Moving the Needle
Episode 1
[A vinyl record spins]
[A needle drops]
Man’s voice on vinyl record: Let’s get ready to explore the basics of budgeting, saving, and investing.
Thomas Foley: I just got really excited by the field, but there were really limited resources, and particularly limited resources for somebody who’s, you know, completely blind. My name is Thomas Foley, the executive director of National Disability Institute. I’m also a person with a disability. I’m totally blind, and I’ve dedicated my entire career to the financial and economic inclusion for people with disabilities. I did find through the National Library Service that they provided a couple of financial magazines, these very thin vinyl records, and I had this record player that like played at like one quarter speed.
Man’s voice on vinyl record: Understanding these key principles is essential for your financial independence and security.
Thomas Foley: If you really needed to hear something again, you’d have to very gingerly kind of poke at the needle to go backwards, you know, two or three grooves, and just again, if you’re totally blind, poking at the needle on a turntable to make it jump three or four, not the easiest thing in the world. When NDI was first formed, it was really based on a very simple, straightforward belief, and that belief is that people with disabilities could participate in the financial mainstream, and that is the driving ethos behind what we do every single day.
Narrator: “Welcome to Moving the Needle,” a podcast series celebrating 20 years of NDI’s impact in collaborating and innovating to build a better financial future for people with disabilities and their families.
Laura Gleneck: It’s one thing to change programs. It’s another thing to change perspectives. I’m Laura Gleneck with National Disability Institute. I am the division director for employment projects.
Thomas Foley: The world has changed a great deal in the last 40 years to the benefit of access for folks with disabilities. My dad had a disability. He had profound hearing loss. He was in one too many tanks in World War II tanks that got blown up, but I watched him get up early every morning and go to work for the Board of Education in Chicago. You know, he wore a 1960’s-era hearing aid that was helpful sometimes, but not always. But you know, every day I got to watch him, you know, get up and go to work, and I think that really instilled in me this belief that even though I was this blind kid on the south side of Chicago, that the expectations for me were going to be no different in my family than anyone else. I just firmly believed, somehow, I’d figure out a way to build a financial future, to have a house, to do all the financial mainstream things that we talk about, and it was a role model to participate in the work world. It was a role model to participate in the financial world, and it was a role model to show what could be done despite physical limitations.
Laura Gleneck: Lived experience shapes real systems change. While we were staff a few at the beginning, it was a group of the most creative and innovative minds. We were and continue to be dream leaders and dream makers. You know, anyone can talk the talk, but not everyone has walked the walk. I actually worked with the co-founder before NDI existed. When it was just a vision in his head.
Elizabeth Jennings: Michael Morris, as you may or may not know, was a visionary, so he was never short on big ideas. But arguably, the creation of National Disability Institute is right there at the top. I’m Elizabeth Jennings. I’m the deputy director of National Disability Institute. Michael would often share the story of the day he was walking his dog, Max, and struck up a conversation with a man who happened to work for National Cooperative Bank. Now, Michael had been working in the disability sector. He was a lawyer by education. Early on, worked for an organization that provided services to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, providing advocacy work for that organization. He was one of the first Kennedy Fellows. He worked for Congress, and he held a leadership role with United Cerebral Palsy. He knew of the efforts to support employment, community living, increase access to assistive technology, and he had come to realize that nobody was talking about the financial lives of people with disabilities. He was watching the landscape and seeing that this was a gap, and envisioning how that gap could be filled. So he’s on this walk with this with his dog, chatting with this man, and by the end of the walk, or as the story goes, he has space at National Cooperative Bank, which of course came with the opportunity to connect and build with others at the bank who could be thought partners. So he’s there at the bank. He puts together an initial team of Sharon Brent and Jonette Hartnett. They put together a board of advocates from the disability community and allies from the financial sector. They hire a first employee, Nakia Matthews. Michael partners with the University of Iowa Law Health Policy Center to be part of a large federal grant and brings in Laura Gleneck. And with foundational funding from the Ford Foundation and Bank of America, National Disability Institute is born.
Laura Gleneck: We grew as funding allowed. Many of the people we brought on were practitioners we had met through grants, contracts, or partnerships. I feel bringing people directly in from the field has always been one of NDI’s greatest strengths. They walk the walk, and that lived experience shaped, and I can see still continues to shape everything we do.
Thomas Foley: It really circles back to that initial idea that we had 20 years ago, which is people with disabilities can successfully participate in the financial mainstream, and all we have to do is make the tools and the information and the products accessible, and they can meet the talent, the ambition, and the potential of people with disabilities to build the financial life they want to have.
Laura Gleneck: it needed to move beyond employment alone to a broader focus on financial empowerment and stability that built roads where none truly existed. When I think back to the early days of NDI, I think of them as humble. We were certainly learning as we went. I think now the expression is flying the plane before you built it. We said yes to opportunities that helped us ultimately build credibility in the field. Sometimes, even when we didn’t quite have the staff capacity yet.
Elizabeth Jennings: Actually, at the start, even though we were a fledgling organization, we had quite a few foundational partners and funders. In addition to the Ford Foundation and Bank of America. Other early foundational funders were AT&T, Darden Restaurants, the Walmart Foundation, the Kessler Foundation, the U.S. Department of Labor, the North Carolina and Florida Councils on Developmental Disabilities, and several states through their Medicaid infrastructure grants, an incredibly important foundational partner was the IRS.
