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Remarkable Insights: Diego Mariscal

Transcript

[00:00] Viv

We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we record this podcast The Gadigal people. This is their land, never ceded, always sacred and pay respects to the elders past, present, and emerging of this place. Coming up on Remarkable Insights.

[00:18] Diego

We have to be creative, we have to be resilient, and so it is not about whether or not disabled people are going to be good entrepreneurs. The question is, do they have the right ecosystem support that are going to allow them to thrive?

[00:34] Viv

Disabled and proud, in this episode, we speak with 2Gether International CEO and Chief Disabled Officer Diego Mariscal about his mission to have disability recognized and valued as an asset for business and entrepreneurship. Diego, it’s so great to have you here. If we could start, would you mind giving a description of your visual self and the setting that you’re in?

[00:54] Diego

Sure. Yes. So I am a Latino man. With a… we were just talking about this, with a red painting behind me. The painting has a bunch of wheelchairs on it.

I am wearing a dark blue shirt and black blazer.

[01:17] Viv:

Thank you so much for joining me today and I thought we’d just start, for people who don’t, would you mind giving an introduction to who you are and what you do with yourself?

[01:28] Diego:

My name is Diego Mariscal. I am the CEO and founder of 2Gether International, which is the leading accelerator for founders with disabilities specifically. We support high growth, high impact startups that are led by disabled founders. We work with over 600 entrepreneurs all over the world. Collectively they’ve been able to raise over $50 million in less than four years. And it’s been an incredible ride.

And I will say that we’re doing it together. Some of the entrepreneurs that we work with, we’ve referred to Remarkable and vice versa. The biggest difference I see is that we’re exclusively focusing on founders with disabilities, but the mission of looking at disability as something to be proud of or something to embrace is definitely a common theme and I can’t wait to see what we’re able to accomplish together.

[02:34] Viv:

And I love that your title is CEO and Chief Disabled Officer. Can I get your perspective, these titles like Chief Disabled Officer are sort of new to some people, but I would love for you to give your perspective on the importance of what that title means.

[02:50] Diego:

Yeah. That was very deliberate. I hope that a title such as that is able to convey that whoever the next CEO of 2Gether International is, should really be a disabled person. Because really we want to signal to people that this is meant to be by and for entrepreneurs with disabilities and that there is a sense of pride and identity in having a disability.

[03:20] Viv:

When it comes to articulating the benefits to a bottom line of investing in this space. What are some the sort of the top points that you would say to people?

[03:30] Diego:

That we are the largest minority in the world in the United States. That’s about 20, 25% of of the US population and anyone can become disabled at any point in time.

More importantly though, I think that it is important to recognize that as folks with disabilities, we are innate problem solvers. We have to solve problems every day from how do we get dressed to how we drive, how we communicate and so that… often people are looking at who are the most resilient, who are the most creative, because we know that makes for better entrepreneurs. And the reality is that we have to be creative, we have to be resilient. And so it is not about whether or not disabled people are going to be good entrepreneurs. The question is, do they have the right ecosystem support that are going to allow them to thrive.

[04:30] Viv:

For me, there’s this part of a narrative, which is entrepreneurship and advocacy in this space seem to go hand in hand to some degree, but I feel that there is this greater awareness piece, which is to say that we want to get more people with lived experience driving this space as founders, as people who are the developers, designers, but is there part of the narrative where people also need to take into account that there is an exhaustion that comes with the advocacy, that we are just not factoring in that, that people having to fight for this the bare minimum?

[05:05] Diego:

That’s another deep question that I haven’t been asked before. So kudos to you for the preparedness. Even in my own life, right? Managing my own disability and managing a business I think certainly there are moments of exhaustion. What I have learned is because there’s no other option I have to prioritize my health, I have to prioritize exercising and sleeping well because if I don’t, it just compounds. Ultimately that makes me a better entrepreneur, right? Because I am taking care of my body and taking care not always in the perfect way, but who is, right? But because I prioritize care that comes with managing a disability, that makes me for a better entrepreneur.

Not everybody has that. Not everybody has the right ecosystem and the right supports in place to be able to do that. To give you an example, vocational rehabilitation services, which are state agencies that are funded by the federal government to support folks with disabilities to obtain meaningful employment. They have a reputation from being extremely difficult to work with. I have been a client and I tell this experience that they ask you what your employment goal is and I tell them 2Gether International and supporting entrepreneurs with disabilities. And then the counsellor comes back to me and says oh, I’m excited about it, to show you all these resources to help you with what you’re trying to do. And what they show me is my own website and my own resources, and I’m like, ‘you are not even reading what is it that I’m working on’. And that’s a funny story, but many times where I’ve worked with vocational rehabilitation services, I still find it extremely humiliating at times and dehumanizing because of the way people in that agency treat folks with disabilities.

And so I share that because, It’s about making sure that all entrepreneurs, but especially entrepreneurs with disabilities, have the right ecosystem around them, right? So that they are able to not just manage their disability, but manage their business in a way that compliments each other.

[07:40] Viv:

Talking about the journey of a disabled entrepreneur, is there a really common mistake that you see in the journey to… in the early stages, that you would want to speak to and give people advice of how to avoid?

[07:52] Diego:

The number one thing I see is being afraid of losing benefits, which is a very real concern. And I don’t fault the entrepreneurs for this because it is a legitimate concern. That’s why organizations like Remarkable and 2Gether need to exist, right? To be able to help entrepreneurs navigate. But for example, going back to vocational rehabilitation services, so let’s assume that I was going to college and vocational rehabilitation services was paying for my tuition. Also, as a person with a disability, oftentimes you have access to Medicaid services which covers your health insurance in the US and on top of that, you can have access to social security supplementary income if you’re making below a certain amount. 

So that’s $800 a month that you’re entitled to. And so if you’re able to utilize those services the right way or the way that they’re intended to be used, you actually have $800 in your bank account that you can start to use to fund your business. Because VR (vocational rehabilitation) services is supposed to be paying for room and board, and so your expenses should be covered. In some ways disabled people can actually have a leg up, pun intended, leg up in entrepreneurship because you know of the systems around it. That’s not to say that it doesn’t come with a taxing prize and that it’s not a difficult thing to obtain. My encouragement or my piece of advice to folks with disabilities is navigating a disability is difficult. 

Navigating a business is difficult, but you’re going to succeed not in spite of your disability, but because of the lessons that you’ve learned thanks to your disability.

[09:52] Viv:

Are there any pieces of tech that you use that allow you to have that, to keep that balance in place? And if you wouldn’t mind sharing those?

[10:03] Diego:

My computer speaks every 15 minutes to tell me what the time is. So that’s certainly one. I use screen readers all the time to read documents and things like that. For the longest time, I thought that having two laptops would be a luxury. I was fortunate enough to be able to get two laptops at one point through vocational rehabilitation services, one of which was very big and bulky, and I have been using it for years and that was my work laptop. And finally my colleague recently was like, Diego, you need to get a new laptop, you’re lagging on the video. Like you need to get a new laptop. And he must have told me 10 times. Cause it’s the impression you’re giving. 

And finally, last week I just got a new laptop and and it’s great, it’s great! Having two computers, one at home and one, one in the office. I never think about how much carrying a backpack with weight on me would make a difference. And even though I know that health is really important, this was an example of how hard work technology for me, being able to use both computers is saving me not just the weight off my backpack, but also weight in terms of stress in terms of needs and things like that.

[11:44] Viv:

I’m conscious that I’d love you to clock off and go enjoy your evening. So I just have one last question for you. We like to invite the guests to leave our listeners and people enjoying the podcast with a Remarkable Insight, and that can be a piece of advice or something you would just like them to think about after they’ve finished this episode.

[12:03] Diego:

Listening. Listening doesn’t cost us anything other than being present, and it is the number one skill that I think entrepreneurs can have because if you listen well, you’re going to pick up on what the market needs. Now, listening doesn’t always mean you have to do what the other person says. People often think that listening means, okay, I’m gonna do what you say, but really listen and be present. And you’ll pick up on some wise insights along the way.

[12:39] Viv:

Thank you to our guest, and hopefully you found your own Remarkable moment. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and follow our Instagram at @remarkable_tech for unheard moments from this episode. Talk with you all on the next one.

Remarkable Insights: Joel Sardi

Transcript

[0:00] Viv
We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we record this podcast, the Gadigal people. This is their land, never ceded, always sacred and pay our respects to the elders past, present and emerging of this place.

[0:17] Viv
Coming up on Remarkable Insights…

[00:19] Joel
And then one day they got the opportunity to come and meet him on a site visit. He said, just come out the back. I went to his office while the taxi drove me there. I was in there and I went to go to the office and there was a stair to get in, so I called him and said, ‘I’m out the back. I can’t come up the stairs’. He said, ‘yeah, just come up the stairs. I’m in here’. I said ‘ I can’t go upstairs. I’m in a wheelchair’. It’s like I told him he just won $10 million the way he responded. ‘What? What do you mean? You’re in a wheelchair?’

