Expert Q&A

By Jennifer Allen and Dan Tobin

When you hear of someone who is regularly pulling in multimillion-dollar grants, it’s tempting to think they started with a lot of wealthy friends, a team of experts, and a massive budget. Kimberly Danesi disproves the stereotype. Her journey to becoming an accessibility champion, and a major force in Galveston, was built from the ground up—or actually from the sand up. Danesi began by applying for modest $3,000 and $6,000 grants for beach access. Through her tenacity, she parlayed the thousands into hundreds of thousands and eventually into millions, all dedicated to accessibility and infrastructure. She has also risen to the lofty and influential post as interim CEO for the Galveston Island Park Board of Trustees.

Kimberly’s path wasn’t easy by any means, but it is a replicable model as she demonstrated in a recent interview with TravelAbility, provided of course, you supply the scrappiness. 

Find the Passion

It all starts with passion. Applying for grants is a  tedious process that requires time,  commitment, and a thick skin. When Danesi was asked where her passion comes from, she said it goes back to how she was raised. Her mom worked with kids with special needs and shared her own passion with her family. Passion is contagious—which has turned out to be key in Danesi’s work with the Galveston Park Board.

If your organization is lacking that passion, look for others outside your community who can provide ideas and inspiration. “You have a community through TravelAbility. Destinations International is another network that can help,” Danesi advises. 

These networks can help you identify and recruit champions from your own community —a disability mom, a nonprofit, a community member who’s already speaking up. “Go to them and build that relationship and ask questions. They have ideas, and they’ve thought about how to make it happen. Sometimes it’s about asking smart people stupid questions.” You’ll find advocates and their passion will spread. Look at enlisting advocates from local nonprofit organizations, United Way, your school district, the chamber of commerce, and on and on. You can never have too many. 

Find Your Community, Or Build It

So much of Danesi’s success extends beyond her own strengths to the supportive community behind her. “It’s all about a sense of community,” she says. The grants you’re applying for are impacting the people in your community as well as the visitors you’re trying to attract. You’re all in this together. Build relationships with the organizations around you. 

Looking back to the early days of her organization, Danesi acknowledges that it’s hard to dedicate sufficient time to the grant writing process if you don’t have the budget, the staff, or the capacity to do so. Even this can be helped by the community, says Danesi. People often step up to the plate when they are a part of something bigger than themselves and know they can contribute in a meaningful way. You’ll often encounter community organizations who are already looking for ways to give back to the community and may be eager to help fund a project.

Scrappiness often comes through piecing together the smaller contributions from community organizations.

Be a Beacon

By now everybody in Galveston knows the Galveston Park Board is on fire for inclusion. They speak up about it. Everywhere. Always. As a result, funders have started coming to them. “If someone knows you’re looking for money and will act, they will share opportunities with you that they hear about.”

Networking is a lifestyle. When you’re constantly broadcasting a message of inclusion, you create new funding opportunities that weren’t considered before. 

Just Ask

This applies across the board.

When it comes to needing support from your community: just ask.

When a grant isn’t exactly what you need: Just ask.

Instead of funding accessibility assessments, Danesi utilized a college intern. Not only was that intern able to do the accessibility assessments, but she ended up being a link to another sizable grant opportunity. 

Danesi gave the example of the beach wheelchairs being distributed by the state of Texas for the national effort to improve beach accessibility. Danesi was offered one beach wheelchair, but she pointed out the expanse of the Galveston beaches and asked if she could have three, instead. They agreed without hesitation. “The worst they can do is say ‘no,’” she says.

Another example was when they were approved for a 1.4 million grant in 2017. Due to multiple setbacks, they weren’t able to implement the grant until four years later. By then, the cost of the project had nearly tripled. Knowing the project would no longer be possible with the grant, they asked for the difference—and it was given.

It never hurts to ask. The very worst that can happen is someone says “no.”

Keep Inclusion in Mind

Keeping  inclusion in the forefront has been central to Danesi’s success. She’s used her grants for building beaches, for adding Mobi Mats and beach wheelchairs, and for improving infrastructure, and for improving accessible amenities. Not all of these grants were disability inclusion specific. Danesi and her team have developed the vision to see how to make improvements that positively affect all travelers.

