anything didn't work for them, please let us know. They were grateful to be informed and were able to fully engage. It also put some action items on my list for the future. I didn't fix everything. I told the truth and gave them a way to tell me more.
Follow-up. Ask afterward. "Was there anything that made it harder to be here?" And if someone tells you, do something visible with the answer. Don't self-flagellate, and don't ignore them because it's awkward. A short "thank you, here's what we're changing" goes a long way.
It's the small tweaks kind of change. Nothing about your case for support has to move. You're just noticing what you'd been skipping.
Where to go next
Talk to actual disabled people. Not as a focus group, and not only when you need something. Ask your board members, your donors, and your staff what they wish you knew, and then believe them, including the ones whose disabilities you can't see and might doubt if you let yourself.
Read what disability rights organizations say, and read disabled authors. Sins Invalid's 10 Principles of Disability Justice is a good place to start, and so is Talila A. Lewis's working definition of ableism, which describes it as a system of assigning value to people's bodies and minds. And when you come across the principles of universal design, which NC State's Center for Universal Design published in 1997, read them as a list of your possibilities, not as a list of everything you're failing to do. The same goes for the articles and checklists. If you read them as a scorecard, you'll get defensive. If you read them as a menu, you'll get curious.
Some things do cost real money, like interpreters, live captioning, and audio description. Elizabeth Ralston's piece for Community-Centric Fundraising is a good next stop when you're ready to budget for them. But I'd rather you start with the version you can do this week than wait for a budget conversation that may or may not happen this fiscal year.
What could shift
I keep imagining the same event, run the other way. Same brunch. Same donated food. Someone asked, before anyone sat down, what would make it work, and somebody remembered.
At the smallest scale, that looks like a person who doesn't have to decide whether to disclose, or eat in the car beforehand, or spend the afternoon feeling like a problem to be managed. Disclosure becomes a choice and not the price of entry. A board member stays. A donor gives a little more, or gives at all. A staff member with lived expertise stays long enough to change something.
At the scale of the sector, I think it's bigger, but I'm less sure. If the organizations that call themselves society's conscience start planning for disabled people as a default, then sponsors, funders, and donors get to see that it's normal. And normal is the thing we're really moving. I don't mean flattening difference, because people aren't interchangeable and shouldn't be. I mean de-centering the one body we've been treating as the baseline, so that everyone else stops being an exception.
I can't promise that'll happen. I'm one person, and this is one article. But I'd rather widen the center a little and get it wrong than keep it exactly where it is.
So here's what I'd ask you. Think about the last event, board meeting, or donor visit you organized. Who did you plan it for? Who's in your "us," and who got filed under "them"?
