Inevitable Foundation launched on January 1, 2021, with a mission to address the barriers that disabled mid-level screenwriters faced in the entertainment industry through fellowships, mentorship services and advocacy.
“In many ways, we’ve had successes with that,” foundation cofounder and President Richie Siegel told IP, “but we knew there was a need to invest in filmmakers. There have been so few disabled filmmakers who have made a feature or short film with some real budget to it.”
Last May, the foundation, which has offices in New York City and Los Angeles, launched the Visionary Fellowship, a year-long program that invests in disabled filmmakers with funding, mentorship and networking opportunities to make a short film and leverage it into their first feature film. Siegel and his team spent all of June in production on the fellowship’s five shorts. “It was very challenging work,” he said, but “also immensely rewarding.”
June turned into July, and the foundation announced the creation of Inevitable Studios, a production company that will develop, produce, and market films and television shows focusing on stories about disability and caregiving. “It’s a key part in our strategy around not just working with disabled writers and filmmakers from a programmatic perspective, but actually going and making the stuff,” Siegel said. The studio will also generate revenue “that can be used to fund our other work so we can wean ourselves off our reliance on philanthropy.”
Those revenues will be critical for the foundation’s operations moving forward. When it launched in 2021, “there was a lot of momentum around the kind of representation narrative and workforce development work that we were focused on,” Siegel said. Post-election, however, the foundation and other disability rights organizations are navigating an uncertain funding landscape.
Grantmakers “are retreating or they’re afraid to step up, and that could mean funding other organizations that are doing amazing work across the disability space, whether it’s arts, policy, or advocacy,” Siegel said. “The data around disability funding continues to be a fraction of what nondisability-focused organizations get, and we need to find new ways to grow the pie.”
Disabled creatives have made progress, but there’s more work to be done
In the spring of 2021, the foundation made its first foray into film by launching its Accelerate Fellowship, a six-month “rewriting sprint” that gives disabled film and television writers $40,000 in funding and mentorship to develop a “spec script” — industry parlance for a screenplay written on speculation — to market.
When I connected with Siegel about a year later, he and cofounder Marisa Torelli-Pedevska walked me through the foundation’s other offerings, including a talent sourcing service, the Screenwriting Fellowship, which provided mid-career writers with a grant and was subsequently renamed the Accelerate Fellowship, and mentoring workshops with successful disabled writers and advocacy. At the time, less than 2% of on-screen characters and 0.7% of writers were disabled, even though 20% of the U.S. population had a disability.
The momentum that Siegel cited in the foundation’s early years perceptibly began to abate in 2023 when strikes by the Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Writers Guild of America pumped the brakes on production efforts throughout the industry. Siegel said that while the foundation’s pre-strike work wasn’t easy, there nonetheless was “an ease to it.” Post-strike, “we’re working harder. There’s more friction. It’s a very different time than it was two or three years ago.”
Despite these challenging headwinds, Siegel stressed that disabled creatives have reaped gains since the foundation launched. After all, before 2021, offerings like its Accelerate Fellowship (formerly the Screenwriting Fellowship) didn’t exist. “But if you look at the statistics, they’re effectively the same, and in some ways, a little worse than they were five years ago,” he said. “We are not solely responsible for those statistics, but you can’t help but think that this isn’t working as fast as we want it to work. Disabled Americans are a quarter of the population we’re talking about. There should be more shows, more films, more disabled creatives getting hired.”
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Examining why some disability rights funders are in retreat
Siegel doesn’t expect disabled writers and filmmakers to attain proportionate representation in the entertainment industry overnight. “It’s a huge, systemic, multidecade, if not longer, challenge,” he said. But the lack of substantial progress across the last few years is real, and he attributes it partially to the fact that some funders have gotten cold feet.