“This is not just value added for people with accessibility needs,” explains Danesi. “Every person uses this mat. We’re creating accessibility for everyone.” All of the beach goers with their wagons and gear prefer the easy access of the mat.

Persevere

“When you’re denied, and it does happen, you should follow up to find out why you were rejected,” Danesi advises. “We usually hear, ‘you have a great project, but this one was more aligned with our current grant, come back next year.’ Go back, they mean it.” A rejection isn’t the end.Take suggestions. Accept constructive criticism. Keep going.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, October 11, 2023 – TravelAbility, the leading organization for accessible and inclusive travel, announced today that it will host its Emerging Markets Summit on October 28-30, 2024 at the Argonaut Hotel in San Francisco. The summit will bring together travel industry professionals, disability advocates, and travelers with diverse needs to explore the latest trends and best practices in inclusive travel.

The Argonaut Hotel, located in the historic Fisherman’s Wharf, is one of the most accessible hotels in San Francisco, according to several travelers with disabilities who praise its facilities and its services. The hotel offers spacious rooms, roll-in showers, grab bars, lowered counters, and other amenities that cater to the needs of travelers with a range of abilities.

The summit will provide travel industry professionals with a big-picture view and concrete strategies for tapping the growing market of accessible travel. Topics include:

• How to design and market inclusive travel products and services
• How to reach and engage travelers with disabilities and other emerging markets
• How to create accessible and inclusive destinations and experiences
• How to leverage technology and innovation to enhance accessibility and inclusion
• How the emerging markets of diversity, sustainability, and accessibility intersect one another.

The summit will also offer two exclusive concurrent sessions for attendees who want to deepen their knowledge and skills in inclusive travel. The first session is a two-day immersive accessibility training for travel professionals, led by TravelAbility Ambassador Kristy Durso, who has developed an in-depth accessibility certification program. The second session is a half-day workshop on the travel needs of senior travelers, in collaboration with AARP.

“We are excited to host this summit and share our vision of making travel accessible and inclusive for everyone,” said Jake Steinman, the founder and CEO of TravelAbility. “We invite all travel industry professionals to join us and learn from each other.”

This year’s summit in Savannah sold out. To register for the summit or learn more about TravelAbility, visit or follow TravelAbility on Facebook and LinkedIn.

TravelAbility is dedicated to making travel possible for everyone, regardless of their abilities. In its five-year history, the organization has established itself within the tourism industry as a leading innovator, advocate, and resource on accessible travel.

Julie Pingston is not one to coast or think small. She and her team at Choose Lansing just unveiled a new name, a new logo, and new taglines based on nearly a year of research and design. And the unveiling was no soft rollout. How about halftime of a Michigan State football game? But Julie is on to the next huge project. In a few weeks, the DMO will host their inaugural accessible travel summit. TravelAbility Insider Editor Dan Tobin was fortunate to catch a few minutes with Julie to talk about how to capture the highlights of a diverse region, the passion that drives her commitment to accessibility, and what she has learned from a year in the Destination A11y Club.

DT: I really love your new logos and I thought it was great that you explain the thinking behind the changes on your website. Why did you decide to do that?

JP: We worked almost a year on the rebranding and we had gone through such an extensive process and we had come to an outcome that we were so proud of. We wanted to explain everything that went on behind it so that people could understand some of the choices we made. Our name is now Choose Lansing instead of Greater Lansing Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is a lot shorter for one thing. Our research told us that when people are planning things for our region they value how we partner with them and help them make choices. So that ties into the word “choose.” And we are a regional organization so the tagline “Plan on something greater” represents the idea of the entire region. And we used a pinpoint icon with the star inside to show we’re a capital city. Then the different colors showcase that we have a lot of diversity and different options here. So it was all very purposeful. 

The day after we launched the new name and logo, we showed it in our Spartan football stadium during the first home game and 75,000 people got to take a look at it. And the crowd liked it so that was very exciting.  

