Creating a More Inclusive Future: A Q&A with Adam Ballard

The Disabilities Fund at The Chicago Community Trust is an affinity fund that supports organizations advancing disability inclusion, rights and justice. Recently, the Fund underwent a year-long transformation to adopt a participatory grantmaking model that better centers the perspectives of those with lived experience of disability. 

In celebration of Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month (March 1-March 31), Adam Ballard met with Cora Fassett, the Trust’s strategic communications intern, to discuss how the Disabilities Fund is working to build a more equitable Chicago. Adam is the interim co-chair of the Fund and a longtime community activist focused on disability and aging issues. He takes an intersectional approach to policy work that addresses fair and affordable housing, transportation, and community development. 

Some questions and answers have been condensed and edited for clarity. 

What are you most excited about seeing the fund do in the new iteration? 

Adam Ballard: A lot of our funding was going towards more established, institutional-type partners who are doing great work, but we knew there were folks without access to capital who were trying to do good work or had great ideas for work. The profile of our ideal grant recipient moving forward is one of two things: a smaller startup organization for people with disabilities or an initiative or a program at an existing organization that’s trying to do something new in the disability space with disability leadership.  

It’s really important to us that the organizations or programs that we fund have decision-makers who are people with disabilities. It’s not that that wasn’t the case before, but it’s now very much central to how we are going to do business going forward. 

What are some of the decision-making changes you made?  

AB: We saw an opportunity to have our advisory board be a little more inclusive. We really wanted to have a chance for a younger, more diverse group of leaders to come in with a variety of lived experiences. Because unemployment is the highest in the disability community compared to any other marginalized community, we wanted people who are early career, mid-career, and maybe people who have a hard time keeping a job because of their disability. We wanted a wide variety of experiences that felt more representative of the community as a whole.  

What do you see as one of the biggest issues facing people with disabilities in Chicago?  

AB: We have one of the largest organized disability communities in the country here in Chicago, which is a plus, but it’s also a very large community. There are still a lot of people, and this is true everywhere, who don’t identify as part of it, but we still want to reach out and help them see that they are part of this community and that their disability is not something to be ashamed of or to hide.  

The reality is that many people with disabilities in Chicago, like everywhere, survive on a low fixed income – often relying on Social Security or similar programs. However, they typically have no assets, no savings, and little opportunity to build a secure future by themselves. Simply surviving can be incredibly difficult, given the limited financial support available. 

That’s why expanding resources and developing community-based, community-owned assets is so important. Any projects we fund will, in some way, contribute toward that general goal – whether by improving health outcomes, housing outcomes, or other key factors that ultimately allow people to live the lives they choose. 

Do you have any advice for people looking to broaden their understanding of the issues facing the disability community?  

AB: It’s really important for people to understand that people with disabilities often get trapped in a cycle of poverty by the very programs that we depend on. 

Medicaid and Social Security have asset limits, meaning you can quickly exceed the asset threshold by partnering with someone, making it difficult to get married or start a family. It’s also hard to build savings when reaching a certain amount could put your health insurance, housing subsidy, or income at risk. We call it the benefits trap. It’s not the benefits themselves that are the problem; it’s that they keep people in poverty and make it nearly impossible to afford stable housing, which is essential for securing steady employment. On top of that, we live in a world that still doesn’t accommodate us to the extent that it could or should, making it even more difficult to break out of the cycle. 

What’s your vision for the future of the Disabilities Fund?  

AB: We’re piloting this new participatory grantmaking process, continually refining and improving it. We will learn lessons from this round of funding and then apply it to the next. We hope to build a process that eventually is inclusive and representative of people with disabilities across the region. We’re on the right path. 

Over the past few decades, there has been a powerful movement of people with disabilities stepping into leadership and driving change. Now, it’s just as important to prepare the next generation of leaders and make sure they are even more inclusive and representative of the disability community in Chicago and the U.S. Participatory grantmaking is one way we can make that happen.