Laura Gleneck: I’m really most proud of the partnerships we built with federal agencies, national organizations, states, foundations, and communities. Together, we helped shift the national, state, and local conversation around disability, employment, and financial inclusion. At that time, NDI was creating a roadmap out of poverty, and part of that was integrating financial empowerment into U.S. Department of Labor Disability Employment Initiative. It needed to move beyond employment alone to a broader focus on financial empowerment and stability that built roads where none truly existed.
Elizabeth Jennings: We created training for VITA volunteers and VITA sites to increase their level of comfort serving people with disabilities, and we leveraged those blossoming relationships to create convenings in local communities that brought together these tax and asset building coalitions with the disability community to have a conversation about the gap that existed between these two groups, and through these convenings to create plans for defining a path for prosperity, a path to prosperity for people with disabilities together.
Laura Gleneck: We were a team building something together. Again, the plane, piece by piece, Back then, whenever we had a big event, I’d fly into D.C. I was the only remote staff person at the time. We’d all stand around the small conference table assembling huge binders. Everyone had a section. Even our founder and executive director was right there with us on the assembly line. It showed how invested we all were, and all the time those binders turned into USB drives and then QR codes.
Thomas Foley: I’ll never forget, you know, if you wanted to, you know, send money to a friend, you might have to write a check, so you’d write it. You’d actually physically write out a check. You’d put the check in an envelope. You’d address the envelope. You’d put a stamp on the envelope. You’d go find a mailbox. Nowadays, you know, with a smartphone, all you have to do is pull up an app, press a couple of buttons, and send that money off. And the exciting part about that is it’s all accessible. You know some of the work that financial institutions, nonprofits, and other organizations have done to really make financial products, tools, and services more accessible to people with disabilities have not only given you physical access, but has just absolutely changed the landscape for what a person with a disability can do. You can get financial education through an online system or through an app. You can send money. You can pay bills. You can pay your mortgage. You can research anything you need to. Technology has been an absolute linchpin to helping people with disabilities access the financial mainstream.
Laura Gleneck: I still laugh thinking about one of our first training sessions on websites in the early days. We never even showed a website during the training. I think it was an audio conference, but it was surprisingly successful. And that kind of innovation and willingness to try new things helped define NDI from the beginning and who we were to become. And the financial industry has really recognized that people with disabilities are a new market that they can serve.
Elizabeth Jennings: Between 2009 and 2023, the unbanked rate for working-age households with disabilities has fallen from 18.3 percent to 11.2 percent. That’s a reduction in the unbanked rate of almost 40 percent. And still, our work is not done, as people with disabilities remain unbanked at rates three times higher than those without disabilities.
Laura Gleneck: Our staff include people with disabilities, family members, parents, advocates, people who are personally connected to this mission, and that passion shows up in everything we create: our tools, our training, and our technical assistance.
Elizabeth Jennings: Our team, 40% of whom have a disability, is comprised of subject matter experts who have worked in the field. Our folks come from the disability services sector, the workforce sector, the small business development ecosystem, and the financial services sector.
Laura Gleneck: I believe it separates NDI for many organizations because we understand at our core what this mission means beyond any single deliverable or project.
Elizabeth Jennings: We have strengthened the ways in which we move a promising practice from concept to approach to pilot to validated model.
Laura Gleneck: We dreamed big, and sometimes those dreams turned into something amazing. One of my favorite examples in the early days is the American Dream Contest in 2010, where people with disabilities had the opportunity to share their dreams through short videos for a chance at funding and mentorship, it was incredibly touching, and through it, we met some amazing people out there. And it literally started as an idea a staff member wrote on a napkin while they were flying home from the conference. So I think maybe without truly understanding it, we were building what we were to become today.
Elizabeth Jennings: We have expanded our programmatic work to play a significant role in the employment of people with disabilities through our administrative employment network called the American Dream Employment Network to support entrepreneurs with disabilities and launching and growing businesses through our small business hub and small business projects.
Laura Gleneck: Disability benefit systems are complicated. They’re overwhelming. NDI has always had the incredible ability to break things down, meet people where they are, and that truly comes from our staff. People with disabilities and their families had clearer information, more confidence, and gutter [verify against audio] tools to really build a real economic future. And that’s what it meant in practice. It wasn’t just education; it was empowerment.
Thomas Foley: We have been successful over the last 20 years, really introducing people with disabilities to the financial mainstream, and maybe that’s savings through an ABLE account, maybe that’s re-entering the workforce after a disability, or maybe that’s accessing financial counseling and you know building a better future that way,
Elizabeth Jennings: And we are the go-to, unbiased resource on ABLE account information through our AABLE National Resource Center. We’ve also expanded our efforts to provide timely information to the disability community through our Financial Resilience Center. This is a one-stop resource center for a range of topics, from where can I get my taxes done for free to how do recent shifts in policy impact my student loans or Medicaid, a full circle moment back to the beginning. Over the years, we have strengthened the ways in which we move a promising practice from concept to approach to pilot to validated model.
Laura Gleneck: We help move disability from being viewed as a compliance issue to being understood as central to how America defines opportunity. And to me, that’s last seen [verify against audio] change, and that truly is something I’m incredibly proud to have been a part of.
Elizabeth Jennings: We look forward to scaling our models and realizing our vision of all individuals with disabilities having full access to the broadest range of employment and financial opportunities, reaching their financial goals, and living their best financial future.
Thomas Foley: This work, the savings, the employment, the access to credit-it’s not only good for people with disabilities, but it’s good for industry and it’s good for the American economy. So join us in building a better financial future for people with disabilities and their families.
