New Nonprofit
Disability communities around the U.S. are getting to know a new advocacy organization, New Disabled South.
Lots of disability-focused nonprofits start up every year. New Disabled South is notable. It has the potential to make an unusually focused impact – well beyond a city or small town, a tiny, insular corner of the internet, or a single disabled person's personal ambitions. It may also serve as a model for other disability organizations, and other nonprofits, on how to make methods consistent with mission.
New Disabled South is a nonprofit disability advocacy organization with a regional scope – broader than local or state level, but more specific than a national disability organization. Its founder and CEO is Dom Kelly, a disabled Georgia man with extensive experience over the last several years doing disability-related outreach, organizing and advocacy work, first for Fair Fight Action and then for Stacey Abrams' 2022 campaign for Governor of Georgia.
New Disabled South has a small staff, plus governing and advisory teams that are deeply diverse, and most of whom are also people with disabilities. Current staff includes Kelly and Chief Operating Officer Kehsi Iman Wilson, plus three others dedicated to organizing and advocacy, finance, and communications. The organization is led by a 10-member Board of Directors, and guided by a 12-member Advisory Council. Staff, board, and advisory council are all made up of people experienced in the field of disability activism, and diverse across race, gender, and sexual orientation. Every member of the staff and Board has some kind of disability. And 5 out of 12 members of the Advisory Council are disabled as well.
New Disabled South’s unique geographic focus includes 14 states in the Southeastern U.S., as far west as Texas and Oklahoma, and to Virginia and West Virginia to the North.
Its staffing diversity and representation, and its regional approach are only parts of what make New Disabled South different and an intriguing prospect for the future of nonprofit disability advocacy. Kelly and his team also employ other approaches that already make the new organization stand out, and suggest some bold ideas for the future of organized disability advocacy.
Priority issues
New Disabled South’s Mission is, “To improve the lives of disabled people and cultivate strong disability rights and disability justice frameworks in the South.” Its Vision statement calls for, “A South where liberation and justice for all disabled people is achievable.”
While these are notably broad and ambitious goals, New Disabled South’s work centers on more specific and practical disability policy issues that are organized into three “priority policy buckets":
1. Poverty and Care
This includes advocating for benefits and services designed to enable people with any disability to live independent and financially secure lives. One issue Kelly specifically cites is healthcare, in particular, Southern states’ failure to take up the Medicaid Expansions available in the Affordable Care Act. This is a nationwide issue as well, but is a much more severe problem in the South, one that acutely affects people with disabilities and people of color. New Disabled South has also recently spoken out about the need to raise pay and eliminate waiting lists for Home and Community Based Services, the everyday hands-on services so many people with disabilities need to live independently and avoid institutionalization. These are services that tens of thousands of disabled people are qualified for, but are denied only due to lack of funding. It’s another problem not unique to the South but more common and harmful to disabled people in the region.
2. Criminalization
This policy “bucket” calls attention to how disabled people are in many ways disproportionately entangled and abused by law enforcement. This includes police mistreatment, violence, and killing, and high incarceration rates. It’s one of the most critical policy areas where disability, race, and other types of social discrimination intersect and overlap. And it’s another issue that runs that much deeper in the South through the legacies of slavery and segregation.
3. Democracy
New Disabled South’s third policy focus is on the process of government itself. It will continue and refine the ongoing fight for basic voting accessibility, flexibility, and simplicity for people with disabilities – at every stage from registration to casting votes on election day. This includes pushing back against recent state efforts, especially in the South, at making voting procedures more complex and burdensome in the name of “integrity.” These measures end up suppressing votes of people of color and people with disabilities.
In an effort to better engage with disability policy, and the political movements where policy is made, New Disabled South announced last week the start of its new 501(c)(4) "political arm," New Disabled South Rising. 501(c)(4) status allows some greater freedom to engage in more partisan advocacy than the core organization’s 501(c)(3) designation allows. While most disability advocacy organizations do valuable work on disability policy while remaining strictly nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) rules limit how much and in what ways they can interact directly with candidates and lawmakers to influence the direction of disability policy. Properly setting up a second, more political operation right from the start shows how Kelly and his team are preparing to advocate disability issues as powerfully as possible in the heart of today’s political life.
