In this episode, Beth Golik sits down with Ryan Wolfe from Ability Ministry to discuss a new free stock photography website that celebrates the beauty of disability and fights the stigma and negative narratives of the world.
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Beth: This is Beth Golik and you are listening to Key Ministry: The Podcast. This is Episode 009: Disability Is Beautiful. Now before we get started, I want to welcome new listeners to the podcast and encourage you to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Each week you’ll hear from one of my colleagues, Dr. Lamar Hardwick, Sandra Peoples, Catherine Boyle, or Dr. Steve Grcevich and on the second week of each month you’ll hear from me. But wait, you say, this isn’t the second of the week of the month? Well, you’re right. There’s a bonus Thursday this month, and so we are bringing a guest on the podcast. Today I have the privilege of interviewing Ryan Wolfe, President and Executive Director of Ability Ministry.
There are many, many things Ryan and I could chat about, including a certain progressive metal band that he and my husband have in common, but we’re going to narrow it down to one topic. There is something very exciting that we are going to discuss today and that is a new initiative called Disability Is Beautiful. The concept and the actual website that has been developed is so exciting to me that I would stumble all over my words to share it with you. So, Ryan, would you please do the honors!
Ryan: Awesome. Well, thank you Beth for having me on the podcast. I’m extremely honored to be a part of that. Before I get into Disability Is Beautiful, I’m wondering if any of the listeners would know that progressive metal band…
Beth: [laughs] You could ask!
Ryan: I can ask and here’s a little bonus: if anybody can figure it out and message me, maybe I will send them a prize. How about that?
Beth: Oooh. Good one.
Ryan: So if anybody can figure it out, message me and I’ll send them a prize.
Beth: And I’ll take bribes for hints.
Ryan: [laughs] So very cool. Let’s talk a little bit about Disability Is Beautiful. First I’d like to talk about maybe where the idea came. As a leader of a disability ministry organization, one of the things that we do and I know Key Ministry does as well is we’re always looking for good stock photography of people with disabilities to use in marketing material and curriculum that we produce, in social media posts. We always want to have good representation of people with disabilities. And over the years at Ability Ministry we seemed to struggle to find good pictures of representation of people with various disabilities. When I say that, it’s because we don’t always struggle to find the cute pictures of kids with Down Syndrome. Specifically, there’s a little girl that has fingerpaint all over her hands that I think we’ve used multiple times, and there’s another picture of a young man with Down Syndrome who’s staring into his father’s eyes as they’re kind of looking at each other getting ready to hug. And we use both of those photos over and over again.
Beth: Right, it’s funny because this is a podcast, so people can’t see pictures, but I guarantee you that pretty much all of our listeners can picture those two photographs and have probably used those two stock photos at some point in their ministries.
Ryan: Absolutely. If you go online and search “photos of people with disabilities” those are probably the top two that are going to pop up. And they’re good. They’re really good photos, so we’ve all used them. But, you know, you don’t want to use the same photos over and over and over again, and it’s not a fair representation of all the different types of disabilities that people may have. So, we at Ability Ministry – when I say “we” it’s specifically me and Jason that put together most of our stuff – we got frustrated with that.
We thought, “OK, these photos are good, but it’s not an equal representation of all the different disabilities that are out there.”
And we just got to the point where we were really frustrated and we said, “OK, we’ve got a couple of different options. We can get frustrated and just accept how it is, we can get frustrated and hope that somebody else will do something about it, or we can be frustrated and we can do something about it.” And that’s kind of where we landed. We said, “OK, there’s not equal representation online of images of people with disabilities, like all disabilities. What can we do about it?” And we came up with the idea of developing our own free stock photography website and we came up with the name Disability Is Beautiful, and I’ll talk about that in just a second.
So, yeah, DisabilityIsBeautiful.com, you can go there and we’d encourage you to bookmark that page. It is a page where you’ll find multiple different pictures of people with disabilities, varying disabilities, doing all kinds of different things that you can use in your social media, your marketing, your stuff that you’re creating for print, banners, posters, anything that you want. So bookmark that: DisabilityIsBeautiful.com.
As we developed the idea for it, we knew that we would need a lot of pictures to create a stock photography website. And I don’t know if you have used, like, Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, those are kind of our three go-to free stock photography websites. So we kind of designed our website based on those different websites so it kind of has that similar feel to it and we started posting. We made our site go live January 13, 2022, so this year, so it’s still only a few months old. And we started just pushing out content, reaching out to people that we know, and asking them to create a free account, upload some of your favorite pictures of loved ones and friends with disabilities or share it with people that have disabilities and ask them to upload their favorite pictures to DisabilityIsBeautiful.com. We’ve had a good response. And the catalog of photos is growing. Why we tell people, hey, bookmark this site is because each time you come back it’s probably going to look a little different because it is a growing catalog of images.
