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Opening Doors to Mainers With Disability: A Look at Open Door Arts’ Accessibility Workshops
ARTS SECTOR CAPACITY
Photo credit: Open Door Arts
As a mission-driven, inclusion-focused arts nonprofit, Open Door Arts (ODA) has championed accessibility in their programs for more than 50 years. Now, with the community it’s assembled and the expertise it’s developed, ODA has embraced a second mission: to train other arts nonprofits to be accessibility champions, too.
“Through programs, partnerships, and training, our team works to ensure that people with disabilities can fully engage as artists, audience members, and cultural leaders,” says Dani Rose, director of cultural access at Open Door Arts.
ODA’s Arts and Culture Accessibility Hub is central to its goal of increasing people with disabilities’s access to the arts. The Hub helps cultural institutions “skill up” in accessibility, providing tools and guidance for transforming nonprofit programming into fully integrated, accessible resources for people with disabilities.
Starting in September 2025, ODA shared their expertise and custom tools with 28 Onion Foundation grantees via a 10-month Cultural Accessibility Peer Learning Cohort. Through a series of professional development sessions and workshops, the organization’s leaders guided participating nonprofits through a self-assessment process aimed at analyzing their current accessibility needs. Organizations gained insight on why accessibility is so critical and how they can move beyond accommodations checklists to infuse accessibility into their organizational culture, operations, and approaches.
And in the past year, the organization has significantly increased the training resources available on its Hub and has recently launched a cultural access certification program — activities that will further empower and prepare nonprofits to turn lessons into action. Here’s a look at the initial peer learning cohort and what’s come out of it thus far.
Looking Inward
Don't wait until you think you have enough time, enough money, or enough expertise. Disability is already part of every community. Every step you take toward greater accessibility creates more opportunities for people to participate, connect, and belong. Start where you are, keep learning, and build from there.”
— Dani Rose, Director of Cultural Access
ODA anchored the cohort in its Accessibility Self-Assessment tool, a self-paced digital evaluation tool comprising 300 multiple-choice questions organized around the nonprofit’s:
- Overall approach, including policies, practices, and procedures
- Physical spaces
- Access services
- Communication practices
- Programming
Participating nonprofits examined their organizations’ current practices, learned about the importance of inclusive programming, and identified gaps they could address to improve the accessibility of their operations, organizational culture, and programs. The range of topics the survey covered meant that cohort participants had to work collaboratively with their staff, board members, and volunteers to complete the self-assessment.
“What makes the tool unique is that it's both an assessment and a learning tool,” explains Rose. “Throughout the process, participants will find glossary terms, legal guidance, examples, and companion resources that explain accessibility concepts and requirements.”
After looking inward and learning core concepts, organizations move from assessment to planning. Upon completion, ODA provides a personalized report of the organization’s self-assessment results with data visualizations, key insights, and an accessibility action plan template, enabling organizations to identify priorities for their future accessibility planning.
In the final months of the peer learning cohort, participants translated their self-evaluation results into action steps, with guidance from ODA on how to prioritize, sustain momentum, and build accountability into their planning. At the end of the cohort, organizations had not only a comprehensive understanding of where their accessibility practices stood, but also a roadmap of where they were going next and what more they needed to learn.
‘You Can’t Grow What You Don’t Know’
One of the most valuable parts of the workshops was creating space for organizations to ask the questions that don't always have simple answers.”
— Dani Rose, Director of Cultural Access
The impacts of ODA’s learning communities boil down to one of the organization’s key mottos: You can’t grow what you don’t know. The learning community helped nonprofits build the self-knowledge needed to address critical areas for growth. It also helped:
Make Change Manageable
“Accessibility touches every part of an organization, so the work can feel enormous when you look at it all at once,” says Rose. The self-assessment tool and cohort learning are designed to break this work into smaller pieces, helping organizations move toward more inclusive practices incrementally.
Move Beyond Check Boxes
Accessibility is about more than one-off activities or accommodations. According to ODA, true accessibility is a far more involved practice that requires organizations to embed inclusion into their core operations.
This cohort training helped nonprofits better understand the nuances of accessibility: “Accessibility often involves navigating gray areas, balancing organizational realities, and thinking through unique situations,” says Rose. “Those conversations helped participants move beyond checking boxes and toward making thoughtful decisions that fit their organization.”