In 2019, two years before Inevitable Foundation went live, the Ford and Robert Wood Johnson foundations launched the Disability & Philanthropy Forum to advance disability inclusion in philanthropy. The foundations’ respective presidents, Darren Walker and Richard Besser, created the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy, which, in 2020, established the Disability Inclusion Fund, a five-year funding collaborative addressing challenges faced by people with disabilities.
In addition to these promising developments, “you started to see some incremental growth from other foundations thinking about how to fund disability vertically and horizontally,” Siegel said, meaning that, for example, a workforce development funder would decide to center its efforts on disabled workers. Now, however, “a lot of the risk [taking] that you would expect in philanthropy has receded. All of the performative stuff is gone at this point. The election and the currents around it have effectively moved it away.”
Siegel attributes funders’ backsliding to the election influencing them to “think more narrowly about their strategies, often at the expense of disabled and other historically marginalized people, even though these strategies affect disabled and other historically marginalized people.” This is a myopic perspective “because arguably, with the Medicaid cuts, disabled people are more affected than anyone. So it’s less [that] the cuts are drawing focus away from disabled people, and more the fear in the environment is causing funders to think more narrowly versus expansively, which ultimately only hurts their impact objectives.”
Inevitable Foundation’s funders have included the MacArthur Foundation, Pop Culture Collaborative and the Ahmanson Foundation. I asked Siegel if he wanted to call attention to any funder in particular — while recognizing that doing so is like asking a parent to name their favorite child — and without missing a beat, he mentioned Ford and its “fundamental support from day one of our work, which continues to this day.”
Siegel also cited Inevitable Foundation’s largest corporate supporter, Netflix, which funds its Visionary and Accelerate Fellowships. Its funding comes “against the backdrop of other companies that have thrown up their hands and walked away, and that matters a lot,” he said. “We’re excited to see what else we can do with them to push the work forward.”
The foundation is leaning into narrative change to support disabled writers and filmmakers
For Siegel, the volatility across the disability rights ecosystem is a stark reminder about “how fast the external environment can change, and how much is not in your control.” Another critical dynamic in the space — and especially in the last year — is “how powerful narratives are, and in how, in some ways, narrative is underutilized and misunderstood in philanthropy.”
“Narrative change” has been a discrete field for grantmaking for some time, aimed at shaping the public’s perceptions around an issue and dispelling harmful stereotypes. Interest in narrative change has grown in recent years as funders have applied it to areas like climate change, mental health and immigration. As far as Inevitable Foundation is concerned, Siegel said it’s “looking at ways to create a world where disabled people can live self-determined lives and stories from disabled people are a big part of how we get to that.”
Zooming out beyond the disability space, Siegel noted that while the narrative change field “has been a very niche area in philanthropy, in the same way disability impacts every single impact area, narrative also impacts every single issue area.” It’s therefore incumbent that funders’ Trump 2.0 playbook includes strategies to reach people through podcasts, films, television, social media and other communication channels.
“People are beginning to understand the narrative battlefield we’re playing on,” Siegel said, echoing the sentiments of IP Editor-in-Chief David Callahan, who noted how the MAGA movement effectively cultivated a deep distrust of elites across segments of the electorate. “They’re saying, ‘Wow, we need to play in the narrative space more,’ because, in many ways, progressive philanthropy is losing or has lost the narrative.”
As I talked with Siegel, I couldn’t help but notice Inevitable Foundation’s own compelling narrative, which is one of steady and thoughtful expansion. When it launched four years ago, its initial focus was supporting disabled writers. But when I caught up with Siegel in early July, he had spent the previous month overseeing the production of short films and the launch of Inevitable Studios, which will bring stories from disabled writers and filmmakers to market.
“A lot of our work historically has been about helping people prepare for the opportunity, but we weren’t getting control of the opportunity,” Siegel said. “So for us, it’s a question of, ‘Do you want to be on the sidelines, or do you want to be in the game?’ And we want to be in the game.”
Note (7/16/25): This article has been updated to include the new name of the Screenwriting Fellowship, which is now called the Accelerate Fellowship.