So, yeah, it’s exciting. The reason we went with the name DisabilityIsBeautiful.com is important as well.
We chose that name because we believe there is a reason there’s not equal representation online.
It’s because of negative narratives that exist about disability. We believe that the world has a different narrative about disability and the world, we think, would tell you that disability is ugly, it’s shameful, it’s undesirable, it’s something that should be disposed of, and we could go on and on about those negative narratives.
But because of those narratives, there’s no equal representation.
People kind of shy away from disability. If people aren’t sometimes comfortable around people with disabilities they tend to look away, walk away, or not engage, because of those narratives.
So, we said, OK, let’s come up with a name that flies in the face of that negative narrative. So that’s why we came up with “disability is beautiful” and we also believe that it is a biblical truth.
Psalm 139 says that all people are fearfully and wonderfully made. God makes no mistakes. God does not make things that are shameful, ugly, and need to be hidden or disposed of.
In Genesis 1:27, this is the conversation between God and Jesus, “Let us make man and woman in our own image.” So I don’t believe that God is an ugly being. I believe that, you know, He is beautiful. So if we are made in His image, we too are beautiful.
So that’s why we kind of came up with the name “disability is beautiful” because we believe it’s biblical and we believe that it flies in the face of the negative narrative that exists around disability.
Beth: I love it. It’s a celebration and it’s scriptural. I love it.
Ryan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And you’ll see a tagline on the website when you go to DisabilityIsBeautiful.com. You’ll see the tagline says: Beauty belongs to everyone. Just a declaration of the fact that beauty does in fact belongs to everyone. So it’s a celebration, absolutely. One of the great features again about DisabilityIsBeautiful.com is everything is free. Every download of every picture is free. If you go to different stock photography websites, stock photography is expensive! If you’re going to buy an image, probably the baseline price is around $25 an image and it can go up from there. So, again, this being a free resource is a win for everybody. It’s also free to create an account on DisabilityIsBeautiful.com. So if you create an account there are a lot of cool things you can do. You can save your favorite photos in an account so you don’t have to go searching for them. Once you save them, they’re in your account. If you create a portfolio, if you are uploading images that’s free as well. All those images are kind of cataloged in your account, your portfolio. So one of the things that’s cool that we try to encourage people to do is, say you’re an individual with disabilities and you want to become a model, you want to be featured on Target’s website – because Target is really good about including people with disabilities – and you want to start building your portfolio, sharing that with companies. Create a free account on DisabilityIsBeautiful.com and upload all of your favorite images and you can share that entire portfolio with just a single link to your account on our website.
Beth: That’s a great idea! I hadn’t even thought of that!
Ryan: Yeah, so if you’re an aspiring model with disabilities, we’d love to host your portfolio on our website and it would be easy to share a link of all those photos. Because we know that creating your own website is kind of a daunting task so let us host your portfolio for you. And all you have to do is share the link to our website to your specific page.
There are so many great features. And again, just reinforcing the fact that 100% of it is free.
Beth: I love it. And I can speak as an end-user because Key Ministry has used DisabilityIsBeautiful.com, my church has used some photos in some of our marketing pieces, and it’s a very easy to use website. I love that it’s free. And, yes, the catalog continues to grow. So it’s exciting to come back and see what’s new.
Ryan: Yeah, it’s very exciting. Probably one of the most fun and engaging projects I think our ministry has ever taken on. So it’s something we’re very proud of and something that if you follow Ability Ministry you’ll see us talking about quite a bit.
Beth: And I love that you created this ministry – because it is a ministry I think – created this ministry, you know, you were experiencing frustration. And this is something all of us can relate to and I love that you didn’t decide to just grumble, grumble about it, but actually do something about it. So, fantastic. Ability Ministry and DisabilityIsBeautiful, all these links are in the shownotes. We really encourage our listeners to check it out. Ryan, is there anything else you’d like to share?
Ryan: Yeah, just encourage everybody to go to DisabilityIsBeautiful.com, bookmark the page, use it, upload to it, and share with us your favorite photos. The way to make it the best resource possible is by everybody sharing their favorite photos. So, yeah, just encourage people to do so.
Beth: Well, thank you so much, Ryan for being our guest on Episode 009 of the Key Ministry podcast, our topic today was Disability Is Beautiful. And it sure is. So thank you for sharing that with everyone.
Listeners, thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Key Ministry: The Podcast. Please take a minute to share it with a friend or colleague or in your social media and don’t forget to check out the show notes for all the links that were mentioned today.
