On April 2nd, 2022, Emily suffered a spinal cord injury while visiting her parents in Mexico. What was supposed to be a celebratory family vacation became, in a single moment, the thing that changed everything. Four years later, it still feels like both yesterday and a lifetime ago. Somehow, both are true.

Today we are both deeply grateful and devastated. The bad days hurt and the good days are far better than any of us could have anticipated. One way we made that dream a reality is by starting Lotus Disability. We knew we would never fully understand why it happened, but we believed we could make it better for the people coming after us. Through pain, came progress and hope.

Employees deserve better

Between us, we have spent three decades in HR, most recently at American Express. Our job was to put people first. We built inclusive policies, expanded PTO, created flexible schedules, and fought for access to resources that were hard to come by.

We still had a gap around disability. It is hard to admit that we did not know how to support people living with disability until we lived it ourselves. We now understand why people do not disclose to their employers, even when they trust their HR partners. Silence feels less risky than losing your job or losing access to the accommodations you need. It is not that we did not care, rather that we did not know until it was us.

Employers want to show up for their people and they can. They just need the right infrastructure to do it.

Insurance and vendors can do better

Lotus is a call to action to every insurance company: cover the things people living with a disability actually need. We are not talking about nice-to-haves. We are talking about supplies that should be preventative, devices that could substantially improve someone's wellbeing, and therapies that could be life-changing. These should not be out-of-pocket. They should not require hours of searching with no financial support at the end of it.

To medical vendors: it should not be impossible to access self-pay supplies just because there is a larger margin in going through insurance. People are not a margin opportunity, they are people.

We can do better for all of us

Nearly 30 percent of people in the US live with a disability. The other 70 percent care for someone with one, or will one day become disabled themselves. The structure we put in place now is not for one of us. It is for all of us.

Lotus aspires to be the membership that brings total access to everyone impacted by disability. We want to change how disability is viewed in the workplace, drive policy that puts disability at the forefront, and support every person who has been told they have to navigate this alone.

Our hope is that one day, anything you need is accessible: affordable, available in a dignified and timely way, easy to navigate, adaptable by design. Whether that is a new mobility device or in-home care, your disability journey should be available to you when you need it.

Disability is not a bad word. Disability is not the problem. The world's inaccessibility is.

As HR leaders, as co-founders, and as a couple who lived it, this is our mission.

Please join us.