[00:46] Viv
Did you know the employment of people with disability in Australia hasn’t improved in 30 years, but why? Joel Sardi is part of a team of people with disability who founded and created an accessible job search site here in Australia. If Remarkable doesn’t hire me for Season 3, I might need it. Joel Sardi, hello! And please could we start with a visual description of yourself?

[01:07] Joel
Sure. So I’m sitting in my bedroom slash office at home wearing a pink hoodie. Some black over ear headphones. Sitting in front of my laptop.

[01:17] Viv
For those who maybe aren’t aware of the amazing work you do and the person you are, would you mind just starting by giving a bit of an introduction of who you are and how you got to where you are currently?

[01:29] Joel
Yeah. Okay so we’ve already touched on my name. I work for a company called ‘The Field’. The Field is an employment site built by and for people with disability, actively linking them to inclusive employers. So in essence, it is a job site built by people with disability with the understanding of some of the barriers to meaningful employment and my role now is through account management, but in the early days, it was through consulting, through my lived experience. Because I am a person with disability, I’ve got a spinal cord injury consulting on the experiences I’ve had to achieve or to actually attain meaningful employment.

[02:04] Viv
Before we dive into The Field I would love to know about your sort of opinion of the disability space and how that impacts employment and the reality of employment for people with disabilities. How that changed sort of your knowledge prior to your accident to afterwards.

[02:24] Joel
I wasn’t aware of the statistics about the one in five Australians who live with disability. I had no direct connection to disability until I broke my neck and I really didn’t see too many barriers to employment until I actually acquired my disability. And it was just one of the biggest ones was people’s misconceptions around what I could do. People put a ceiling on my capability purely because they didn’t understand disability as such. And I’ll put my hand up and say that I was probably one of those people that had a misconception about disability before I acquired my disability.

[02:56] Viv
It’s interesting because I learned about my diagnosis of autism and ADHD only in the last couple of years. And it’s been such a cool journey for me because I feel like I’ve worked in the disability space for many years, and so I’ve learned a lot about it. It’s just funny that it took me so long to realise these things about myself. But yeah, anyway, we laugh.

[03:17] Joel
How old were you when you got your diagnosis?

[03:20] Viv
Last year? 28!

[03:23] Joel
Wow.

[03:23] Viv
Welcome!

[03:24] Joel
Yeah.

[03:25] Viv
But the experience on The Field was a cool thing because just in being on it, I was exposed to so many other things that I could ask for and in a job that I didn’t know I could. And I think that there is this really cool piece in what you’re doing as well, which is just creating a safe space some people don’t even know they need it yet. But I suppose I’d love to learn about how the actual creation of the tech took into account the nuances and the experience of disability and how you’ve created a website with people in a real co-design way.

[04:04] Joel
It’s like nothing for us without us. A lot of the technology advancements we see through smartphones have been born out of people’s consulting through disability, or people with disability consulting to, for example, Apple. You look at a mainstream device such as a smartphone, it’s almost now an iPhone one of the most accessible pieces of technology that exists. Similar to The Field, a lot of the accessibility features and the tech innovation that exists on The Field are there through people’s consult, through their lived experience of having disability. That is where the tech innovation lies. Long story, but that is where it lies through actually being built by people with disability and consulting, with people with disability.

[04:52] Viv
And do you find the work that you do firstly, is a lot of it virtual? And if so, Do you find that people might not know that you are a wheelchair user? And that sort of changes the tone of conversations and then they might find out later on, and then again there’s a bit of a tone change?

[05:12] Joel
That’s a really good question because I never used to introduce myself as somebody with disability or my connection to disability is this, which is something I’ve learnt and started to put into my daily routine when now working at The Field. I used to work in recruitment and there’s a classic story I share where I had an account I was managing and the guy I was speaking to for five years over the phone and it was always virtual, a hundred percent of it. And then one day I got the opportunity to come and meet him on a site visit, and I went there and he said, ‘just come out the back’. I went to his office. Well, a taxi drove me there, I was in there and went to go to the office and there was a stair to get in, so I called him and said, ‘I’m out the back. I can’t come up the stairs’. He said, ‘yeah, just come up the stairs’. I’m here. I said ‘ I can’t go upstairs. I’m in a wheelchair’. It’s like I told him he just won $10 million the way he responded. ‘What? What do you mean you’re in a wheelchair? I didn’t even know that’. And why does it matter? But yeah, that was a funny experience. For five years I’ve been talking to this guy and he never knew because I didn’t think to share it.

[06:13] Viv
And now do you choose to share it from a fairly early point and why is that?

[06:19] Joel
I do it because it’s not my identity, but it definitely creates who I am in regards to my lived experience. And given this is a job site built by and for people with disability. I’ve had direct input into some of the features on here, which have been changed a lot and updated and improved based on something I said. But yeah that’s what we’re most proud of, we’re disability led and driven, and I’m one of those people.

[06:45] Viv
So cool. And how many like what is the diversity of disability employed at The Field? How many people are on your team?

[06:53] Joel
We work with Get Skilled Access as well, they’re our sister company and I think we’re 80%, 85% disability led overall, and there would be over 45 staff.

[07:03] Viv
We’re looking at the platform that you built with The Field and it has been built with quite a diverse range of people with disability, and you’ve already had that user feedback when you’ve opened it up to a wider audience and you’ve had a greater range and diversity of disabilities that have come in and given you feedback. What does the future of that look like and how much feedback have you already gotten that’s changed the platform as it stands?

[07:27] Joel
When we built it, we could only consult with a limited number of people, although it was still a lot, as soon as we went public facing we did receive feedback from people with different disability in regards to what was accessible and what wasn’t for the platform. So we immediately took that on board and tried to adapt as much as we could in so much as release 1.1 to 1.2 to three to 1.4, so on or so forth. But I guess that’s the beauty of being a platform willing to listen and willing to learn because like I said, one in five Australians have disability and when we initially built it, it was within the confines of who we were consulting with, but now it’s public facing the country to the world really. You can access this website from another country. I guess that’s the beauty of it. It’s forever growing, forever being shaped by the user’s experiences. Tomorrow there could be someone new access the platform. Never seen it. Never heard of it, and said, ‘Hey I want this to change. I want this feature built in because I can’t access this’.

[08:29] Viv
So wonderful. And is part of the equation also eventually gonna be a bit of an education piece on the types of technology that organizations can provide that make jobs accessible to people?

[08:44] Joel
Yeah. There’s actually an opportunity on the platform to conduct microcredentials, inclusive recruiters course or inclusive recruitment strategy and the employer then entertains a badge that we give them, we certify them with. Which allows them to celebrate what they’ve learnt, what they can actually carry out in the workplace based on the training we’ve provided them. And that’s free.

[09:05] Viv
That’s awesome. And I know you also have a tool on your platform, which is an inclusive language checkup. Can you speak about the importance of that?

[09:13] Joel
Yeah. Vivien, could you give me an example of a term that would be used for somebody with Autism that’s not inclusive or offensive? Actually, don’t give me it because that’s probably not a good idea. Maybe think of a term and just imagine that the employer was writing a job description and has said that exact word and thought, ‘Geez. I wonder if I can use this? To make sure I can, I’m gonna go to this option called the Inclusive Language Tool’, which is free on The Field, click on it and it’s like a ‘Wash Your Document’ tool. You enter that word that the employer’s not so sure about if he or she can use it, and for example, for someone like me who’s a wheelchair user, perhaps it says ‘wheelchair bound’. Now the employer goes to hit check and it highlights ‘wheelchair bound’ and the word that you were thinking of as well and says, ‘Hey, we’ve noticed you’ve used these terms. They’re not inclusive because they are, they indicate that the person is bound to the wheelchair’ or they indicate that ‘this is something for somebody with Autism that is incorrect or more inclusive’. ‘ How about you try this term’ and then you can hit edit and it copies that text into the updated version. Allows you to become more inclusive. You learn along the process. That’s how we learn we make mistakes and you become more inclusive.

[10:30] Viv
Yeah. And I guess it’s an exciting element of that, of the future of how AI ChatGPT could be used on the platform to help people write in a way that ensures inclusive language.

[10:43] Joel
Yeah, ChatGPT’s got unlimited potential obviously because of what it represents, but it doesn’t understand the nuances of a country or its culture or its beliefs. So that is where the inclusive language tool is so unique because it’s built by Australians living with disability.

[11:01] Viv
That’s awesome. And we’d like to end these conversations by asking our guests to leave listeners and people enjoying the show with a Remarkable Insight. What’s something you’d like to share for them to think about?

