A Century-Old Group Created by Private-School Alumnae Becomes a Force on Race and Disability

More than 50 nonprofits have signed the Disability Inclusion Pledge, committing to do more to provide access and opportunity to individuals with disabilities. The grant makers among them are some of the mightiest in the land — Ford, Kresge, Mellon — but the list also includes a little-known Pittsburgh foundation born in 1911 as a noblesse oblige group of boarding-school alumnae who wanted to help poor and working-class women and their children.

The FISA Foundation awards about $1.5 million in grants annually, which could be a rounding error in Ford’s billion-dollar budget. Yet it is punching above its weight as a leader in Pittsburgh and nationally as a voice on disability issues. Not coincidentally, seven of the pledge signers are Pittsburgh groups. Specifically, FISA and executive director Kristy Trautmann are making the case that racial-equity movements — whether focused on housing, employment, or economic mobility — won’t succeed if they don’t consider how race and disability conspire to deepen the problems they aim to solve. In the past year, it has run webinars, shifted its grant making, and rewritten its mission statement and strategic plan to ensure to put racial justice at the center of its work.

“This is a fundamental change for us, not a passing interest,” Trautmann says.

FISA has a trifold mission, having added disability issues to its original core work. While race has always factored into much of its grant making, it seemed tangential to disability issues. Trautmann, however, describes a painful reckoning in which she and her board recognized that they were overlooking the double burden carried by people of color with disabilities.

First, there was Vilissa Thompson’s #DisabilityTooWhite’s social-media campaign and its critique of the disability movement as led by and centered on the experiences of white Americans. Trautmann and FISA also had to confront Ruderman Family Foundation research suggesting that one third to one half of individuals killed in police custody — many of them Black Americans — had a disability.

Most important, FISA grantees and partners working with girls of color pushed to disaggregate data related to the school-to-prison pipeline. Analyses showed disparities rooted in race but also in disability. “That was very powerful,” Trautmann says. “We owe a debt to the women of color leading these efforts. They were bringing it to us.”

Last fall, FISA convened its disability grantees — most of them led by white executives — to share what it was learning. It also asked several people of color with disabilities to share their personal experiences. Some were parents of children with developmental disabilities who, having been diagnosed late or not at all, had been pushed out of school and landed in trouble with the law. Others talked about the hostility of the overwhelmingly white corps of care providers.

“It was a really pointed critique,” Trautmann says. “That was hard for us to hear but also impossible to forget.”

Forty to 50 percent of FISA’s disability-focused grant making in the past year has gone to groups working at the race-disability intersection, and the foundation is embracing new strands of work. It’s backing, among other groups, Autism Urban Connections, which brings together families of color who have children with autism. FISA is also supporting a legal-services group that works to expunge the criminal records of people convicted of minor offenses that stem from a disability. That’s something the foundation has never done before.

“First steps are going to be stumbling and awkward,” Trautmann says, “but you need to take those first steps and stay with it through the mistakes and awkwardness and fear of doing it wrong to get to more purposeful action.”