Turn Accommodations Into Organizational Systems
Throughout the learning community, nonprofits learned about building accessibility best practices into staff training, committee activities, communications, and strategic planning. As Rose explains, “They began to realize where to put their efforts and resources in the immediate present while planning for a more accessible future.”
At the end of the cohort session, nonprofits had not only a clearer picture of their core goals and objectives, but also a better sense of how to improve over time.
Insights From Cohort Participants
Organizations often begin the cohort feeling like accessibility is something they'll have to tackle someday, when they have more time, more funding, or more expertise. By the time we reach the analysis and planning workshops, many of them have already started making changes.”
— Dani Rose, Director of Cultural Access
The cohort learning workshops both inspired and equipped the organizations to undergo transformative change. Many have begun turning practices into formal policies. Others have reached out to potential service providers. And others have built accessibility into their planning conversations. Here’s what two participants had to say about their experience.
Heart of Biddeford
Since 2011, Delilah Poupore has served as the executive director of Heart of Biddeford, a nonprofit that, in her words, “works to create a vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable downtown through community development, placemaking, and public events.”
What was your cohort experience like?
The cohort helped move accessibility from being something we thought about on a case-by-case basis to something we can intentionally build into our planning. The sessions were practical, welcoming, and realistic (focused on continuous improvement rather than perfection). It was also valuable to learn alongside other organizations working through many of the same questions, and making some of the same mistakes we've made. Dani Rose modeled accessibility throughout the training, from the way sessions were facilitated to the resources and tools shared.
Based on the workshops, what kinds of strategies have you included in your action plan to improve accessibility?
The assessment highlighted how much accessibility depends on having consistent systems and planning. We realized that many of the things we do happen informally and that creating clear organizational practices — such as event accessibility standards, communication guidelines, and requests for accommodation processes — will help us provide a more consistent experience for everyone.
Our plan focuses on creating accessibility standards for all events, improving the accessibility of our communications, and building stronger relationships with disability-related organizations and with people with disabilities in our community. We also plan to begin evaluating accessibility at our major events and to incorporate accessibility into the planning of exhibitions, ArtWalks, and other arts programming, rather than treating it as something to address after plans are already in place and someone has made a request.
How would you describe the overall impact this workshop series has had on your organization?
The workshop series gave us a practical way to think about accessibility as an ongoing organizational practice instead of a checklist. Rather than leaving with a list of ideal solutions, we left with realistic goals we can begin implementing now while continuing to learn and improve over time. For a small organization, that made the work feel approachable and sustainable.
During this cohort, several participants realized they shared the same venues or worked with the same communities, so they started exchanging resources. That kind of peer learning wasn't something we could have created on our own — it came from the generosity of the organizations themselves."
— Dani Rose, Director of Cultural Access
Cobscook Institute
Cobscook Institute’s community programming steward, Emily Guirl, joined the cohort to learn more about accessibility and practices she could implement right away. The Institute hosts outdoor educational programs focused on community well-being, sustainability, and deep relationship-building.
What was your cohort experience like?
I was initially overwhelmed in the accessibility cohort, being fairly ignorant of the disability rights movement, workplace requirements, and disability inclusive language. The facilitator, Dani, created a compassionate learning environment in which I felt welcome and supported in my learning. The spreadsheet that Open Door Arts provided to help us write our accessibility plan was extremely helpful!
Based on the workshops, what kinds of strategies have you included in your action plan to improve accessibility?
Cobscook Institute is a progressive and inclusive organization, so I was surprised to find through the assessment how much more we could be doing on campus and online to improve access for people with all kinds of disabilities.
Training staff and designating an accessibility coordinator or hiring an accessibility auditor (who’s also a person living with disabilities) were at the top of our action plan items. These steps will assure that access work stays at the front of organizational planning.
How would you describe the overall impact this workshop series has had on your organization?
I think the program has started a shift within the organization to be proactive in our inclusive strategies. If we wait for people with disabilities to come to us to tell us what they need, they might never come and we’ll miss an opportunity to serve part of our community.
A More Accessible Future
For Rose and the rest of the Open Door Arts team, accessibility is core to nonprofit work, and building a more accessible future in programming starts with curiosity.
“People often ask if they’re ready to begin this work, but I don’t think there’s any such thing as ‘ready,’” says Rose. “Curiosity is readiness. If you’re asking questions about accessibility, you’re already taking the first step.”
Leading with curiosity, the nonprofits in this cohort are on a path toward greater inclusion for all Mainers.