DT: I’m hearing a couple of layers of meaning in the logo design. One is the idea of diversity. It also seems to speak to your flexibility and your customization, that you provide choice

JP: That’s exactly what we’re trying to convey.

DT: What were the key ideas that came out of the research?

JP: You know, we are a destination with a big 10 university and a state capital and a lot of other resources. How do we best portray all of that? That’s how we came up with the central idea of choosing.  If you come here we’ve got lots of things to choose from; we’ve got lots of opportunities. We have trails and outdoor recreation and we also have urban destinations. The main point to our clients is that we are going to be engaged with you at all levels and really give that positive experience.

DT: How did you get started with the accessibility assessments and your focus on autism? 

JP: We started with our work with accessibility related to neurodiverse opportunities. A number of our attractions and other locations were looking to add programming so we proactively brought people together within the community to find tools create programming for those traveling on the autism spectrum or with other neurodiversities. Our job as the destination marketing organization is to let people know that we have all these opportunities here. We have a couple of programs that were drawing people from throughout the state. But we wanted to  find more things for those families to do so they are not always going to the same place every time they come here. And our attractions really did step up and every single one of them basically created something that was pointed toward more neurodiversity. 

We then just put out the word out in the marketplace  that we had all of these opportunities. We also had the opportunity to add training to our front line staff so we partnered with the Michigan Autism Association and residential options and they trained more than 1000 people so far on how to help guests with accommodations and understanding all the different needs that travelers might have. That really gravitated throughout the community because suddenly we were not being asked to train exclusively our hospitality businesses but we were being asked to train all kinds of businesses. That was six years ago and then we were intent on making our destination accessible in all ways and for all needs. The pandemic slowed us down a little bit but we were always very intent on moving forward to provide opportunities and information about all the accessibility points in our community. 

On October 26 we are doing our inaugural tourism accessibility summit for all of our hospitality partners and anybody who really wants to learn how to heighten the guest experience by providing information and just doing more being more aware.

DT: How are you measuring the results of all these great initiatives? Are you looking at the bottom line or are you looking more at customer service and satisfaction?

JP: Both definitely. We have seen more people travel here looking for these resources that we have put into place. Some of our attractions do track where their visitors come from that participate in the programming and we have seen an increase in the number of visitors from further away and in and staying over. I always think of something Jake Steinman says:  At some point we’re all going to be in need, having mobility issues and needing all the accommodations we can find. So I just think of this work on accessibility as planning for the future.

DT: Choose Lansing was invited to join TravelAbility’s Destination A11y Club last year. What are you taking away from that group so far?

JP: So much. It’s been very beneficial to us as a destination to be able to have the resources of the other members so that we can ask questions or share an idea. TravelAbility has also created a wonderful playbook for DMOs that we’ve been able to use locally with our partners. You know, you don’t know what you don’t know and then you start going through this playbook and all of a sudden they’re discovering things that they never thought about, It gives information in a very easy to digest format. Everyone can take that information and then make change within their venue or their property or their attraction. We use the playbook as a guideline to steer people and that’s how we got to the tourism summit where we can pull all that together as a destination and showcase for everybody. 

DT: It sounds like you’re playing a key leadership role in this work of raising awareness. But you’re also playing a convener role of shining a light on what venues and attractions are doing and bringing them together. 

JP:  That’s absolutely accurate. Our goal is to just bring all the things that are happening together so that we all can share and create that destination wide experience for all that come here. It’s not like you can only go to this hotel or this attraction to find that experience. You can go anywhere in the region. 

DT: Is there any particular moment you can  point to that crystallizes why you do this work? 

JP: Our theater does sensory-inclusive performances. The first one I went to I met several families and every single one of them said that they had never had the opportunity to go out together as a family before. I have a good friend who has a son with autism and she has taught me that when her son was young she could never go to a theater or a museum or any kind of art gallery. And now you know those opportunities are available because of the work that we’ve done for those on the autism spectrum. And when I see these families at the theater and the children are all dressed up everyone looks so excited . . .  it’s a beautiful experience and that’s how I know that we are on the right path. I tear up. 

Our Takeaway: Julie Pingston is a standout in our field–a great leader, bridge-builder, and advocate.