Director of Disability Justice & Accessibility (Volunteer)

About Mentor A Promise

Mentor A Promise (MAP) is a New York City–based nonprofit supporting children and youth ages 5–18 experiencing housing instability through mentorship, education, literacy, social-emotional learning, creative expression, career development, advocacy, and community-centered opportunity. MAP believes access should never depend on whether someone is willing, able, or comfortable enough to repeatedly ask an organization to remove barriers. We want to build differently.

About PromisePublic

PromisePublic is MAP’s advocacy, public engagement, and community-facing division. PromisePublic works to elevate issues affecting children, young people, families, and communities; strengthen public understanding; advance meaningful participation; and help MAP contribute thoughtfully to conversations about housing instability, education, equity, opportunity, accessibility, and systemic change. The Disability Justice & Accessibility Department advances this work by helping MAP examine not only whether disabled people can technically access our organization, but whether they can participate meaningfully, exercise choice, influence decisions, encounter dignity, and experience genuine belonging.

Role Overview

Mentor A Promise is seeking a thoughtful, knowledgeable, collaborative, and action-oriented Director of Disability Justice & Accessibility to lead MAP’s disability-justice and accessibility strategy. This is not solely a compliance role. It is not solely a digital-accessibility role. And it is not a position where one person becomes responsible for making everything accessible. The Director will serve as MAP’s organizational leader and subject-matter resource for disability justice and accessibility—helping identify systemic barriers, establish standards, strengthen practices, develop organizational knowledge, elevate disability perspectives, support advocacy, and hold MAP accountable for continued progress. The Director will work across programs, technology, communications, creative media, volunteer experiences, events, operations, and public engagement. The central question is: Who might be excluded from what we are creating—and how can we design differently before exclusion occurs?

Key Responsibilities

Disability Justice Strategy

• Develop and advance an organization-wide disability-justice strategy grounded in accessibility, dignity, autonomy, agency, intersectionality, participation, representation, universal design, collective access, equity, belonging, and shared influence.
• Help MAP move beyond treating disability solely through an accommodation or compliance framework.
• Strengthen systems that remove unnecessary barriers before individuals are required to request accommodations.
• Establish priorities and measurable goals for advancing disability justice across MAP.
• Advise leadership on emerging accessibility needs, barriers, and opportunities.

The Director should help the organization progress from Accommodation → Accessibility → Participation → Belonging → Influence. Individual accommodations remain essential, but the long-term objective is to remove unnecessary systemic barriers so fewer people must repeatedly request exceptions simply to participate.

Organization-Wide Accessibility Leadership

• Develop a practical accessibility framework that can be applied throughout MAP.
• Create accessibility standards, guidelines, checklists, planning tools, and resources.
• Establish processes for accessibility reviews and barrier identification.
• Support divisions in translating accessibility principles into everyday practice.
• Develop mechanisms for tracking accessibility concerns, ownership, remediation, and progress.
• Help leaders ask accessibility questions during planning rather than after implementation.

The goal is not simply to create accessibility policies. The goal is to change experiences.

Youth & Program Accessibility

• Partner with PromisePrograms and other youth-facing teams to strengthen accessibility across:
• Program registration and enrollment
• Curriculum and instructional materials
• Learning activities
• Physical environments
• Virtual programming
• Communication methods
• Sensory environments
• Scheduling and transitions
• Events and workshops
• Technology
• Feedback mechanisms
• Help teams create multiple appropriate ways for young people to engage, communicate, learn, create, and participate.
• Ensure accessibility does not mean lowering meaningful expectations, but rather examining whether unnecessary barriers are preventing someone from reaching them.

Universal Design

• Champion universal-design approaches throughout MAP.
• Help teams consider whether people can receive information in different ways, participate in different ways, and meaningfully engage without being unnecessarily restricted by a single sensory, physical, cognitive, communication, or learning expectation.
• Encourage teams to examine whether they are designing around an imagined “average” person and whether thoughtful design decisions could eliminate barriers before individual accommodations become necessary.
• The Director should help MAP shift accessibility upstream—from correction toward intentional design.

