What happens when disabled artists, activists, and scholars finally have a space of their own? Pushing Limits radio presents its first program featuring the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center. This new venue will host a wide range of activities—from art exhibits and “café crip check-ins” to a collective quilt and a space for disabled and disgruntled academics to air it all out. Plus, the renowned Superfest Disabled Film Festival is now under the auspices of the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center, marking a major new chapter for disability culture in the Bay Area. Tune in so you don’t miss any details! This program is hosted and produced by Eddie Ytuarte. Program Transcription: Eddie Ytuarte: And that’s our Pushing Limits theme, which we feature every time we come on the air. I’m Eddie Ytuarte, and this is Pushing Limits radio program, perhaps the only radio program in the Bay Area that talks exclusively about disability. We’re on every week now at this time, Friday, 2:30 p.m. And we’re emanating from KPFA in Berkeley, California. San Francisco in the last year has, I believe, the first disability cultural center in the city. And it opened up around July mid-year. And today we’re going to have one of the co-directors, Emily Beitiks, who will be talking to us about that whole new center because we haven’t really talked about it yet. So, Emily, welcome to Pushing Limits again. Emily Beitiks: Hi, Eddie. Thank you so much for having me on. Eddie Ytuarte: So where is this? By the way, what’s the official name of the cultural center? Emily Beitiks: We are the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center. And we’re not just the first in the city, we’re the first public disability cultural center in the country. There are other cultural centers, but they’re all inside of universities. San Francisco was the first one to think about having support for one that’s open to anybody. Eddie Ytuarte: And thank you for that, because I understood that UC Berkeley has a disability cultural center, but I guess it’s located on the campus. Emily Beitiks: Yes, we love working with them. We work with a lot of other universities to cross promote programs and brainstorm. But yeah, this is the first municipal one. Eddie Ytuarte: Great. And where are you located in San Francisco? Emily Beitiks: We are at 165 Grove Street, and we look out on the south side of City Hall. So, we just could not have a more exciting central location that meets all of our access needs for where we would be, which included being really close to public transportation. So, we’re close to BART, close to Muni. Eddie Ytuarte: Wow, I didn’t know you were that close to the center of stuff. Yeah, that’s great. Now, is this part of a, it’s not freestanding, it’s part of a bigger building or what? Eddie Ytuarte: Is it on the ground floor? We are on the ground floor, street side, and we have our own entrance, but we’re part of a building that is the Kelsey Civic Center. Eddie Ytuarte: Oh, okay. Emily Beitiks: And the Kelsey is an amazing organization that is also disability focused. They fight for housing access for disabled people. And so, the building that we are a part of, everything else in the building is a residency that is every unit in 112 units was built to be accessible for disabled people. And 25 percent of the units were reserved for disabled people. They couldn’t reserve more than that because it’s considered reverse discrimination. But it’s a very disability centered community. They have a lot of nice events, and the residents are regulars at our programs. But our programs are open to anybody that we’re not just for the building. Eddie Ytuarte: Okay. And what’s the capacity of the number of people that could be there for an activity? That’s a funny thing. You know, we are kind of a small space. When the city knew that they wanted to have a disability cultural center and didn’t know where, and then the Kelsey approached them about the space. And it was just such a perfect fit to be right across from City Hall. such a great thing to be part of this wider building that has this disability focus, but the actual center is tiny. So events, we’ve managed to have about 65 people, but it’s pretty intimate. But that being said, it’s a brand new space that was built to meet our access needs and our biggest access dreams. So everything is built to be hybrid. And we also are partially indoor and partially outdoor. So we have one entire wall of the Disability Cultural Center slides open or folds open these glass folding doors. And then we have patio seating. And that is one of the things that we’re just most excited about to have people who are immunocompromised, who really just won’t ever be comfortable at an indoor event, have been able to join us at the Cultural Center for our programs sit in the patio. And because that wall folds open, the audio goes outside as well. It really allows everybody to feel like they’re together as one central event. So that ups our capacity a little bit, being able to have people on the patio. Eddie Ytuarte: And I’ve been hearing about a disability cultural center, the prospect of it for several years now. And it’s a reality beginning, I guess, in July when there was the opening. And can you give us a little bit of background as to how you folks came into existence? Emily Beitiks: Yes, it was a long journey. In 2017, the city of San Francisco started thinking up the idea of a because they had this pocket of money that was pushed forward by San Francisco taxpayers or voters, I should say, to have a pool called the Dignity Fund. And it was to have seniors and disabled people be better equipped and supported with staying in San Francisco when they knew some of the access challenges of being a senior or disabled meant staying in San Francisco was hard for a lot of people. And so, the city then had to do a needs assessment to see like, OK, well, are we actually reaching the people we say we’re trying to reach. And they found that they were reaching seniors quite well through the wide network of senior centers that we have in the city. And they were not doing the same, having the same success with reaching disabled folks, because the current, you know, belief was like, well, they can go into the senior centers. And that’s great if you’re a disabled senior. But if you’re not, you know, you don’t necessarily want to go to a senior center to get access to services. You want a place where you feel is meant for you. So, the city then came up with the idea of the Cultural Center, really thanks to Nicole Bond, who is at the mayor’s office, the head of the mayor’s office on disability at the time. And then in 2018, they did a strategic plan, and they hired the Longmore Institute on Disability, where I was working at the time, to really capture the city’s disabled populations, like hopes and dreams for what a space could be. They didn’t know where it was going to be yet. They didn’t know what it was going to look like. And they did a citywide survey. They held focus groups and met with disability leaders to come up with a more concrete vision. And then things slowed down. You know, 2019, they were kind of like working to figure it out. And then 2020 happened and everything stopped. So, it wasn’t until the Kelsey came to the city and said, well, we’re opening this building, we have this ground floor space. In other Kelsey buildings, that ground floor space would be like a store or restaurant. And they said, well, why do that when the city also wants a cultural center? This seems like a perfect opportunity. So, then they put out a request for proposals for who would run the new Disability Cultural Center. And the organization I’m with, Haven of Hope, the LC and Lily Cox Haven of Hope decided to apply and collaborated with the Longmore Institute in the early years to help get it going. So, we had a virtual launch first, and we offered a year of virtual programming. And that was really just because people had been waiting since 2018, and the city was waiting for this building to open, but they didn’t want to wait any longer to be able to start offering services. So, we offered a year of virtual programming. And then this July of 2025, we had our big grand opening in the space. And so we’ve been open for the last six months offering hybrid programming from the space and continuing our virtual access as well, which has been really exciting. Starting with virtual both meant that folks who are physically isolated and really can’t get out and about. Like we got to start with those folks. And so often that community comes second. It was really great to sort of build our core with that community, but it also brought people from all over the country, but beyond the country. We’ve had people in South America joining. We’ve had a lot of people from Canada and Europe and basically people who are isolated and saying like that it’s sort of unthinkable for their local geographic region to have a disability cultural center, but because everything is hybrid, they can participate in San Francisco. So it’s been it’s been wonderful. Eddie Ytuarte: Now, do you agree with me that it’s really important for our disabled cultural workers to be able to do their work, explain, and have their vision explored by the non-disabled world, especially these days because of what’s happening with the federal government, for instance, tearing up the Department of Education, SNAP, cutbacks on SNAP and other things that are affecting people with disabilities. But we also have a lot of kinds of discrimination and a lot of things about, that you might see on, through internet or through the movies or through radio or television. Still a lot of negative things