Kelly is hopeful about this, despite the political polarization which threatens to divide disability communities the way it seems to divide every community. “If we take the political party out of it completely and have discussions about basic policy,” he says, “I'd venture to say that most disabled people agree on many issues that impact our day to day lives.”
Regional approach
Kelly and his team see similar disability issues across Southern states, like poor health coverage, waitlists for services, incarceration and police violence, poverty, and restrictive and inaccessible voting. That is why the regional approach is so important and promising. “When we can look at these critical issues from a regional perspective,” Kelly says, “look at the throughlines between Georgia and Mississippi and Louisiana and wherever else, we can think holistically about how we organize and how we find solutions.”
Patterns of policy decisions affecting people with disabilities, such as voting and health care – and historically misunderstood intersections of race and disability, and compounding effects of racism and ableism are especially acute in the South. And the call for something more refined than a generic “disability rights” stance. Kelly argues for both regional and cultural specificity, noting, “You can't expect to talk to a different racial or ethnic community about the issues they are facing without understanding their history, traditions, etc.” Disabled people of all walks of life have much in common. But different disability communities experience disability differently.
Staffing and compensation
If New Disabled South’s goal is to empower people with disabilities and lift them out of poverty, then possibly its most powerful statement so far is its approach to its own employees.
It starts with comparatively high pay for the nonprofit sector, especially disability nonprofits. Staff salaries are in the realm of $85,000 to $90,000, depending on position, and in the $115,000 to $130,00 range for top management. While this is still low compared to salaries of at least some disability nonprofit CEOs, the whole salary range is a lot more than what starting day to day staff at most disability organizations make.
From the beginning, Kelly was determined not to be, as he says, “obsessed” with keeping salaries and overhead low, which feeds into the common implication that operating on a shoestring and paying staff subsistence wages is some kind of virtue for nonprofits. This tends to lead to nonprofits having what Kelly deems, “criminally low pay and terrible benefits.” Among other things this makes it harder, sometimes impossible, for marginalized and less well-off people to commit to this kind of work.
It is an even more critical problem for disabled people who want to work in disability advocacy. Living with a disability is expensive. And far too many disabled employees at disability organizations are forced to deal with a minefield of government benefits eligibility rules because they earn low salaries and have few if any benefits. Substantially higher salaries alone can all but eliminate this added worry for disabled employees.
New Disabled South’s benefits package is even more impressive. According to Kelly, it includes 100% Platinum health insurance premium coverage for employees, (50% for dependents), dental and vision, life insurance, (100% of premium covered for both employees and dependents), and $1,000 per year of professional development stipends. New Disabled South also allows 12 weeks paid family leave and 2 months paid sabbatical after 4 years of service.
The organization’s regular work routines are also designed for flexibility and sustainability. It runs on a four-day, 32-hour work week. There is an unlimited paid time off / sick leave policy. Work from home is allowed and a stipend for that provided. And there are over 3 weeks in organization-wide office closures, including a two-week winter break and one week break in summer.
All of these generous and flexible staffing approaches are designed to ensure that New Disabled South can have and keep the best disabled staff possible. At the same time, they demonstrate how other nonprofit employers could and perhaps should treat all their employees, especially those with disabilities.
For Kelly, having the right team is critical. “I also believe in hiring people who know more than you,” he says. “So if you can figure out how to create an income stream but you don't know how to manage a budget, hire someone who does.” His first full-time hire was Chief Operating Officer Kehsi Iman Wilson, an expert in operations and Human Resources. “She teaches me so much everyday,” says Kelly, “and we are really a team.”
Asked how all of this is funded, Kelly says that New Disabled South relies on many individual donors, as well as foundation support. Fortunately, Kelly actually likes fundraising. “It really brings me joy to raise money,” he says, “especially when it's to make change for our community.”
New Disabled South is less than half a year old. But it is already notable in the disability advocacy community for its bold approaches, authenticity, and competence. It is idealistic but focused, broad in scope, but practical and specific. And it seems to be grounded in organizational structures that both reflect and power its mission and values.
It’s a model others with disabilities can learn from. And Dom Kelly has advice for people with disabilities who want to take the initiative and create their own opportunities:
“Find your people in this community who motivate you and push you, work through your fears, and carve out that space,” he says. “Don't do it alone, though. Ask the people you admire to be a part of it, hire people smarter than you, and do whatever you have to do to make the dream a reality.”
