ED&I Hub | Diversity Fellow Project, Kate Caldwell

CEED Project

Project Narrative

1. Please describe your activities during your Fellowship experience. Describe your final capstone project(s).
As a postdoctoral Diversity Fellow, I focused on several activities that engaged with the community to discuss disability-entrepreneurship and its intersection with race, gender, and class, a topic on which I am currently writing a manuscript. In light of conversations that have been happening on a national scale, I created a graphic for Equal Pay Day that included disability alongside statistics broken down by race and gender. This ignited a conversation about race AND disability, given the lack of statistics publicly available. I spent months submitting formal requests for data from federal agencies that was not available online. After some back and forth, I received truncated data along with the message that, “We are unable to send wage data due to Department of Labor restrictions” and was informed that they were revising what data was to be made publicly available. This continues to be an ongoing conversation among likeminded disability advocates, and we will continue to work on this issue moving forward.

In light of this development, I decided to focus instead on the voices of entrepreneurs with disabilities from diverse backgrounds who participated in the Chicagoland Entrepreneurship Education for People with Disabilities (CEED) Project’s entrepreneurial training program, which can be heard in my capstone project videos. I also met with the Director of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD) for the City of Houston, Maria Town, and gave recommendations for ways they could include their supplier diversity, contracting, and procurement programs for entrepreneurs with disabilities. Additionally, I was asked to serve on the Chicago Mayoral Task Force on Employment and Economic Opportunity for People with Disabilities by Commissioner Karen Tamley as chair of the working group on Encouraging Economic Development through Entrepreneurship. It has been wonderful to be in conversation with these two incredible women about the power of disability-entrepreneurship and brainstorming ways to improve access to entrepreneurial opportunities.

2. Who did your project inform, help, influence or impact? (UCEDD, individual, community, state) How?
The CEED Project videos help to put faces to the idea of entrepreneurship for people with disabilities. When you look at the literature and at representations in the media, they often do not reflect the diversity of the entrepreneurs with disabilities that we have been working with. Indeed, the majority of participants in the CEED Project (and its precursor, Participation Through Innovation) have been people of color, and women of color in particular. These videos help to add their voices to the national conversation.

With regards to my work with the MOPDs in Chicago and Houston, I am optimistic that the recommendations will lead to meaningful change that will allow people with disabilities to better access and take advantage of the wonderful entrepreneurial opportunities these cities provide.

3. Why did you choose to work on that project(s)?
I chose to work on this project primarily because what we were seeing in our CEED trainings was different from what we were reading in the literature, and I wanted to look into the topic more. Further, in the CEED curricula we suggest that entrepreneurs with disabilities connect with organizations that specialize in working with minority-owned and women-owned businesses. However, we found that many of our participants were encountering access issues in doing so. I wanted to work on developing strategies that could be implemented to address this problem.

4. What did you gain from being a Diversity Fellow?
Being a Diversity Fellow allowed me to focus on exploring an issue that often goes overlooked. Moreover, it allowed me to engage critically in dialogues that will continue on past this project, and will hopefully help to move this conversation forward on a larger scale.

5. How will this experience impact your education or career decisions?
I have accepted a position as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I intend to continue pursuing this topic as part of a larger research agenda on entrepreneurship as not just an employment strategy, but also an antipoverty strategy within the context of disability employment, social policy, rights and citizenship.

6. What are your future goals? Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?
I look forward to continuing the conversations that have been started, to continue raising awareness and educating people about the innovative potential of entrepreneurs with disabilities both in my role as a researcher and educator. I will be working with our extraordinary research team to compete for grants that will allow us to expand upon and extend our work, incorporating all that I have learned during this fellowship. I do not want to be presumptuous with saying where I hope to be in five years, particularly as in the current social and political climate so much can change. However, I hope that we are in a place where entrepreneurs with disabilities have access to the information, resources, and tools they need to pursue their passions, have creative careers, and drive innovation. Moreover, I hope to be a part of making that happen.

7. What recommendations do you have for other Fellows?
One thing that I find helpful is to do a self-assessment at the beginning of a fellowship, like this one from the National Postdoctoral Association, to assess your own strengths/weaknesses in specific areas. The process of just doing it helps think through what skills you have and which skills you want to develop more, even if all the questions are not directly relevant to your work. This can be used to help come up with a list of areas that you want to work on and you can make a plan to improve skills in those areas over the course of the fellowship so that when it ends you know you will have gotten what you wanted to out of that experience and really made the most of it.