Rebecca Cokley

Rebecca Cokley is the Program Officer for the Ford Foundation’s first-ever U.S. Disability Rights program. To date the team has moved over $60M to disability rights and justice organizations. She also serves as the foundation’s liaison to the President’s Council for Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy, a coalition of 17 foundations committed to funding the disability rights and justice sector.

Rebecca grew up in the Bay Area with her mom, the Director of a Disabled Students Center at a community college, and her dad, the Executive Director of a Center for Independent Living. Both of her parents were little people, like herself. Her dad became paralyzed when Rebecca was eighteen months old and the family faced discriminatory practices by agencies who refused to provide support unless Rebecca was put into foster care. Rebecca was raised within a community of disabled activists, including her godmother Ann Cupolo-Freeman, Judy Heumann, Paul Longmore, and others.

While in high school, Rebecca was concurrently enrolled at the College of San Mateo where she received an A.A. in liberal studies and received the prestigious Karl Pister scholarship to the University of California Santa Cruz. Rebecca attended the UCSC where she majored in Politics. Her earliest job post-college interning for her local representative, Congressman Tom Lantos, the only member of Congress who was a Holocaust survivor. During the internship, the Congressman engaged Rebecca on the draft UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. At the same time as working for her local member, she worked her way up the corporate ladder at Victoria’s Secret, co-managing multiple stores in the San Francisco market. Three of her stores gained Platinum status (top third) within the company during her tenure. She credits her time in retail for teaching her how to talk to anyone about pretty much any subject.

Prior to her time in government, Rebecca worked at the Institute of Educational Leadership where she ran the National Consortium for Leadership and Disability/Youth, focusing on empowering young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to use their voice to promote social change. While at IEL she contributed to guides on disability disclosure, mentoring, and created an assessment to determine the level of authentic youth leadership for youth development programs. Rebecca came up through the youth movement in the disability community and served on the leadership team of the National Council on Disability’s Youth Advisory Committee and was the policy director for the National Youth Leadership Network. She worked with young people in 5 different states (West Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Washington, and California) on a successful campaign to require disability history included as a mandatory part of K-12 public education.

Rebecca has a deep history as a political advisor. In 2024 she mentored Harris Walz director of disability engagement Anastasia Somoza throughout the 90 day campaign. In 2020 she was asked to help interview candidates for roles at the Department of Health and Human Services. She routinely supports Senator Duckworth, Representative Ayanna Pressley, and Representative Katie Porter. During the 2020 election, she led a campaign working with 13 different presidential campaigns to develop and promote disability platforms. She worked closely with Senator Warren and Secretary Castro and served as a surrogate for Senator Warren.

A three-time presidential appointee, Rebecca served in key policy roles at the Department of Education (where she introduced the language of the “ADA Generation’) and the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as oversaw diversity and inclusion efforts for the Obama administration at the White House. In this role she worked with leaders and organizations centering race, lgbtqiap, ethnic, religious, disability, veteran status, and recent college graduates to help create an administration that reflected the diversity of the nation. She went on to serve as the Executive Director of the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency tasked with advising Congress and the White House on issues of disability public policy. While at NCD she oversaw key reports on the civil rights of disabled parents, the importance of home and community based services, and mental health services for students on college campuses. She also fought for the inclusion of people with disabilities and their families in discussions of police violence following the Ferguson uprising. While at NCD Rebecca cultivated a number of writers and journalists with disabilities to help shift the narrative as it related to people with disabilities.

Prior to joining Ford, Rebecca was the co-founder of the Center for American Progress’ Disability Justice Initiative, the first disability policy project to be housed at a major progressive think tank and was a critical voice in ensuring the disability community and its priorities were not left behind during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Rebecca’s policy work at CAP centered on driving an agenda to disrupt the relationship between disability and poverty and included campaigns to raise the minimum wage (and eliminate the subminimum wage), preventing attacks on nutrition and lighting and heating programs, and increase access for home and community based services. She was instrumental in pushing back on attacks on the Americans with Disabilities Act, Medicaid, and Social Security.

In 2020 she was awarded the Richman Distinguished Fellow in Public Life for Brandeis University. She was awarded the Frank Harkin award by the National Council on Independent Living and the Judy Heumann award by the Maryland State Independent Living Council. Rebecca has spoken at Netroots Nation, New York City Comic-Con, Yale University, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, the Women’s March National Conference among others and given a TedX talk. Rebecca has published with The Body Is Not An Apology, Rewire, CNN, Refinery 29, the Nation, the Washington Post, and been a guest on MSNBC and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Her piece on “the talk” was part of a collection curated by Ibram Kendi’s The Emancipator for a Murrow award. Her essay on “Disability selective abortion bans” was included in Alice Wong’s groundbreaking Disability Visibility.

Rebecca sits on the board of directors for Rockwood Leadership Institute, the NY Women’s Foundation, and Common Cause and is an Equity Advisory Board member for Sephora and Advisory Board member for Emerge. She has previously served on the board of the ACLU of the District of Columbia. She has been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Policy Link health equity fellow (2017), and a Rockwood Leading from the Inside Out Fellow (2016), and an Education Policy Fellowship Program fellow from the Institute for Educational Leadership (2006). She is the proud spouse of Patrick, mother of three, and eventually she will finish the two books she has been working on for the last decade. Her three loves outside of her family are Prince, Legos, and Liverpool FC.