Cindy VandenBosch testifies on cultural accessibility research and Disability Forward Fund

Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Nantasha Williams, as well as other members of the City Council staff and those that are here today.

My name is Cindy Vandenbosch, and I am the president of Turnstile Tours and Studio.

I have over 20 years of experience working to advance accessibility in the cultural and tourism fields in New York City, and I've also worked for disability service providers through the years.

I'm delivering my testimony today from the perspective of a non-disabled cultural accessibility practitioner, researcher, and planner.

I'm currently the lead consultant on this research and planning project for Cultural Accessibility NYC, and we are taking an evidence-based and collaborative

approach and are seeking to take collective action to advance the city's arts and culture sector towards experiential equity for and with disabled workers, artists, and audiences.

I'm currently working alongside a team of researchers and steering committee of artists, cultural access workers, and advocates, most of whom have lived experience with disability, to gather quantitative and qualitative data

on the state of the city's cultural accessibility infrastructure to inform strategies to address systemic barriers and aggregate resources to better support organizations'accessibility capacity building efforts.

This research seeks to build on past efforts, including the cultural plan and all the hard work that many, many disability advocates and cultural accessibility experts invested in.

We also seek to, we're conducting a landscape analysis literature review and a survey, which is

live through the end of the week, targeting cultural workers about organizational structures and needs, as well as focus groups with deaf and disabled artists, disability service providers, and cultural workers.

We welcome the city to engage with this project.

We need the city to engage with this project.

As we've been doing this research, you know, we've thought to ourselves, what would it mean if we could actually gain access to some of the data that the Department of Cultural Affairs actually has in its applications?

I will also say that since my time is short, a priority from our perspective is this question around nothing about us without us, the disability rights mantra.

You know, Simi Linton and Kevin Gottkin from the Disability Arts NYC Task Force who mobilized so many people

to work on the cultural plan, they're not here today and they need to be at the table, as do other leaders in disability arts and cultural accessibility.

How can we integrate accessibility into the way that organizations carry out their work?

And what's going on with the Disability Forward Fund that was designed to increase equity and inclusion of artists, cultural workers, and audiences with disabilities?

We're asked today to comment on where we go from here, but we don't even know.

We know that there were some funds distributed, but how were they distributed across the objective?

areas.

There were multiple different objectives for that fund, and there's no sort of public sense of how those funds have been used.

And last but not least, I think this is for all New Yorkers.

We do want to, I'm excited to hear that there will be more data that's available.

But for example, on the CDF application, it asks thousands of organizations, what are your specific strategies and policies to make programs accessible to people with disabilities?

Outline your practices that go beyond ADA compliance.

Imagine what we could learn if we all took a step back and there was actually analysis that was done.

Why is it that we don't have researchers in-house at the Department of Cultural Affairs as the County of LA has?

They actually are able to do that analysis.

Is it a capacity?

building issue?

You know, is there a way that there can be partnerships that are formed with organizations that are in and of these communities that can support analysis so that we know what has been accomplished and we're not starting from scratch.

We need to build on the hard work that's been done on this cultural plan and understand what has been accomplished and where do we go from here.

Thank you.