[11:13] Joel
I think of innovation in technology as the cousin to disability because the innovation in technology is born out of people with lived experience or the way they consult with tech experts in making things accessible or ways that make their lives a bit easier. So I guess that’s my Remarkable Insight in regards to the relationship between technology and disability.

[11:36] Viv
Thank you to our guest, and hopefully you found your own Remarkable Moment. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and follow our Instagram @remarkable_tech for unheard moments from this episode. Talk with you all on the next one.

2023 Remarkable Tech Summit: Revolutionising Disability Tech

The 2023 Remarkable Tech Summit, which is made possible by Cerebral Palsy Alliance and Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation, is a 4-day event that took place from Oct 2 – 6 in San Diego. It includes insightful panels, keynote speakers, robust debates, networking opportunities, and group workshops. And it was all geared towards one aim – celebrating and expanding the burgeoning Disability Tech landscape.

The theme for the 2023 Remarkable Tech Summit was ‘Liminal – exploring the space between the world as it knows it and the world as it could be, in disability tech and innovation.’ Within this we explored the space between:

  1. Design and innovation – How to prioritise access alongside innovation.
  2. Need and Market – Changing the narrative from charity/compliance to opportunity/market growth.
  3. Human and Environment – Shifting the burden from disabled people to advocate, to be included in a rapidly changing innovation economy.

 

Now for the highlights…the question is where do we begin? The Summit was teeming with brilliant moments some of which are listed below!

1. Exploring Disability, Youth & Employment

Before the Summit kicked-off we joined our friends at ATscale, hosted by UNOPS for a 1-day ideation workshop. We joined an incredible group of individuals to explore how to leverage AI-enhanced assistive tech (AT) to dismantle barriers experienced by young adults with disabilities in low-and-middle income countries. Later in the week the insights of this conversation were shared with our Tech Summit guests in a panel conversation.

A group of individuals sitting in chairs presenting a panel on stage, one person is holding a microphone.

2. Incredible speakers tackling the hard questions

What we love about the Summit is that we don’t shy away from asking ourselves hard, provoking questions about our sector and challenging ourselves to think bigger and bolder.

We had a huge range of guests join us to tackle various topics including the future of AI, equitable access to AT in low-middle-income countries, the constraints of funding models, the dangers of averages in inclusive design-thinking, risks of hustle culture and more. Below are some of our favourite quotes:

Headshot of Fernando Botelho

“If you want to do something bold, really bold, you’re going to have to redesign everything. You’re going to have to rethink the way you work with labor unions, improve training, redesign the production line. Both the equipment and the process itself. Because it’s just too ambitious for you to get it done without rethinking everything about the way you do it.”

Fernando Botelho, Assistive Technology Programme Specialist at UNICEF 
Headshot of Jutta Treviranus

“We need to upend the hierarchy of compromise because what happens is that the people at the margins are told to be happy with the pittance of change that we provide and people at the margins, such as people with disabilities, have less room to compromise because they feel greater constraints. It is the people with the most power, attention and resources that are most able to compromise.”

Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre.
Headshot of Charli Skinner

“We adopt this ever familiar hustle approach and that disabled people are really forced into. We exist in this world that isn’t made for us. So we create our own Suburbans, our own tools, our own systems and our own coping mechanisms so both brilliantly and ironically, those are often the sweet spot of where innovation is arising.”

Charli Skinner, Co-Founder of SODA 
Headshot of Moaz Hamid

“We realized that there is a $146 billion impact in our economy because we are not employing people with disability today. We are not creating the opportunity for them, and we prefer to just give them a voucher and not offer any job.”

Moaz Hamid, founder and managing partner of mvmt ventures
Headshot of Diego Mariscal

“Oftentimes, particularly in the entrepreneurship space, when we think about disability, we talk about it being the source of innovation, creativity, resiliency, which all that is true. But the challenge that I want to pose to you today is that that image oftentimes is too rosy. It’s too one-sided because disability also encompasses oftentimes medical appointments, unsupported family structures, accommodations that are not received…Failing to recognize the complexity of disability puts us at risk of not supporting people in the holistic experience that they need.”

Diego Mariscal, CEO and Chief Disabled Person of 2Gether-International
Headshot of Elizabeth Chandler

“The future cannot be built upon the past. We’ve had a past that has not considered accessibility and inclusivity as part of what we’ve got the foundation of what we’re working with and trying to build off of in future innovations.”

Elizabeth Chandler, Founder of The Good Robot

3. Launch of world-first Disability Tech report 

Last year, Remarkable joined the Moonshot Disability Accelerator Initiative’s inaugural class, which is a groundbreaking alliance launched by SmartJob and Enable Ventures. We were excited to see the impact of this initiative taking shape with the public release of the world-first report looking at the Disability Innovation Ecosystem at our Tech Summit!

Developed in partnership with Village Capital, JPMorgan Chase & Co., this report analyses the global landscape for disability innovation hubs and organisations propelling the next wave of inclusive tech startups. We had Elizabeth Nguyen from Village Capital, and Gina Kline from Smart Job share some of the key insights of the report at the summit!

Headshot of Elizabeth Ngyuen

“Overall, the moral case of inclusion and disability and accessibility is becoming the business case. It’s a market size that is just too big to avoid.” 

Elizabeth Nguyen, Village Capital

3. The inaugural Solly Rodan Award

We hosted a Startup Showcase with some of our amazing #RA23 startups including Hominid X,  Springrose,  Possibility Neurotechnologies, SpineX Inc. ,  XR Navigation and Aurie.

As part of this showcase our audience voted for their favourite pitch and we were thrilled to award the first-ever $20,000 Solly Rodan Award to Nicole Cuervo, Founder of Springrose!

A group of individuals smiling and holding a large purple check and sign
Two people on stage presenting a startup pitch. Behind them is a large screen with their presentation.
A diverse group of individuals on stage smiling for a group photo.

4. Blueprint for the future

Each day included group discussions designed to create nine guiding principles for our guests to feel empowered to move forward with clarity on how to best grow the Disability Tech space. Below are a few of our favourite principles that we established together:

  1. Innovation is not an end in and of itself. In order to make AT accessible we need to focus on innovation in distribution systems AS MUCH as specific new technology.
  2. Technology needs to be designed with the most diverse input from the outset and work to ensure continuous interoperability.
  3. Move from a marketplace that suggests products based on diagnosis to one where users choose products based on their specific needs, encouraging individualization and adaptability.
  4. The AT ecosystem should have standards, norms, and facilitators that drive scalability and sustainability to bring products and services to markets quickly, efficiently, and equitably.
A young woman presenting on a stage in front of a large screen that says ‘Tech Summit: Future Lab’’

What are the next steps? 

Well, we will carry the brilliance, energy and insights from this year onwards so that we can reflect on what we’ve achieved as a community at our next Summit and will focus on these three key next steps:

  1. Investment – Off the back of the Disability Innovation Report we will be seeking investment into the Moonshot Initiative and the Disability Tech sector at large.
  2. Guiding principles – As a community we will collectively use our guiding principles to influence how we pave the future of the Disability Tech sector globally.
  3. Tap into the outliers – We will challenge ourselves to constantly check that we are using the learnings and knowledge of minorities, outliers and just as importantly our mistakes to create truly inclusive innovative solutions.


We’re excitedly seeking collaborators, champions, and partners to join us in this journey! Stay in touch by contacting us at hello@remarkable.org. Here’s to the wonders of the future!

Remarkable Insights: Emily Yates

Transcript

[0:00] Viv:
We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we record this podcast, the Gadigal people. This is their land, never ceded, always sacred and pay our respects to the elders past, present and emerging of this place.

[0:17] Viv:
Coming up on Remarkable Insights…

[00:19] Emily:
That has changed the game for me. It’s taken this worry and lack of control out of the environment and given me autonomy and flexibility and really ultimately stopped me having to make a phone call two weeks before I’m travelling.

[00:37] Viv:
This is a podcast about disability driving innovation. I’m your host Viv Mullan and our guest has more stamps in her passport than a pilot. Emily Yates is here to talk about accessibility, design and travel. Emily could you please start by giving a visual description of yourself.

[00:53] Emily:
Sure absolutely. I’m a white woman with bright pink hair and pink glasses that kind of look a little bit like my grandmother’s cook glass, if that makes sense (laughs). And I’m wearing a green tartan jumper and my background is of orange paisley wallpaper.

[01:16] Viv:
And I would love to just get to know a little bit about you and how you got to where you are today with professional and personal setting that you’re in now.

[01:25] Emily:
So I guess the first thing to say that you can’t see on camera is that I’m a wheelchair user and that really is the backdrop to why I’m here today and my career in many ways. So I was born with a condition called cerebral palsy, which you will know all about with the work that you do. And I had an operation when I was nine years old to try and correct certain things that didn’t quite go to plan. So I’ve been a wheelchair user for the last 22 years.

