Our Commitment to Inclusion and Access
The Chronic Pain Project uses art and visual storytelling to help people living with chronic pain express experiences that are often unseen, misunderstood, or difficult to put into words. We bring artists, providers, caregivers, and community members together to build connection, increase understanding, and make the realities of life with chronic pain more visible.
Chronic pain affects people across every community, but it is not experienced or responded to equally. Race, ethnicity, disability, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, income, language, geography, and access to healthcare can influence whether someone’s pain is recognized, believed, and treated.
We are committed to centering people whose experiences of chronic pain have too often been overlooked or excluded, including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; LGBTQIA2S+ people; disabled and neurodivergent people; and people experiencing financial, geographic, or healthcare-access barriers. We seek to represent the full complexity of these experiences without reducing chronic pain to a single universal story.
Across our exhibits, workshops, interviews, and community events, we work to:
Actively welcome and seek participation from artists ages 18+ with diverse identities, backgrounds, abilities, and experiences of chronic pain.
Offer programs free of charge or on a sliding-scale basis whenever possible.
Provide art materials for in-person workshops whenever possible so that cost does not prevent participation.
Hold in-person programs in physically accessible spaces and consider participants’ needs for seating, rest, mobility, sensory comfort, and other accommodations.
Offer virtual and remote participation options when possible for people who are homebound, geographically distant, immunocompromised, or unable to attend in person.
Create environments where people can participate at their own pace and in ways that reflect their energy, capacity, communication preferences, and creative experience.
Respect each artist’s autonomy, privacy, and right to decide whether and how their artwork, image, story, or health experience is shared.
Accessibility and inclusion are ongoing responsibilities. We welcome feedback from artists, participants, volunteers, and community partners about barriers they encounter and changes that would make our programs more intentional, accessible, and inclusive. We commit to using that feedback to guide future programming, partnerships, policies, and resource decisions.