News Context: Cultural Policy for Access & Artistry
A special issue of Crip News with a call to action to influence a plan for NYC's Department of Cultural Affairs.
In addition to your weekly news roundup in issue #119, today we’re also publishing a longer-read with some background and analysis about a news item: the release of 5-Year Accessibility Plans for each of New York’s City agencies. If you have the spoons this week and especially if you live in NYC, please read through to the bottom where you’ll find a call to action.
-kevin
Policy enshrines progress.
Policy doesn’t guarantee anything.
Such is the tricky place for policy in disability movement work today. We think of Disability Rights and we’re reminded of enduring successes that legislation can enact. We think of Disability Justice and we’re reminded of the urgency of mutual aid efforts to do what policy can’t, when policy protects only those who already have “the right to have rights.”
Today we’re supplementing the usual news-gathering with some analysis about the role of policy in advancing access and disability artistry.
NYC’s 5-Year Accessibility Plans
There’s a lot of policy to review any given week. See the UK’s recently announced 32-point “Disability Action Plan” or the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s recent guidance on “Providing an Accessible Workplace.”
Here we’ll focus on one policy process in NYC, the development of 5-year accessibility plans in City government.
In late 2022, a group of City Council members led by Linda Lee introduced legislation that requires each city agency to develop and implement a 5-year plan to ensure accessibility for disabled New Yorkers. The Council approved the bill and it became law in January 2023 despite Mayor Adams taking no action to sign it.
The law calls for plans to address:
The steps the agency is taking and will be taking over the next 5 years to ensure accessibility to the agency’s workplace, services, and programs, and
Information on ongoing projects and projects planned over the next 5 years related to improving physical, digital and programmatic access, and effective communications for persons with disabilities.
The bill puts the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities in consultation with each agency (plus the MTA) for this process. It requires the agencies to seek public comment on a draft plan before publishing the final versions on March 15, 2024 and periodically report on progress after that.
The Department of Cultural Affairs’ (DCLA) Draft Plan
The DCLA is the largest municipal funder of arts and culture in the US, most recently providing $241 million in program support for over 1,000 nonprofits. Here’s a breakdown of the draft plan the DCLA has proposed:
The plan consists largely of background information, summaries of its past commitments to access, and statements of intention to "deepening and doubling down” on them.
It reports on regulatory compliance with many current access standards.
The specific initiatives and proposed actions begin in Appendix D on page 20:
2024: Internally, reinforcing a network of “Disability Service Liaisons” in each agency unit and developing “targeted educational meetings.”
2024: Explore future user-testing of the agency’s “online systems and platforms.”
2024: Advise the cultural field on “public inclusion for online meetings.”
2024 and on: Encourage more people from disability communities to serve as panel reviewers for its main funding program, the Cultural Development Fund.
2024 - 2026: Engage disabled artists, audiences, and reviewers in the Public Art program.
The Hidden Contexts of Organizing
Starting in 2016, Simi Linton and I influenced the cultural policies of NYC through an organization we co-founded, Disability/Arts/NYC (DANT). In short order, we convened hundreds of people in NYC’s arts and disability worlds to help shape the City’s first-ever cultural plan, CreateNYC, a document that will be revised only once every decade.
We made a significant impact, including the establishment of the Disability Forward Fund that has so far distributed $2.23 million in support for disabled artists, audiences, and cultural workers. This work catalyzed, guided, and monitored the DCLA’s commitments to disability arts, which is cited extensively in the 5-year access plan draft.
But here is some crucial context that is missing from the draft plan:
We had to pressure the agency outside of its channels to secure these wins. After watching the agency’s administrative processes consume and neutralize our advocacy, we galvanized support for a disability arts platform for the City and campaigned the DCLA through memos and meetings.
This work was too rare. It was unpaid and energy-intensive. Some of our collaborators needed to leave the work to attend to medical crises. It tells the story of why a lot of important disability organizing is too often short-lived.
So when the draft access plan says “One of the cornerstones for DCLA’s work on issues of access and inclusion was the preparation of the cultural plan in 2017,” it is really naming a swell of education and advocacy that was driven by disability communities.
Good policy is nested within disability-led organizing.
In 2022, a new commissioner, Laurie Combo, was appointed to lead the DCLA. Soon after starting in this role, Cumbo claimed that the language of disability was exclusionary. “To be labeled 'disabled' to me, I wouldn't want it for myself,” she said in a hearing in 2022, “and I certainly wouldn't want it for my child.”
Several wonderful people tried to organize a community response, but right now we are missing an organization that can keep the DCLA accountable to the progress we have made. And now we have an access plan that rests largely on past work, when community-driven organizing was uniquely vibrant.
We know that what really moves the needle on cultural policy is not the particular wording in a bill but the conditions for disabled artists’ agency and influence on policy-making. The question becomes:
How can cultural policy create an organizing system where disabled artists and organizers lead?
Call to Action: Comment on the Draft Plan
For as critical as we need to be as disabled organizers, we also recognize the labor and goodness that goes into policy-making. Because the DCLA’s plan describes generalized and vague commitments, we can use this opportunity to call for specificity.
You can post comments on any of the City agencies’ plans here by FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2024.
Having worked with the DCLA for several years and served as a panelist in the Cultural Development Fund review process for the past 2 years, I offer the following 5 suggestions for feedback on the plan.
If you agree with these and want to amplify them, join us in leaving a public comment on the DCLA’s draft plan.
Here’s how: Click through to the comment portal for all the agencies’ draft plans, click “Comment on a plan!” then find the Department of Cultural Affairs (3rd row down). Finally, copy and paste the language below and submit.
[Introduce yourself, where you reside in the NYC arts ecosystem.]
1. Support disabled people to lead.
This means making regular public meetings with disability communities and paying disabled facilitators and access workers to lead these meetings. It means developing specific initiatives to uplift disabled artists and organizers as integral parts of sustainable and measurable expansion of access.
For example, update us on the progress made in the CreateNYC Action Plan before we ask. Let disabled artists choose the the access priorities from 2026 - 2029, since the current draft is missing any detail about the plans in the latter half of the 5-year period.
2. Make disability-affirmative employment real.
This is much more than gesturing toward an undefined sense of an accessible workplace. It means offering solid evidence that the agency leads the design of job accommodations, like working remotely or part-time. It means offering access to a “hold harmless fund” for disabled workers experiencing a benefits cliff when they start working for the City. It means hiring more disabled DCLA staff members who work directly on disability and access.
3. Be transparent about your capacity.
If the DCLA staff is exhausted, let us know. If new access work falls on the same people for no additional pay, tell us. Embrace a lesson from disability organizing to reflect how many spoons you’ve got. If we don’t know anything about the agency’s capacity, we can’t offer strategic support for making the access initiatives happen.
4. Prepare the next administration.
Don’t allow leadership changes to leave good organizing behind. Require new leadership to review the work from previous disability arts organizing and meet with organizers as early as possible.
5. Strengthen the Cultural Development Fund review process.
Recent reforms to the CDF process are a good start. But the access information that organizations submit in their applications is insufficient, very often reinforcing compliance as the single source of access work. In addition to ensuring that every CDF panel includes an access expert and that disability is a clear part of all diversity work for CDF panel recruitment, the DCLA should also offer targeted support for applicants’ access initiatives and, when appropriate, render organizations ineligible for funding if they don’t demonstrate a their commitment to access.
Thank you.