Disability Friendly

2The Power of Disability Entrepreneurship

The time is ripe for the encouragement of people with disabilities to become entrepreneurs, and to address and remove daunting additional barriers facing potential entrepreneurs who have disabilities. Archaic public policies, disability discrimination in the workplace and people with disabilities becoming so psychologically and completely discouraged from work all throw tremendous adverse barriers in front of adults with disabilities. Entrepreneurship becomes for many, the only viable alternative to living a life with some dignity intact. What other group of citizens faces such choices?

Becoming an entrepreneur must be a free, knowledgeable, enlightened career choice, where adults make serious commitments to risking their reputations, their meager resources, and what they've managed to cobble together from family and friends. I admire any adult with a disability who dares to take on this challenge, and this is but one reason that The Viscardi Center in Albertson, New York, and I, while serving as its president and CEO, began the National Center for Disability Entrepreneurship. Formed in 2017, the center provides resources, bridges to funders and experts, and even small financial support to budding entrepreneurs with disabilities.

Disabled adults ready to explore entrepreneurship face serious policy barriers in the form of Social Security's current limits on asset accumulation (approximately $2,000 total as of 2022), a level which has ...