I’m 31 now and it’s quite strange I almost feel that this was part of my identity that I was always supposed to have and it’s led to some really amazing things and opportunities and achievements in my life. I am a really keen traveler. So I’ve gone to lots of different places and experience that accessibility or lack of in those places and that really gave me a bit of a drive to change things, particularly within both the built environment and attitudinal barriers that disabled people often face.

And then career-wise, after finishing university in London I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to volunteer at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games. Really, my work started from here because I was invited by Lord Sebastian Coe who helped organize the games to sit on a press conference, and he quoted me in his closing ceremony speech at the games.

[03:05] Viv:
Wow! You have achieved such an incredible amount and do you remember what the actual quote was?

[03:12] Emily:
Yes, ‘For London and for the UK having the games there had lifted the cloud of limitation for lots of disabled people’.

[03:22] Viv:
Wow, and is that because there really had been a lot of work done to improve the accessibility in the lead up to those games?

[03:28] Emily:
Yes. Firstly, I think that’s a really important point that, it’s sad isn’t it that really has to be the case, that you have to have a huge global event coming to somewhere for change really to be made, but it’s true that had happened. But I think secondly, and just as importantly, this visibility of disabled people and this heightened representation of disabled people had really changed attitudes and perceptions. I remember being around London, finishing my volunteering shift, starting them, and people were just more willing and more confident to communicate and to think about the language that they’re using and just be a little bit more proactive in how they might welcome disabled people into certain environments and that change that I witnessed was really quite, quite a joy to see. And again, it’s a shame that a global event has to make that change, but the longevity hopefully was worth it.

[04:36] Viv:
Wow! You’ve mentioned in there that you’ve got this real passion for travelling, which has taken you to various parts of the world with the work you do. I also know that there’s been quite a large amount of conversation lately about just how inaccessible the experience of travel and air travel can be for people with disabilities, specifically wheelchair users. Can you speak to that, to the conversation that has begun and how you hope to help find solutions with the work that you’re doing?

[05:07] Emily:
Yeah, absolutely. So for me personally, the crux of a lot of issues is that the design doesn’t communicate with the operations. And this is probably no more obvious than in an airport and an airline situation where you’ve got the design of the airport, the design of the plane, both of which have accessible amenities but are inaccessible in other ways.

For example, you can’t yet get your wheelchair on board and stay on board in a plane. But that’s a whole other story. But in between all of these designs, you’ve then got the operations that are wanting you to get through the airport onto the plane. And if that operational value and service doesn’t work through the design that’s present, it’s impossible for disabled people to have an equitable experience because we’re relying on that operation to give us that same potential and value as passengers, as our non-disabled counterparts. So you’ve only got to think about, this doesn’t even relate to getting on the plane itself, but you’ve only got to think about, ‘okay, the commercial value that airports bring, and the fact that we all like to go through duty free and spray a bit of free perfume on and go to some posh shops everybody likes to do that.

Actually with the way that the assistance service is set up at the moment in a lot of airports, unless you are able to completely take yourself through the airport and meet somebody at the gate quite a lot of the time, you’ll be transferred into a bit of an assistance pen once you’ve got through duty free, and then you’ll sit there for an hour and somebody else will come and pick you up to take you to the gate. i.e. You bypass all of that commercial joy and opportunity that everybody else gets to access. And for me that’s because the design and the operations of the airport don’t fit together. And they should, and that’s what we should be working on.

[07:12] Viv:
And what is the role that technology plays when you’re looking at how you can redesign these spaces?

[07:19] Emily:
How a plane’s going to look in the future. What’s that link between the airport and the airplane going to be in the future. That will all have to be technologically redesigned.

How will technology improve our communication between airport, airline, and passenger in the future? That to me is really interesting. Goes back to that design versus operations situation again. How do we make sure that everybody’s informed and everybody has that choice because we’re talking about disabled people and the horrific things that are going on at the moment about mobility equipment being damaged and people being left on planes for hours on end, waiting for assistance and absolutely that is true, and that must be spoken about.

It’s not acceptable, but at the other end of it, when you look at the kind of back of house operational environment, assistant staff are absolutely beside themselves with the amount that they’ve got to do. There is a lack of staffing, there is a lack of training. People in many ways are really trying their best and not getting the support that they need, not having the correct communications.

So that’s another area that I’m really keen to look at and to speak to because we can only improve things for everybody if both of those parts work together.

[08:44] Viv:
Such a good point. And have you got any examples of technology that you’ve helped implement in the airport setting that has improved that experience?

[08:55] Emily:
So this isn’t specific to an airport environment but I think it’s very interesting. So if you think of somebody who is blind or partially sighted and needs to get through an airport, a train station, a museum, whatever it might be. You can have tactile paving on the floor, you can have tactile signage, but the tactile paving only goes so far in the sense that it directs you until you need to make a decision and then you don’t know what decision you need to make and where you need to go.

And then the second part is tactile signage is great as long as you know where to find it and where to put your hand to read it and this is where I think digital accessibility or technology could be really interesting and we need to start looking at it in this way because what if you utilized that tactile paving and it helped you to direct where you were needing to go, but once you had to make a decision, you could do so utilizing that technology.

Or what if you were able to be directed by an app to specific tactile signage that told you a little bit more about where you were, the environment that you were in, the knowledge that you needed to learn to have a great experience, etc. So for me personally, they’re the really exciting opportunities around technology.

[10:28] Viv:
And just in your own personal sort of travel experience, what kind of role does technology play in just your journey throughout it? Do you have any sort of tech hacks?

[10:39] Emily:
One thing that has absolutely changed the game for me, and it’s not an airport specific one, it’s actually a rail app, is an app called ‘Passenger Assist’ that, I don’t know if you’ve heard of.
So it allows me to now, in genuinely about 30 seconds, book a train ticket, reserve my space as a wheelchair user on the train, which I’m unable to do online as it stands right now. Tell somebody exactly what I need, whether it’s help pushing my wheelchair, help carrying luggage. The fact that I need a ramp onto the train and where that assistance should start and stop, both at the start and the end of the journey.

That has changed the game for me. It’s taken this worry and lack of control out of the environment and given me autonomy and flexibility, and really ultimately stopped me having to make a phone call two weeks before I’m travelling, allowed me to be more impulsive with my travel, because let’s face it, who really makes those calls?

There’s been so many times when I’ve not booked assistance when I should because I’ve forgotten to make the call or those kind of things. So this has really helped me become more independent and autonomous but I can see for companies and staff members how it’s also massively helped them as well because there’s no excuse now not to just say this is what I need, this is where I’ll be and this is how you can help me. So that has really changed the game for me. Such a simple system, such a simple process, but it shows just how those simple things are often the best.

[12:29] Viv:
Yeah. And I know that things are being used like VR headsets and digital tours of ways we can change a physical setting. Have you ever engaged any sort of technology like that?

[12:40] Emily:
Absolutely. So we have been looking at what the design of train stations might be in 10-15 years from now, when these stations open. What’s really fascinating is we’ve been able to put together an experience for both disabled and non-disabled people to go through, and they’re really able to experience what that train station would look and feel like.

What it is meant in terms of our particular work is that they’ve been able to work out, ‘right okay, that sign should be placed there because that’s where people are looking and this is where they stop in order to make a decision about where they might want to go next.’ ‘This colour works really well, this signage height works really well, the tech should be this big, etc. etc.’ And what it has also meant from an accessibility point of view is we’ve been able to take disabled people through that VR environment and they’ve been able to say ‘right okay, I would want to be making a decision here, I would start to feel quite anxious here if I’d not seen a member of staff yet’, or if I’d not had an opportunity to confirm where I needed to go at this point’, ‘actually, I would like to know that I need to get to the step free access route at this point’, and it just has really allowed us with customers and those with lived experience at the heart of the design to really think about exactly where we’re going to place different elements of that design so they can be as human centred and customer-centric as possible.

[14:25] Viv:
Such a good point, and we’d like to end these conversations by asking our lovely guests to leave listeners and people enjoying the show with a remarkable insight, which could be a piece of advice, your favourite quote, anything that you would like them to think about after this episode.

[14:42] Emily:
One of the best phrases I ever heard it was from the CEO of Enhance the UK, a disability awareness charity I used to work for. One thing that they teach in their training sessions is ‘there’s no such thing as disabled and non-disabled people. Only disabled and not yet disabled people, and actually accessibility and inclusivity and equitable experiences can and will benefit everybody’.

Remarkable Insights: Varun Chandak

Transcript

[0:00] Viv
We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we record this podcast, the Gadigal people. This is their land never ceded always sacred and pay our respects to the elders past present and emerging of this place.

