The D*List: the home of disability culture in Aotearoa

The D*List is the proud home of disability culture in Aotearoa. However, we only exist because three years ago, a group of funders had the courage and integrity to trust disabled people to design the future, and tell them what success looked like.

In 2023, the Human Rights Commission set out to co-design a way of shifting ableist attitudes in Aotearoa. Their working assumption was a communications campaign of some kind. However, in conversation after conversation, disabled people said we needed something else: we lacked connection, belonging, and that what we actually needed was a community space designed by us, for us. So later that year, The D*List was born as an independent and disability-led charitable trust: a first-of-its-kind community hub for disabled people and tāngata whaikaha Māori.

The leadership of that funding rōpū - including Foundation North, JR McKenzie Trust, Todd Foundation and Spectrum Foundation - to trust disabled communities to lead the work, has shaped how I think about power-sharing ever since. Here are three things I'd ask funders to take from our journey.

Let the community write the KPIs.

Our theory of change says that when disabled people take part unapologetically in shared experiences, we build connection, belonging and pride. In turn, that collective confidence shifts how everyone thinks about disability. While our recent external evaluation suggests we’re making extraordinary progress towards that moemoeā, it’s taken time to get here. The road has not been straightforward. But the enduring trust of our funders has given us the time we need to not only understand what success looks like, but begin to measure that for ourselves.

Fund belonging as an outcome.

For our community, belonging is the outcome that makes everything else possible. One person told our evaluator, “I didn't have to explain myself or my experiences – they just got it.” Our community told us said that the sense of tribe that The D*List creates for disabled people gives them the courage to exist in society, and tell bolder stories. Those bolder stories travel – our online audience reached over 200,000 this year. Community members have found affirmation, pride and connection in these stories, and allies learn from them. Together, this alchemy is creating a more inclusive Aotearoa that no longer tolerates ableism.

Fund the foundations.

Building an organisation like The D*List doesn’t happen overnight. Our evaluator recently found that our internal culture of high trust and care is a core driver of our external impact. Disabled kaimahi who don't have to justify their access needs at work make braver work for disabled audiences, and experience greater levels of overall wellbeing. Protecting that culture takes time and flexible philanthropic funding, and as critical as it is to our success, it’s also quite difficult to articulate in an evaluation report!

I feel so fortunate to have witnessed power sharing in action. For us at The D*List, power-sharing looks like: funders trusting communities to co-design what success looks and feels like; measuring belonging as a core deliverable; and backing the people closest to the issue with untagged, long-term support, to chart their own journey alongside community.