Art continues to become more inclusive in the Valley. Four local cultural staples in Hampshire and Franklin counties are working to better equip themselves to serve people with disabilities.
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Historic Deerfield, Pioneer Valley Ballet dance school in Easthampton and Empowerment Through the Arts in Shutesbury recently received $5,000 each from the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Innovation Fund, part of its Universal Participation (UP) Initiative.
The UP Initiative aims to make the cultural sector of Massachusetts more accessible to people with disabilities. The program awarded a total of $465,000 Innovation Grants to 93 “UP Designated Organizations” — organizations that aim to be as accessible and inclusive as possible — throughout Massachusetts.
“This funding is about more than compliance,” said David T. Slatery, acting executive director of the Mass Cultural Council, in a statement. “With these grants, we’re empowering cultural organizations to test new ideas, center lived experience and move our cultural sector toward a future where access is embedded from the start.”
That funding can go toward initiatives like training staff to help neurodivergent guests who are experiencing sensory overload, making facilities and physical spaces more accessible to guests with physical disabilities, hiring disabled teaching artists, providing sensory-friendly events and paying stipends for disabled performers.
At Empowerment Through the Arts, a theater and arts nonprofit that specializes in creating opportunities for people with disabilities, that funding will support making their website and social media more accessible with the addition of image descriptions.
In 2018, Ezzell Floranina, founder and executive director of Empowerment Through the Arts, traveled to New Zealand and noticed how much of a focus the country’s institutions had on accessibility in relation to the arts: museums had audio-described exhibits, prisons had arts programs and dance companies presented shows with disabled performers.
“I brought that hope back here to see how we could integrate with other community performing arts companies,” she said.
Now, as part of the cohort of UP Designated Organizations, Floranina has the opportunity to attend meetings in which other organizations share their work around improving accessibility within their programming.
“I think that working together as a community, focused, is much more powerful than working alone in the sphere of access,” she said.
At the Eric Carle Museum, the exact specifics of the way the grant money will be spent are still to be determined, but Jen Schantz, the museum’s executive director, said that a key part of accessibility is “integrating it into the fabric of the institution.”
“The institution in general has been really very concerned and wants to do its best to be as inclusive and accessible a place for its patrons,” she said. “This has been such a great opportunity for us to connect with other institutions who also want to make their institutions more accessible — we’re sharing and brainstorming and collaborating.”
To that end, Schantz said they’ve been working on a way to spend their grant money by creating an accessibility plan through Museums10, a collaboration of 10 local museums, including the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Yiddish Book Center and the Smith College Museum of Art. Through it. Once a month, museum professionals meet to discuss a range of issues relating to the museum world, including accessibility, and share ideas and feedback about initiatives about what worked and what didn’t.
They’ve already collaborated with the Boston-based Institute for Human Centered Design and brought in local “user experts” — people who have lived experience of a disability — to tour the existing space and suggest ways to improve, which Schantz said was a valuable experience.
“We can always do better, and that’s why we’re really excited to have this grant to really explore ways that we can make our space more accessible,” Schantz said.
The Eric Carle Museum is already equipped with a number of accessibility features and initiatives, she said. Museum staff offer guests the ability to borrow weighted lap pads; assisted listening devices; wheelchairs; EnChroma glasses, which help people with red-green color blindness see in a wider and more vivid range of colors; and sensory bags from the organization KultureCity, which include accessibility aids like fidget tools and noise-canceling headphones. The museum’s website has a social story, which provides information about what a visit to the museum is like in pictures with captions. There are also specific story times with Braille books available.
“I think this idea that making a place welcoming for everybody, and, in that sense, the idea that you are making that visible to people, is really important, and I think also things like the EnChroma glasses and sensory bags are things that not everybody thinks about or knows that exist,” said Alexandra de Montrichard, director of operations at the Eric Carle Museum. “I think that being able to get that word out further both encourages people to come here to enjoy them, but also tells other people that those are possibilities they might want to try at their own institutions.”
For more information and a full list of grant recipients, visit massculturalcouncil.org/organizations/universal-participation-initiative.