[0:17] Viv
Coming up on Remarkable Insights…

[0:19] Varun
So when you talk to the people for whom you’re designing there’s no substitute for that. You’ve got to figure out if you are actually solving for the right problem. The problem that you want to solve is that problem that needs to be solved.

[0:36] Viv
Viv Mullan here for the Remarkable Insights podcast which is all about disability driving innovation. On my screen in front of me is Varun Chandak, a disability entrepreneur who almost as excitedly might have a special guest join us on the podcast but I’ll let you give a visual description of who and where you are and who might be joining us.

[00:55] Varun
I am a South Asian male, I am wearing glasses, a hat, a sweatshirt and behind me there’s a couch. At some point during this podcast, my dog might make a guest appearance, so I’ll just be sure to call that out if he does.

[01:12] Viv
We welcome all dogs on this podcast. Big thank you for joining us. I had the absolute pleasure of being able to meet you in person last year. But for everyone who maybe doesn’t know of you yet, would you mind just giving a bit of an introduction into how you got to where you are at this point in your life?

[01:28] Varun
For sure. So just to set some context, I’m the founder of ‘Access to Success’, which is a not-for-profit in Canada that is. How I got here is that I have a couple of disabilities myself. I’m hard of hearing and I have what’s called ‘Erb’s Palsy’, which is a form of partial parallelism of my left arm, and a lot of the work that I do, pretty much all of the work that I do with Access to Success stems with my own lived experiences with disability, and I guess that’s what got me to where I am today.

I’m originally from India, but I came to Canada in 2016. I was in an extremely privileged position, to have access to those accommodations and offer a fact that not everybody’s experience is like that. And I’m about to answer how my experience was very much not like that when I was in India. And there, this is a unique situation, I used to attend a class, a daily class when I was studying to become a chartered accountant. That class was a class of 300 to 400 people at a time. And the guy used to walk around with the mic, obviously, and the mic wasn’t very good. So I couldn’t follow what the speaker was saying very well, and my friends were an instrument in helping me in those situations and yet other times, like in my professional career, it was hard. It was very hard. I had to work harder than every single colleague of mine just to prove that I’m first as capable as them, and then more capable than them. So in the beginning when I used to work in finance and I couldn’t talk on the phone even back then, so that led to some difficult conversations, but I worked very hard to prove to my boss that despite this limitation, I’m better than everybody else in the room, or at least I’m harder working than everybody else in the room.

[03:22] Viv
Does it feel like there was this moment in your life where you started to really understand how technology could allow you to do these things more independently rather than needing someone there to help do that sort of translation?

[03:36] Varun
I’d say that the moment I realized that technology, at least in theory, could be a game changer, was when I was first diagnosed with hearing loss. The day I was diagnosed with hearing loss I started daydreaming of a day when there would be smart contact lenses that would give me live captioning. I wanted my assistive tech to be completely invisible because that was my mentality at the time. Anyway, I still dream of that day, but that’s where it stemmed from, but at least in there, for me, it was about hiding my disability. I didn’t wanna ask for accommodations. I didn’t wanna ask for help cause I thought it would be held against me. When I applied for MBA, I didn’t actually disclose I have a disability for the same fears. But after coming here, after doing a lot of the work that I’ve done, the work that I’m doing, technology has already changed my life massively and I know the potential that it has to change my life in the future.

[04:38] Viv
Wow and do you think that perhaps technology has allowed you to feel more confident to step out and tell people that you identify as living with a disability?

[04:48] Varun
The first, yes, the second, not necessarily. Technology has helped me become independent. To give you an example, I lip read and yes the lack of technology at MBA was the catalyst and me inadvertently subconsciously picking up lip reading. I call myself extremely lucky that in a way, the pandemic hit when it did because live captioning only came into being around 2017, I would say before that it wasn’t very common, and it wasn’t very accurate. From 2017 onward was a turning point in automatic live captioning. So when the pandemic hit without live captioning, I would’ve lost all ability to communicate with people on my own, people who were wearing masks. But with live captioning, I could do that. It was, as I said, life changing for me.

[05:48] Viv
So Cool. And now can you speak a bit to the work that you do at Access to Success?

[05:53] Varun
For sure. We support the development of future leaders with disabilities and assistive technology. So in the future when kids like me search for corporate leaders with disabilities to have a good long list of people to look up to. So we do that through the Access to Success fellowship for MBA students with disabilities. Which provides up to $90,000 in annual scholarships to MBA students at four of Canada’s top business schools. We provide, in addition to that financial contribution, a lot of support, resources, mentorship opportunities networking opportunities and stuff like that to not just the recipients of the fellowship, but also any MBA student at one of our member business schools. The second part is supporting the development of assistive tech. It’s a nature, very similar to the amazing work that you and your team do at Remarkable, which is to support startups that are building products for people with disabilities.

[06:53] Viv
So Great, and what have you learned about the size of the assistive tech market in Canada and then the world?

[06:58] Varun
So speaking of people with disabilities in Canada, people with disabilities are estimated to command 82 billion dollars in annual disposable income. This is according to the research done by a Canadian Rich Donovan whose research is now world famous in this space. Globally, this market, depending on numbers, we look at, there’s several hundred billion dollars of income. If you include, for instance, friends and family of people with disabilities, caretakers for instance, that’s estimate to be a total of over a trillion dollars. Long story short, people with disabilities have a lot of money to spend.

[07:34] Viv
What do you think is the missing piece in the education systems that we are teaching people about how to build a business and build a product? What is missing from that?

[07:45] Varun
The biggest thing, the first thing really is to start with what we call ‘Co-design’. Co-design is the idea is that you design your product, your solution with people with disabilities, that means that you talk to the people for whom you’re designing that product. Far too often what happens is that really well meaning innovators coming from a really good place in their heart, make assumptions about what people with disabilities might need, and create a technological solution that might not really serve a purpose. A very prominent example is Sign Language Gloves. The idea of sign language gloves has existed since the eighties, since the 1980s. And every single year news comes out of another researcher PhD candidate who’s working on new Sign Language Gloves, and consistently the thing that they miss is actually talking to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community about ‘what do they actually need?’. So when you talk to the people for whom you’re designing, there is no substitute for that. You gotta figure out are you actually solving for the right problem, the problem that you want to solve? Is that a problem that needs to be solved?

[08:58] Viv
And do you have examples of maybe even technology that you use in your daily life that does have that ripple effect where it is, it’s something that you use that benefits everyone else that you interact with, and then that has a flow on effect?

[09:12] Varun
Yeah, absolutely. So I have hearing loss and I rely on live captioning, so that’s the one I can talk about at length right now, for the purpose of this conversation, I’m using Google Chromes inbuilt captioning, and that’s the reason we’re able to have a fairly smooth conversation. I also use this app called Otter.ai, that’s Otter like the Animal. And it’s a great live captioning and note taking app that I’ve been using ever since I first heard of live captioning. One other technology that I want to talk about. Even though I was diagnosed with hearing loss when I was 18 or 19, I’ve never been able to speak on the phone my entire life. My family, and I just didn’t know that it’s because of my verbal cognition limitations because of certain technical limitations that I won’t bother with, essentially live captioning until very recently, didn’t work directly with phone calls. So if I want to wear my hearing aid and have the phone audio go directly to my hearing aid or my earbuds, for example, live captioning, wouldn’t pick that up because for that to work, the audio needed to be on speaker and it wasn’t very accurate cause the audio quality was very poor, until recently. Google’s Pixel phone was the first phone ever to come out with the functionality to have live captioning for phone calls. And last year I had my first ever conversation with my wife that lasted for longer than five minutes on the phone, and at the end of the conversation she goes, ‘Varun do you realise this is the first time we’ve had a real conversation on the phone?’ And I was like, ‘oh, dang! You’re right’. I’m probably never going for another phone because I’m just so attached to Pixel now because of that memory.

[11:02] Viv
How wonderful! What did that feel like in that moment?

[11:07] Varun
It was amazing! It’s the same thing, one was just like emotionally it was… so great. For the first time in my life, I can independently make phone calls by myself. It wasn’t something I could ever do before, literally to talk to my doctor. I needed to have my wife with me to talk to my bank! My bank wouldn’t talk to me on the phone because I told them that my wife is helping me, and they said ‘she’s not authorised so we can’t talk to you anymore’. I can actually have those conversations now.

[11:40] Viv
That is so cool, Varun. And at the end of these conversations I like to ask the guests that we have on our show to leave our listeners and the people enjoying this podcast with a remarkable insight. And that can be a piece of advice, words of wisdom.

