children with disabilities

There’s No Cure for Gretchen Lowe: A Mother’s Day Card From Alice

/ Ingrid Tischer / Leave a comment

“My daughter is a person. She’s not a chinning bar for me to build my character with. She doesn’t have cerebral palsy in order to teach me a lesson.”

There's No Cure for Gretchen Lowe

Alice’s schoolteacher handwriting greeted Gretchen in the stack of mail that evening. Oh Alice, Gretchen snorted pleasurably. I couldn’t have picked a better card myself.
A six-pack of baby angels were attempting to fly carrying a colossal banner with MOTHER written in a florid script. Droppage was imminent. Put some wing in to it, damn you. Her mother must have sent it right after Gretchen had called about the board meeting fiasco. There was a letter enclosed.
Underneath the card’s summary appreciation for maternal sacrifices, physical and emotional, Alice had written, “Thought you might like to see the enclosed item right now. I think it confirms that we are related. I cannot take credit for why you are who you are but I did have a hand in it. Then again, you were always a rotten child. Not that I had anything to do with that. Love, Mom.
The letter was her mother’s same handwriting.  Cheered, Gretchen set to reading it. It was dated from May 1970 and addressed to a Desmond Wallace, Chair of Fundraising Operations for the National Cerebral Palsy Association. Oh dear. Continue reading →

I Remember This: I Am Thirteen and in the Recovery Room After Spinal Fusion Surgery

/ Ingrid Tischer / 2 Comments
Cover of Mythology by Edith HamiltonYou are flat on your back under a glaring light. The bed is hard. It hurts. You don’t move because it doesn’t occur to you to do so, it’s so far beyond you. Each part of you that registers – reports in, so to speak – registers through pain. You body is mapped as a topography of pain. No face or distinguishing characteristics. You are a ground-colored shape dotted with points of glaring, popping pain. Where your head aches on the stone-stab mattress, where the gravel of the sheet is under your arms, where it rasps all along the tube that snakes down your throat, to an unidentifiable pressure on your front, low down.
Your back. Oh. Your back is a barely contained thorn patch in a mad stabber’s arsenal.
You’re not alone. There are voices, professional ones. But no one is talking to you.
There is a nurse above you, meeting your eyes. Her head blocks the light. “You’re awake,” she says. “You’re in the recovery room.”
You make a sound. It sounds dreadful. The first sound Frankenstein made on his slab. The thought of the monster brings back your past, all there was before this light, this slab, this pain. And the face in your reunion with memory itself is: Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein.
Continue reading →

Subvert the Dominant Paradigm of Disability/Charity By Letting Me Match Your Monthly Gift for Those Meddling Advocates at DREDF!

/ Ingrid Tischer / Leave a comment

 

Image description: An old-timey drawing from a scene in A Christmas Carol where Bob Cratchit is holding Tiny Tim on his shoulder, who is cheerfully waving his crutch.
My, uh, non-Dickens text is Bob saying, “DREDF’s advocacy means you just might get a frakking wheelchair–maybe even an education!” Tiny Tim says, “I told Scrooge to become a DREDF monthly donor or I’d haunt his ass!”
At the bottom: Dog bless DREDF’s donors – everyone!
Image Credit: Illustration by Fred Barnard

How I love crafting heartwarming holiday cards. Like Tiny Tim subverting the dominant paradigm of disability/charity.

You may not know this, but fundraising is a hotbed of subversion if you’re disabled (like me) and raising money to fight ableism instead of being used as an ableist prop by someone else.

You know what goes great with a paradigm shift? A new narrative.

One where disabled people lead the philanthropic work that affects them. As in:

You let me, a disabled donor, match your monthly gift that will support cross-disability civil and human rights defense led by disabled advocates at DREDF. If you take this action, you’ll be making a gift and helping make philanthropy more inclusive. So it is with real glee that I throw down this match offer to help support DREDF’s 40th year as our country’s leading cross-disability legal and policy defense fund:

If you become a DREDF monthly donor by 1/31/19, I will match your first $40. Ex.: If you give $20 per month, I will match the total of your first 2 months, or $40. 

