Can you tell us about the work you do? What is your business and how did it start?
My company, TRIPPr, offers wheelchair accessible transportation. The existing accessible transportation on Long Island isn’t ideal. You’ll have situations where people make a phone call to go to work or go to a friend’s house and the paratransit bus is supposed to show up at 10:00am, but they’ll be late, or they won’t show up, or they’ll leave before the client comes outside. It’s great that there is a service out there, but we want to be a reliable alternative.
What advice do you have for disabled people who want to start their own business?
If you receive benefits, educate yourself about programs that can allow you to work without losing them. Consider opening an ABLE account to keep your benefits safe. Look into the Medicaid Buy–In Program for Working People with Disabilities. You can’t really take the first “no” as the answer if you want to run your own business and keep your benefits. It’s possible. You just have to keep digging and asking the right people.
Why is entrepreneurship such an important option for people with disabilities to earn a living?
Unfortunately, if you’re disabled, you’re a lot less likely to find a job as quickly as somebody who isn’t. It took me, and I kid you not, 115 interviews to get my very first job when I was 25. And the only reason I was able to go on all those interviews, ironically, was that I had my own means of transportation. I think being able to create your own job can allow you to make things accessible to you and you can help your community.
What disability rights issue is your biggest advocacy priority right now?
Right now, it’s living independently. I don’t mean a disabled person has to live without care in the home, whether it’s family, or nursing, or aides. But it’s really about disabled people being as autonomous as possible, meaning making their own decisions, choosing where they go and when they go there. This is why TRIPPr is 24/7. With paratransit, if you have a family wedding that ends at 11:00pm, sorry, you have to leave before then while the service is still running. So, autonomy and independence is really what we’re working towards.
Looking ahead, what’s next on your exciting journey?
We want TRIPPr to be all over Long Island and beyond into New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut. There’s really no transportation option for when you get into other states to come back to New York. We’re trying to make that possible.
To learn more about TRIPPr, visit https://www.tripprcorp.net