Disability-led hub The D*List reaches over 200,000 people online

The D*List, a disability-led charitable trust, reached an online audience of over 200,000 this year, according to its Executive Director, Red Nicholson.

An external evaluation found that the trust’s internal culture of high trust and care is a core driver of its external impact. Nicholson wrote about the trust’s work in a blog for Philanthropy New Zealand.

How The D*List began

In 2023, the Human Rights Commission set out to co-design a way of shifting ableist attitudes in Aotearoa. Its working assumption was a communications campaign of some kind.

Disabled people told the commission they needed something else. They lacked connection and belonging, and wanted a community space designed by them, for them.

Later that year, The D*List was born as an independent and disability-led charitable trust. It is a first-of-its-kind community hub for disabled people and tāngata whaikaha Māori.

Nicholson credits a funding rōpū that included Foundation North, JR McKenzie Trust, Todd Foundation and Spectrum Foundation for trusting disabled communities to lead the work.

What the evaluation found

The trust’s theory of change is that disabled people taking part unapologetically in shared experiences builds connection, belonging and pride. In turn, that collective confidence shifts how everyone thinks about disability.

The recent external evaluation suggests the trust is making extraordinary progress towards that goal. Nicholson notes the road has not been straightforward, and that it took time to get there.

The evaluator also found that disabled kaimahi who do not have to justify their access needs at work make braver work for disabled audiences. They also experience greater levels of overall wellbeing.

What Nicholson asks of funders

Nicholson offers funders three lessons from the trust’s journey. The first is to let the community write the key performance indicators, the measures of success. The trust’s funders gave it the time to understand what success looks like and begin to measure it for itself.

The second is to fund belonging as an outcome. Nicholson describes belonging as the outcome that makes everything else possible for the community.

According to Nicholson, the sense of tribe the trust creates gives disabled people the courage to exist in society and tell bolder stories. Community members find affirmation, pride and connection in those stories, and allies learn from them.

The third is to fund the foundations. Protecting the trust’s internal culture takes time and flexible philanthropic funding, and Nicholson notes that this is hard to capture in an evaluation report.

For The D*List, power-sharing means funders trusting communities to co-design what success looks like, measuring belonging as a core deliverable, and backing the people closest to the issue with untagged, long-term support.