[11:56] Varun
Perseverance was what did it for me, it’s what always did it for me. Like a lot of people with disabilities, I have received a lot of No’s in my life. A lot of disappointments. A lot of rejections, a lot of times things don’t pan out, where disability had a direct and real impact on those decisions and having that thick skin to take that punch. Take a day after you recover from the punch, but then the next day I get up and keep going. That perseverance was instrumental in helping me not just get where I am, but also continue going where I’m trying to get to. Times when perseverance doesn’t help is the second piece of advice, which is a sense of humor. When perseverance doesn’t help, when you’re trying and you’re trying and you’re trying and you keep getting a no, you just laugh about it, right? Maybe it’s not for everybody, but it’s what helped me a lot.

Remarkable Insights: Minnie Baragwanath Part 2

Transcript

[0:00] Viv
We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we record this podcast: the Gadigal people. This is their land never ceded always sacred and pay our respects to the elders past present and emerging of this place.

[0:17] Viv
Coming up on remarkable inside…

[0:20] Minnie
I was called back into the principal’s office and she genuinely looked devastated and she said look, the organisation said you can’t do this now because you’re disabled you’re blind. and that was the first time I realised the world might see me differently.

[0:35] Viv
Surprise! We had so much fun talking with Minnie that we couldn’t continue to one episode so here is a spontaneous part 2. In this episode we Speak about how Minnie accidentally became the first person in the world to have an eBook and her experience growing up with disability.

So firstly Minnie I understand you received your diagnosis at quite young and soon after you met a doctor who changed your life by introducing you to new technology?

[1:02] Minnie
No, you’re so right. Absolutely. I was so lucky that when I was given my diagnosis, I was sent to the hospital. So I grew up in a town called Palmerston North in New Zealand. The ophthalmologist who diagnosed me then sent me off to a specialist at the hospital Leslie Bolton. I still remember this so vividly, walking into this beautiful room, cause hospitals on the whole aren’t. Known for their beauty, but I think it was because I remember there was sunlight coming in and she had this sunny personality and she was all about what I probably now call possibility thinking. She was only focused on what was possible. She was always looking for different ways at different solutions, different technology that could support her patients, and in this case me as a 15 year old and This was in about 1985, and so it was really pre-computers in a way. There were probably a few emerging, but she had the most extraordinary array of magnification equipment and some of the most extraordinary technology. For me to try out, particularly in the classroom, because the big issue for me was as my site deteriorated, by this stage I was virtually unable to read books and I certainly couldn’t see anything on the blackboard, and I couldn’t see using overhead projectors, which are a thing of the past now. And so you can imagine that made accessing schooling really difficult. I was a very keen student. I loved learning, but. I felt sort of these barriers were coming into play, and so we tried all this equipment, which she had sent me back to school with magnifiers and like little telescoped kind of things to look at the blackboard with, and this piece of technology that was like a handheld device that I could run across my books. Because it was just like this red light and it was a single line of text, but you had to keep your hand really still because you were actually literally running this camera over the page one word, one line at a time drove me absolutely bonkers, insane. Because it was so slow and cumbersome. But nonetheless, these were all the precursors to the technology that we now have available. So some of it worked, some of it didn’t. Look, it’s fair to say none of it could bridge the gap of my site loss. So everything took me maybe incrementally closer. But none of it unfortunately was like that, and here’s the thing that will really put you on a level playing field. But as I said, it was a process of elimination. It was also at a time where technology was evolving quite rapidly. Certainly today, if I was a 15 year old getting this diagnosis and heading into the classroom. The kind of tools that are available are just, oh, they’re in a different league. There’s no comparison. When I was studying, I went to university quite young, and one of the ways we got around the fact that I chose to do English literature, goodness knows what I was thinking. There is so much reading in English literature, but my darling mother would read. As many books as she could. She brought us up pretty much on her own at that point and was working full-time. So it wasn’t easy for her. But she would sit in her bed and read the novels I had to read onto an audio cassette and post them to me at university, which was extraordinary. My earliest audio books were my mother reading to me and there were these funny moments. We should spill tea or something and she’d go, “oh, bugger. I’ve just spilled the tea!” or something in the middle of the book.

[4:50] Viv
That’s such a good example of how your mum would record her voice and essentially give you the first prototype of an audiobook.

[4:50] Minnie
Yes.

[4:51] Viv
Was that something that you told your classmates or your teachers that you were doing?

[4:45] Minnie
Oh my God, no. Isn’t that funny? I don’t think it would’ve occurred to me. Isn’t that interesting? I think it’s possible. I didn’t tell anyone. Probably my flatmates would’ve known… no. And I think a lot of that was I felt that I had to nut a lot of this stuff out on my own. It was tricky. It was very tricky. And I think part of the way I probably responded, and probably to some extent still do, although hopefully I’ve learned a few other strategies to ask for help now, is to go inward and think, now how can I do this? What do I need to do to get through? So I think what I’m, I feel lucky that I seem to have a disposition that is focused on. There’s gotta be a way, there’s always gotta be a solution, there’s gotta be, I’ve just gotta look at this differently. And I have always had the ability to think laterally, I guess in terms of a situation. Sometimes I think I’ve had to wait until I was nearly at the breaking point to discover what that was. But that sort of desire inside of me to persevere, to keep on trying and trying must have been instilled in me somewhere really early on in my life.

[6:16] Viv
And is that a narrative that you experienced a lot? When you had your diagnosis?

[6:22] Minnie
So yes I did. And I noticed that the world quickly fell into two categories. There were the people who. Couldn’t seem to imagine for one moment what I could now do or what they perceived I couldn’t do. And I really stressed that cuz I think that was more about their limitations and their worldview than mine. But the problem is if they are people in power, if they’re our teachers or employers or whomever, That limited worldview can be incredibly destructive. The other side of it is the my doctor Leslie Bolton worldview, which is the possibility, let’s, it’s just a matter of looking at this differently and using some imagination and being creative. And so I talk about the people who have a possibility, worldview and the people who don’t, or I talk about the people who are with you as an access citizen and the people who are not with you. The first time that really happened was when I was selected to represent the school on this amazing boat adventure that high school students would be selected for, and there was often only one student per school. And you’d go away with a group of other students for a week and sail all around in New Zealand. And I’d been selected, which was just extraordinary. And then about a week later, I was called back into the principal’s office and she genuinely looked devastated. And she said, ‘look, the organisation says you can’t do this now because you are disabled, you’re blind’. And that was the first time I realised that the world might see me differently and in that moment, limit my opportunities. And so that was gutting. I just, yeah, I’ve never forgotten that moment and thinking, how am I gonna navigate this if other people are so unimaginative?

[8:14] Viv
I know language is super critical. And just for people listening, you like to use the term ‘access community.’ I would love to unpack what that term means for people listening. And you think if people with disabilities or impairments were given the right , access that they wouldn’t experience disability in many ways.

[8:30] Minnie
That’s it. Probably the first thing I’d say is I think language is so powerful. Every social change movement comes with a shift in language. Language is how we make sense of the world around us, and we communicate ideas and how we create shared frameworks for understanding and meaning creation.It’s vital. So when we set ‘Be Accessible’ up, back in the day, everything in the world was around disability. It was ‘disability’, this ‘disability’ that. Absolutely fine. And I understand the social model and I’ve researched and studied the medical model, so I really get all of this and I also respect, if that’s the language people choose to use.
‘Be.Accessible’, we didn’t call ourselves ‘Be Disabled or ‘Be Disability.’ We called ourselves ‘Be Accessible’ ; it was a call to action. We want the world to be accessible. So we felt as a social change movement, it was vital that we had language that mirrored our intent, and I wanted us to work in a worldview that we were calling an ‘accessibility worldview’, and that was a worldview that believes that equality is possible. It’s a worldview that actually sees all of us at some time in our lives will have a disability, or what I would call an access need. If we live long enough every single one of us on this planet is likely to have some kind of impairment through ageing. I also wanted language that was inclusive of everyone because the challenge I see with disability is that we often use it to denote a particular group over there. And I think it runs the risk of keeping us very binary, us and them, disabled, non-disabled. So accessibility was an endeavour to create a more spacious environment that can hold all of us. And I also noticed that one of the largest communities who have disability is the ageing population. Baby boomers, I haven’t yet met a baby boomer who has happy to call themselves disabled. They’ll say, ‘oh dear, I can’t hear very well, (this is my mum) or I can’t walk, or whatever. But I’m not disabled, I’m just getting older’. And I thought, okay, so we need some language that invites them in. So this was an invitation to smooth off some of those edges. By making it a universal experience. That was also a critical part of our argument that by creating accessible businesses, schools, education, workplaces, customer experiences, we are actually creating a better world for all of us.

[11:09] Viv
Minnie, thank you so much. You have been absolutely brilliant.

[11:15] Minnie
Thanks, Viv!

[11:16] Viv
Thank you for coming.

[11:17] Minnie
It’s a pleasure.