Digital Accessibility

• Partner with PromiseStack and appropriate teams to strengthen accessibility across MAP’s digital ecosystem, including:
• Websites
• Applications
• Forms
• Learning platforms
• Documents and PDFs
• Email
• Digital publications
• Presentations
• Video and audio
• Social media
• Internal systems
• Help advance recognized accessibility practices, including appropriate application of current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
• Areas may include keyboard accessibility, screen-reader compatibility, alternative text, captions, transcripts, color contrast, accessible forms, heading structure, descriptive links, document accessibility, multimedia accessibility, and audio description where appropriate.
• Accessibility should be considered during design, development, testing, procurement, and launch—not simply remediation.

Accessible Communications

• Partner with PromiseVoice, PromisePages, PromiseBrands, PromiseStudios, and other teams to strengthen accessibility across organizational communications.
• Help establish practices involving:
• Plain language
• Accessible documents
• Alternative text
• Captions and transcripts
• Accessible graphics
• Accessible presentations
• Readable typography and layouts
• Video and audio accessibility
• Multiple communication formats where appropriate
• Publishing information does not necessarily make information accessible. Communication succeeds when people can receive, understand, and use it.

Events & Physical Accessibility

• Help MAP teams consider accessibility when planning in-person, hybrid, and virtual experiences. Areas may include:
• Accessible entrances and routes
• Seating and restrooms
• Transportation considerations
• Sensory environments
• Quiet spaces where feasible
• Signage
• Communication access
• Captioning
• Interpretation when appropriate
• Virtual participation
• Advance accessibility information
• Emergency procedures
• Accommodation-request processes
• Where possible, participants should be able to understand accessibility conditions before deciding whether they can participate.

Volunteer & Organizational Accessibility

• Partner with PromisePeople and organizational leadership to examine accessibility throughout the volunteer experience:
• Recruitment → Application → Interview → Onboarding → Training → Participation → Development → Leadership → Transition
• Identify barriers involving job postings, applications, interviews, onboarding, training, meetings, scheduling, technology, communication, documentation, remote participation, performance expectations, and leadership opportunities.
• Support clear and respectful processes for requesting and implementing reasonable accommodations while maintaining appropriate confidentiality.

Disability Voice & Participatory Design

• Help MAP establish appropriate mechanisms for disabled students, volunteers, families, professionals, advocates, and community members to influence relevant work. Approaches may include:
• Listening sessions
• Advisory groups
• Surveys
• Accessibility testing
• User research
• Community consultation
• Participatory design
• Feedback mechanisms
• Participation should be voluntary, respectful, accessible, and appropriately compensated when applicable and feasible.
• People should never be pressured to disclose diagnoses, medical histories, or personal experiences to establish the legitimacy of their perspectives.
• Lived experience is expertise—but lived experience should never become something MAP extracts from people.

Disability Justice Advocacy & Public Engagement

• Help strengthen MAP’s external disability-justice voice. Responsibilities may include:
• Researching disability-related barriers affecting children and families
• Contributing to public education initiatives
• Developing accessibility resources
• Supporting appropriate advocacy campaigns
• Participating in community conversations
• Building relationships with disability-led organizations and advocates
• Identifying opportunities for coalition-building
• Supporting accessible public engagement
• Elevating issues at the intersection of disability, education, housing instability, poverty, and youth opportunity
• MAP should approach this work with humility. When disability-led organizations and communities already possess expertise, our responsibility may be to listen, partner, amplify, and learn rather than attempt to lead every conversation.

Intersectionality

• The Director should understand how disability may intersect with housing instability, economic inequality, race and culture, language, age, education, gender, immigration experiences, transportation, technology access, family responsibilities, and other structural barriers.
• A barrier that appears minor in isolation can become significant when combined with several others.
• MAP should therefore avoid designing accessibility systems in isolation.