Since my injury, I have started a nonprofit, a consulting practice, a travel company and Kansas City’s first fully adaptive wellness center. People hear that list and call me driven. Here is what they usually miss: for a lot of us, entrepreneurship was never the dream. It was the only door that opened.
We start businesses because we have to
Only about 19 percent of disabled Americans are employed, compared to 63 percent of everyone else. Decades after the ADA, that number has barely moved. So we build our own tables. People with disabilities are self-employed at higher rates than non-disabled workers in every age group, and there are more than 1.8 million disabled-owned businesses in this country.
Think about what that means. The group with the least access to jobs is one of the most entrepreneurial populations in America. Not because a podcast told us to chase freedom, but because a hiring manager decided we were a liability before we said a word.
The data nobody collects
Ask what share of venture capital goes to women or to Black founders and you will get a number. It is a bad number, but it exists. Ask what share goes to disabled founders and you get silence. As the Kauffman Foundation put it, the data doesn’t even exist. Most small business surveys never ask about disability at all.
You cannot close a gap you refuse to measure.
Where researchers have looked, the picture is stark. A UK study found disabled founders may be up to 400 times less likely to secure investment than non-disabled ones, and 90 percent of disabled entrepreneurs said they were not treated equally when seeking it. The same research dubbed the quiet part out loud: investors tend to see our companies through the lens of charity rather than commerce.
I have lived that meeting. The tone shifts the moment you roll in. People who came to evaluate a business start congratulating you on being out of the house.
The $2,000 trap
Here is the part almost nobody outside our community knows. If you rely on SSI, and for many disabled people, that is the program keeping Medicaid and home care in place, you are legally barred from having more than $2,000 to your name. That limit has not meaningfully changed since the 1980s. Go one dollar over and you can lose cash benefits and health coverage at the same time.
Now try to bootstrap a business under that rule. Every founder is told to save runway, build credit, reinvest profits. We are penalized for doing exactly that. Workarounds exist, like ABLE accounts and PASS plans, but they are patchwork, under-publicized and full of eligibility fine print. There is a bipartisan bill, the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, that would raise the cap to $10,000. It should be the least controversial idea in Washington.
What the gap costs everyone
This is not just our loss. The World Bank estimates the global economy gives up between $1.37 and $1.94 trillion in GDP every year by sidelining disabled people economically. One in four American adults has a disability. We are the customers the market keeps calling niche, and disabled founders are the ones who actually understand what that market needs, because we live it. I did not open INCLŪSIV because a focus group suggested it. I opened it because I could not train anywhere in my own city.
What would actually help
I get asked what allies and institutions can do. Here is my honest list:
- Count us. Add disability to the demographic questions on small business and investment surveys. Invisibility is a policy choice.
- Kill the cliff. Raise the SSI asset limit and let disabled founders save and reinvest without gambling their healthcare.
- Make the front door accessible. A third of disabled entrepreneurs report that funding applications and systems themselves are inaccessible. If your pitch process cannot be completed by a blind founder or a Deaf founder, you do not have a pipeline problem. You are the pipeline problem.
- Fund disabled-led infrastructure. Organizations like 2Gether-International and the National Disability Institute’s small business programs exist and work. They should not be running on fumes.
- Underwrite us as businesses, not causes. Due diligence, real term sheets, real expectations. Respect looks like scrutiny plus capital, not applause minus both.
Organizations are already proving this model works. In Kansas City, Empower Network is building pathways to economic independence for entrepreneurs the traditional workforce has excluded. Nationally, 2Gether-International has spent over a decade connecting disabled founders with mentors, funders, and community, turning disability into a strength instead of a liability. Disabled But Not Really is joining that work too, expanding beyond adaptive fitness to help close this same funding gap for disabled entrepreneurs.
One seven-figure grant changed what my organization could do for this community: the buildings we could open, the people we could reach. That kind of backing should not be a lightning strike. There are 1.8 million disabled-owned businesses out there run by people who already solved the hardest problem an entrepreneur can face: rebuilding a life with no roadmap. Fund people like that, and you will not be doing charity.
You will be doing the smartest deal in the room.