Remarkable Insights: Minnie Baragwanath

Transcript

[00:16] VIV
Coming up on Remarkable Insights…

[00:19] MINNIE
We had this announcement at the launch of our organization announcing that we had been granted a million dollars a year to set up this social change organization and I remember the entire room just went absolutely silent.

[00:34] VIV
Stick around to see if I ask for a small loan.

[00:37] VIV
Hi everyone I’m Viv Mullan, host of Remarkable Insights, a podcast about disability driving innovation. Minnie Baragwanath joins us to tell us why being human is the greatest innovation in technology today.

Minnie, welcome to Sydney. Thank you so much for coming here and joining me today. How are you?

[00:54] MINNIE
Oh, look I’m fantastic. It’s just such a treat to be here, actually. Been up swimming this morning, 7.30 in the pool.

[01:06] VIV
24 hours in and she’s sunburnt.

[01:09] MINNIE
First thing I bought this morning was a sun hat and some sun lotion as well.

[01:15] VIV
I think that’s how every trip to Australia should work though, right?

[01:18] MINNIE
That’s true.

[01:19] VIV
Now I remember last time we were together in person was in San Francisco and when we were there I took the chance to ask you about visual descriptions and saying at the start of our podcast episodes we would ask a lovely guest to come in and give it a visual description for anyone that was enjoying the show via transcript or video. And I would love to know if you would like to give one and also if it’s something that you find useful or enjoy in podcasts.

[01:46] MINNIE
Look, do you know it’s not something I had really encountered. You introduced me to the visual descriptions – in terms of, in this context, I do now listen to audio description on films and things and actually it’s quite entertaining and I sometimes do think, what movie are they watching? But anyway it’s like in the things they don’t describe. 

But anyway I’m very happy to do that. So I describe myself or do I describe you? I’ll describe myself. So I’m wearing a… I think it’s called Cali Green, I think is the green, which is like an Irish green dress and I have creamy white skin, which is looking a little pink today after the early morning swim. I have on a gold necklace and I have on bright red lipstick and I have blondish hair and I have green eyes. Is that enough?

[02:44] VIV
It’s beautiful. And do you find that information useful for you when you’re at events and things? And if you were going to listen to this podcast would that be useful for you?

[02:54] MINNIE
If I was at an event and there was a speaker presenting and I thought, oh gosh, I’d really like to go and talk to them afterwards, it probably would be helpful to have some idea of what they look like. I am partially blind, visually impaired but I do have some vision. 

In other contexts I probably… it might not be something I’d worry about too much? I’d be, so I’d probably just be interested in what it was they were there to talk about. So it probably is all about context actually.

[03:23] VIV
Thanks for your perspective on it. For the people that are listening that don’t know you can you just give a bit of a description about what it is that you do and how you started doing the amazing work that you do.

[03:36] MINNIE
What do I do? Yes, and this has become a more difficult question rather than… Sometimes I think if only I was a lawyer or an accountant, you know I’d have a one word answer. I have to write an entire book, as it were to explain it. We’ll get to that later.

When I was 15, I was diagnosed with a rare sight condition called Stargardt. And Stargardt is a form of macular degeneration, so I have no vision in the center of both my eyes.

And leap forward several years and I guess now maybe I would say I’m a social entrepreneur, an accessibility innovator but I think the common denominator is everything I’ve done, particularly of the last 20, 25 years has been really focused on finding and exploring multiple different ways of trying to advance accessibility and at the heart of that, it has been really how do we engage mainstream society in different conversations and ways of thinking about access.

So I’m always interested in exploring different ways to get people’s attention around why it’s so important that we level the playing field.

[05:04] VIV
Can you speak to your journey opening up Be.Labs and then that evolving?

[05:09] MINNIE
Absolutely. So it’s funny because people sometimes say, ‘what led you to set up what was originally called Be.Accessible?’ It rebranded about 10 years later into Be.Lab and people are thinking, ‘oh, there’s gonna be some very inspirational story’.

But I always say it was probably equal parts desperation and inspiration, which is a really powerful combination. And I think it was a mixture of realizing that I could not stand the kind of employment situation I was in any longer and I kept thinking there’s gotta be a way for me to have a better experience of being employed. And I was also incredibly frustrated with the slow pace of change around accessibility that I was observing internationally, but in this case, particularly in New Zealand. And I felt I had something slightly different to offer into the mix. I felt maybe there was a way of approaching accessibility that maybe had some value.

I’d never employed anyone. I had never managed anyone. I’d never run an organization. There were a lot of reasons why people… quite a valid reason this time have said ‘Minnie, that’s maybe, a bit out of reach’, but luckily for whatever reason at that moment in time all my guardian angels rallied around me. And all the right people showed up, all the ‘possibility people’, all the ‘with people’ started to show up in my life and before I knew it, there was a team of us with this vision for this organization called Be.Accessible.

All of a sudden we seemed to have funding. It was extraordinary and I remember going down and I’d been invited to present down at Parliament and I walked into this room and I’d never been, I’d never presented to ministers before and I’d completely underestimated the magnitude of that moment and realizing that it was now or never. And I just had that feeling of Minnie you’ve gotta jump and trust, you’re gonna fly or flop. But as it were, I think I flew.

And then finding out I don’t know maybe, it must’ve been three months later that we had this announcement at the launch of our organization announcing that we had been granted a million dollars a year to set up this social change organization. And I remember the entire room just went absolutely silent because first of all, disability organizations, new organizations just never got funding so this was extraordinary. Secondly, it was during the global financial crisis. So it was a zero budget. There was no money, new money going to anything yet, somehow in that environment… oh my God, it still makes me quite emotional now thinking about it, this had happened and it was, it truly felt like a miracle.

And that was when you felt we had this incredible belief and support for this vision for Aotearoa to become the most accessible country in the world.

[08:22] VIV
You speak about the excitement when you found Remarkable and finding people working in the same space, what are some of the risks that you get scared of in this moment of excitement as well? When we see people becoming interested and wanting to put money into this space?

[08:38] MINNIE
Oh, that’s such a good question too. What we need to be asking ourselves and other people coming in is ‘why are you working in this space?’ Or ‘why do you want to invest in this space?’ Or ‘why do you want to make a product for disabled people or access citizens?’

I look at the access space and I feel some of this excitement that’s going on and I start to think people with a lot of money don’t just invest out of the goodness of their hearts usually, that might be one of the motivations. If they’re seeing a business model in here, there’s a business model in here. Why would we, as the ‘access community’, allow ourselves to be exploited for others to make money out of our suffering? Because that’s actually what it is at its worst.

Then you go, okay, we live in a capitalistic world, what’s an appropriate business model that values the ‘access community’ as we invest in products and services with that community? Is there a business model that means ‘actually if I’m developing something for the blind community, how do I make sure that a certain return from the profit of this product actually goes back into the blind community, not just into my shareholders?’, because we wouldn’t have even designed it had it not been for the blind community and their lived experience. Do you see what I mean? I’m really interested.

I think one of the areas of innovation we must be thinking about is, what is the business model we would be proud of in 10, 20, 30 years time that our ‘access ancestors’ can say, thank goodness people were thinking about this 30 years earlier, so that we’re creating products and services in a way that are affordable for us because a lot of the products and services are being designed at the moment are actually designed at a price point that many people can’t afford.

This space needs money. This space needs investment. It’s critical.

[10:39] VIV
You’ve released a book and I’m so excited for you but the people that need to read it are certainly the people in the startup space building technology with and hopefully by people with disabilities because it holds a mirror up. And as part of that, you talk about both people outside the community and in the community holding a mirror up to themselves and what the word disruption means in relation to that. Can you shed a light about that concept of disruption?

[11:10] MINNIE
Yeah it’s funny, ‘disruption’ is one of those words that gets used a lot these days, and particularly marketers love it. If we want things to change, if we really want an accessible future, if we want a future full of possibility where we celebrate and value ‘access citizens’ as the extraordinary innovators, creators, designers, citizens that they are. Then we adopt a ‘with’ approach to everything that we do. It’s that simple. That’ll be in my second book.

[11:43] VIV
Your second book will just be that. Those few words, end of!

[11:49] MINNIE
Exclamation mark! Exclamation mark! My poor editor had to remove all my 10 million exclamation marks.

[11:56] VIV
She’s an enthusiastic person! And one of the last things we like to ask people and you’ve left, I’m sure people listening with a bunch of insights that they can walk away with but what would you like people if you were going leave a remarkable insight for the people enjoying our show to go and think about and ponder and hopefully carry with them after this, what would you like that to be?

[12:21] MINNIE
The most extraordinary technology, if we want to use that phrase and the broadest sense possible, are human beings.

So in this sort of scramble to design the next greatest thing, let’s not forget to keep investing in human beings and in our capacity as humans to imagine different realities, different possibilities and to really show up as the best person and people we can be.

