Exploring the potential for disability justice within Canadian non-profits

Abstract

This thesis examines the implementation of a disability justice framework within non-profit organizational contexts. While the disability rights movement in Canada has achieved significant legal and policy victories, disability justice emerged as an alternative framing to center the experiences of disabled people of color and others marginalized within rights-based approaches (Sins Invalid, 2019). Despite growing scholarly attention to disability justice, there has been limited research exploring how the principles of disability justice translate into the internal organizational environment, particularly within disability non-profit settings. These types of organizations have historically been part of the disability rights movement and shaped by rights-based paradigms but are experiencing increased demands and pressure, and operating in survival mode (Kelly, 2018, 2020). Considering this broader context, this research explores the possibilities and barriers for a disability non-profit organization to adopt a disability justice framework. More specifically, it looks at how organizational transformation can be a strategy for social change by focusing on disability justice in the internal environment. Through a comparative case study of two disability-focused non-profit organizations, this research employed participatory methods to investigate the challenges and opportunities for operationalizing the framework. Ultimately, this study revealed how bureaucracy, neoliberal logics, and an entrenched rights-based framework reinforce each other to constrain non-profit organizations' capacity to fully embrace disability justice in their policies, structure, practices, and processes. Opportunities also emerged to help organizations navigate and maneuver around the external forces. Through a comparison between the organizations, and participant perspectives, a combination of cultural and structural change provided avenues for challenging ableism and pursuing social transformation from the inside.