I’ll know it’s a match gift because you’ll include “Nothing about Tiny Tim, without Tiny Tim” in the note field of your online gift.

You may know me as the Queen of Sardonica or as A Crip in Philanthropy but my days are spent fundraising at DREDF where I’m often serious for up to entire minutes at a time.

Our education rights work alone tells you why: “Dickensian” describes schools that lock disabled students in closets, hold them face-down in  4-point restraints, and fail to teach them how to read. 

Individual contributions are critical because both impact litigation and policy require a big investment of time and resources, and foundation funding for disability advocacy is scarce. 

I’m a DREDF major donor now because I have complete trust in the integrity, independence, and brilliance that the staff (who are not me) bring to disability civil and human rights advocacy.

If you know, like I do, that DREDF has made the world better than it was 40 years ago, please join me in giving a year-end gift. Share DREDF with someone you know. 

If a monthly thing isn’t for you right now, no problem. We appreciate every single gift that will fuel our 2019 work to defend those gains and – let’s hope – advance them over the next decades. Together!

THANK YOU AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Letters to a Young Fundraiser: The Philanthropeon Wars and the Fall of Telethonika

/ Ingrid Tischer / 1 Comment

My Dear Friend:

You wrote of a growing strain on your spirit that seems to have no reasonable source, as your position is unobjectionable, your master provides you accommodations enough, and your annual fundraising goal numbers not unduly burdensome. What then?
You ask if you are perhaps “a loser.” I think not.
During my youth, my father — a fundraising titan who fought for funding alongside Major Donor — became disgusted with my inadequate Girl Scout cookie sales and sent me away to a notorious fundraising academy, one of the very strictest of the Transactional schools.
I was miserable and branded a failure — a loser — at “working the room,” and “friend-raising,” and so on, until I was confined to the barracks for insubordination after I refused to ply my trade at a memorial service, trading donations for signatures in the guest book.
But then I took a History of Fundraising in Western Civilization class. I learned about the Philanthropeon Wars.
I learned about the lost city-state of Telethonika, where disability democracy had been born around the year 504 BC. It is a loss that echoes down through millennia through some fundraisers who have the disability consciousness and who feel the shadow each year as Labor Day approaches. You may be feeling the echo of the fall of Telethonika, that flattish plain located one mountain over from Sparta.

Continue reading →

Dignity Is No Accident(s)

/ Ingrid Tischer / Leave a comment
Another Excerpt From There's No Cure for Gretchen Lowe a novelThere was a remarkable lack of public debate in San Francisco — or anywhere else — on Adult Diaper Dispensation (ADD). All costs were loudly underwritten by The Dignity Foundation (TDF), a charitable body dedicated to community development, medical research, K-12 education, and, now, small businesses hit by the “squat-by defecation” of serial defecants.
Allow TDF’s VP of Communications Lucre Smoothjoy to introduce your faithful repertory character, The Poor, who will today be playing semi-malicious poopers out to get Mom and Pop, who put every dime they had into The Backbone of American Business, their head-shop on Haight Street that sells bongs, whippet cannisters, feathered roach-clips, and what appear to be a number of human bones, including a few spinal vertebrae from, not an American Business, but the backbone of an American opossum from Bakersfield.
Would you like a TDF annual report? We have one for you right here. It makes no mention of our corporate sibling and sponsor, a disposable paper-goods manufacturer that is aging out of infant goods into a more mature market. Our Dignity Initiative public information campaign takes a broad-based social education approach to bring the public up to speed on what we can do — together — through top-level messaging in high-traffic spaces with framing that deploys innocuous word-play rather that blunt fear.
This top-level messaging was visible to all who cared to look out the car window at the blinking billboard near the off-ramp at Duboce. Dignity Is No Accident(s).
Continue reading →