Because this revolution, this possibility revolution or change that we are talking about today can only happen if we choose to show up as people who deeply care about equity, about fairness and about the wellbeing of all humans.

So my little soapbox is all about investing in humans as the most remarkable technology I think we will ever experience on this planet.

[13:26] VIV
Thank you to our guest and hopefully you’ve found your own remarkable moment. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and follow our Instagram @remakable_tech for unheard moments from this episode.

Talk with you all on the next one!

Indii | 2023 Demo Day Pitch

Presenter:

Pete Beckett, Founder of Indii.

Startup:

Indii is enabling independence for disabled and older people by unlocking the potential of the smart home.

Transcript

[00:00 – 01:28] Pete

This is Sofii, the adaptable switch for your home.

And this is Sophie, my youngest sister. Sophie is a genuine ray of sunshine who finds her joy in good food and singing Christmas songs all year round. In 2001, Sophie experienced a severe brain trauma, and as a result, now requires one-to-one care on a daily basis. Sophie’s experience is what inspires our vision.

Hi, I’m Pete Beckett the founder of Indii and we’re developing technology to enable the tens of millions of people with motor disabilities who stand to benefit from integrating smart-home technology into their homes.

Currently, home tech is limited by its input devices. In a world ruled by phone apps, quick and universal control is not a given. Voice assistants have been a great step in the right direction, but there are many scenarios where users cannot or do not want to use their voice as a primary input method.

Meanwhile, companies operating in the assistive tech space excel in designing solutions with specific user requirements. Unfortunately, to date, most implementations of environmental control have been prohibitively expensive and limited in both scope and capability.

That’s what led us to develop Sofii, the switch, not the sister. Sofii supports adaptive switches and offers audio-visual feedback and connects directly to the smart home without the need for a mobile device.

[01:28 – 01:34] Sofii

This button controls your bedroom lights. Press the button again to toggle on and off.

[01:35 – 02:33] Pete

Sofii can act as a Bluetooth switch for iPads, phones and computers and at just $350, is more capable than its nearest Bluetooth-only rivals and for a lower price.

Over the past 18 months we’ve developed the hardware and software and tested with new potential users.

We’re now really close to delivering on our mission of providing new and improved ways to enable independence at home. But the next 18 months is set to be even more exciting. This spring we’re welcoming interested parties to evaluate our hardware and explore commercial partnerships as we move towards a launch, selling into the NDIS early next year. And this is just the beginning.

In the future, we want to take our tech out of the home and into public spaces, providing more convenient ways for our customers to interact with the world around them.

And all this thanks to Sofii, the switch and the sister.

The Care Co | 2023 Demo Day Pitch

Presenter:

Brianna MacDonald, Founder of The Care Co.

Startup:

The Care Co teaches kids aged 5 to 12 mental health habits in the classroom and beyond.

Transcript

[00:00 – 3:29] Brianna

I’d like you to imagine a primary school class. This might be your child’s class or a child you know and there could be about 30 kids.

If it’s a classroom of 30 kids, we expect about 1 in 5 of those children to have already experienced a traumatic event.

We expect 1 in 7 of those kids to already or soon to be struggling with their mental health.

And on average, about 1 in 10 of those young people is disabled.

I’m sure you can imagine, in a classroom of 30 children, that’s a lot of need. And unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there.

We know that 1 in 3 adults struggles with their mental health. We’re losing about $5 trillion in the workplace and 1 in 5 sick days for the same reason. Depression, anxiety and substance abuse disorder are three of the world’s leading disabilities. And it’s expected that almost all people will face at least one significantly traumatic event in their lifetime.

The problem isn’t just our declining level of mental health and wellbeing. The problem is that we’re not learning the skills needed to manage these challenges and we simply don’t have enough supply to meet the need.

My name is Brianna and I’m the founder of The Care Co. I’m a Canadian First Nations woman studying a Masters in Psychology with Harvard. I’ve worked in the trauma-informed education space, am a two-time entrepreneur, and 20 years ago, I was a Care Co kid. Now a flourishing, healthy adult, I’m just one example of what can be achieved with early intervention. And I spend a lot of time looking for where the opportunities are.

Chances are you or someone you know is a parent or guardian and you’re probably pretty busy. While you may not feel like a mental health expert, you’ve got one silver lining. Chances are you send your child to school. If you’re an educator, you might feel plagued with questions like, “How do I teach mental health in the classroom?” Again, an opportunity. You’re teaching fundamental life skills every day. Psychologists are a fantastic, effective model, and while they’re hard to scale in their current form, the psychology community gives us an evidence-based best-practice way to work with kids.

And this brings us to The Care Co. The Care Co is an in-classroom software that teaches kids between the ages of 5 and 12 mental health habits. A self-paced learning tool, we offer easy lesson planning, agency, and a unique way to build mental health habits from day one. One of the features we’re super proud of include our ability-based, evidence-based model,support for school disability funding reports, and activities that are mapped to health subject teaching needs. So where do we go from here?

We’re beta testing our app with 5 schools and 1,500 students. Next we’re partnering with the Cerebral Palsy Alliance and positioning The Care Co in front of about 1,200 schools in September 2023, and officially launch in October. Our future plans include the psychology,
disability and social work communities, as well as an app for parents and guardians at home.

And we have one really audacious goal – “every child, every school.”

To get there, we offer subscriptions priced per student per month. Schools can choose a 6-month or 12-month licence. And considering the 2 billion kids worldwide, we’re just getting started. First targeting 1 million students, we’ll be grossing $60 million in annual recurring revenue if we reach that goal.

For those ready to see mental health skills taught in every school, I ask that you scan this QR code to view a product demo, visit our website, or join our product updates and investment opportunity newsletters.

And if you’re onboard with our North star, join our mission. We would love to have you along.

SpineX | 2023 Demo Day Pitch

Presenter:

Kara Allanach, Director at SpineX.

Startup:

SpineX is a clinical-stage bioelectric MedTech company committed to delivering spinal cord neuromodulation technologies to improve the lives of people with neurological conditions.

Transcript

[00:00 – 04:05] Kara

Imagine if you or someone you love was unable to move their body as they pleased or control bladder function on their own. For millions of people in the US living with neurological conditions, this is their reality.

Here at SpineX, we are developing incredible new technology to treat these conditions by using electrical impulses to retrain the spinal cord. Our technology is built on groundbreaking research from the top scientists in the field of neuromodulation and is done non-invasively, without needles or surgery.

Although our technology has many potential applications, we have chosen to focus our first two commercial products on conditions with huge unmet clinical needs, movement disorder in children with cerebral palsy, or CP, and incontinence in adults with neurogenic bladder. These conditions together affect more than 2.5 million Americans.

Existing treatments are simply not good enough because they don’t fix the problems, they only reduce symptoms. At best, they’re short-term solutions, like drugs that cover up symptoms but have unmanageable side effects. And at worst, they’re invasive treatments, like Botox injections or nerve-severing surgery, causing irreversible long-term reductions in function.

With SpineX, now there is hope for these patients and their families. This is a three-year-old child with CP. Before SpineX, he was unable to take steps on his own but when we provided SpineX therapy, within five minutes, he was able to take steps. We have seen similar results, in line with their functional level, with nearly all of the more than 40 children who have undergone treatment with SpineX therapy so far. The really exciting part? We see durable improvements that last for several months beyond the final SpineX therapy treatment. Nothing else on the market can do this.

Neurogenic bladder, or NB, is common in spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis and stroke. NB often involves incontinence, frequent urinary tract infections, loss of sleep from night-time voids, and use of catheters to empty the bladder. For some people, catheterisation can take 20 minutes each time and must be done anywhere from four to more than ten times per day, including several times through the night.

With SpineX therapy, we’re able to reduce incontinence episodes by 70%. And if leaks do happen, they’re smaller. Patients report feeling more in control, they don’t need as many catheters and they can finally sleep through the night.

How does it work? The common thread between all of these conditions is that messages between the brain and the spinal cord don’t get through clearly. SpineX acts like a hearing aid for the spinal cord, amplifying the signals that need to get through while cutting out background noise. We deliver special electrical pulses through the skin to rewire brain patterns and encourage neuroplasticity, producing long-term results.

What’s next? Our team of highly-experienced medtech professionals is excited to bring these technologies to market. We expect to receive FDA approval for and launch the first of our products in late 2024. We will reach our target customers by working directly with our collaborators in the hospitals, rehabilitation centres and physical therapy clinics where they are already being treated so that we can make sure that we reach as many potential users as possible.

We’ve been told by our patients and their families that the impact of our technology
is magical, and we agree.

Join us in our quest to bring this amazing technology to market. We’re launching a financing round, recruiting for clinical trials, and interested in talking to people with lived experience with any of these conditions.

Please reach out to us. We would love to talk to you.