Making Space

Disabled professionals enroll in Making Space's free accessible training courses and enter curated talent pipelines so that employers in entertainment, media, and tech hire them into production, design, and commentary roles that gatekeepers previously filled with non-disabled candidates.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Create Accessible Content
• Builder-side Interventions → Design Accessible Experiences

What it is

Keely Cat-Wells acquired a disability at 17 when chronic illness led to multiple colon surgeries and an ileostomy in 2016. She traveled to Los Angeles in 2017 to audition for a film role, won the part, and then lost it after a costume fitting revealed her ileostomy bag. That experience of enduring inaccessibility in an industry that had no pipeline for disabled talent drove Cat-Wells to found C Talent in 2018, a disabled-led talent management agency representing disabled creators, actors, and directors.¹² C Talent placed disabled performers in productions including The Hunger Games, Avatar, and The Last of Us, and Whalar acquired the company in May 2022 as its first acquisition.³

After the Whalar deal, Cat-Wells and Sophie Morgan, a British television presenter who became a T5 complete paraplegic after a car accident at 18, co-founded Making Space Media, a production arm that secured a first-look deal with Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine for unscripted content centering disabled talent. Max Goldbart reported in Deadline that the deal would develop multiple projects with disabled founders holding development authority.⁴ Abbey White reported in The Hollywood Reporter that Morgan framed the unscripted format as a way to avoid "cripping up," the practice of non-disabled actors playing disabled characters.⁵

Cat-Wells founded Making Space in 2023 as a builder-side talent acquisition and learning platform that sells employers pre-qualified pipelines of disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill workers alongside training to support those hires after placement. Dominic-Madori Davis reported in TechCrunch that the company closed an oversubscribed $2 million pre-seed round led by Beta Boom in July 2024, after a prospective investor told Cat-Wells to bring on "a non-disabled, male co-founder" before the firm would consider writing a check.⁶ Cat-Wells refused and raised the round without the concession.

Making Space provides disabled job seekers free courses built with American Sign Language interpretation, closed captioning, and assistive technology compatibility. An AI tool called Compass translates lived experience of disability into transferable skills listed on resumes. For employers, Making Space delivers custom curricula, Disability Confidence Training, and retention support. Netflix, NBC Sports, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Salesforce have used the platform, according to the company's own disclosures.⁷

NBC Sports partnered with Making Space in October 2023 to build a free on-demand training course for disabled people who wanted to become sports commentators and hosts. The curriculum covered teleprompter technique, interviewing, scriptwriting, and on-camera presence. Making Space provided NBC Sports with a talent pipeline from the disabled community, and Sophie Morgan, Lacey Henderson (a 2016 U.S. Paralympic track and field athlete), and Chris Waddell (a five-time Paralympic gold medalist) became the first disabled hosts of NBCUniversal's Paris 2024 Paralympics coverage.⁸ Henderson and Andrea Joyce hosted in-person from Team USA House in Paris, becoming the first NBCU commentators ever to report on location at a Paralympic Games.⁸

Abbey White reported in The Hollywood Reporter that Netflix and Making Space partnered on a five-course graphic design tutorial for disabled artists, covering concept, style and lighting, composition, typography, and color and mood, built using Netflix's own design standards by a disabled and women-led team from Intuition Films and Making Space Media.⁹ Andy Lerma, Netflix's design lead, stated that he had "navigated my career with dyslexia and [an] auditory processing disorder" and understood how challenging breaking into the industry could be for disabled artists.⁹ Successful graduates could access temporary contract opportunities at the streamer, addressing the unpaid-internship barrier that typically blocks disabled creatives from design roles.

Forbes named Making Space to its inaugural Accessibility 100 list in 2025.¹⁰ L'Oreal Paris selected Cat-Wells as one of ten 2025 Women of Worth honorees from more than 4,000 nominations.¹¹ The GitLab Foundation awarded Making Space a $500,000 grant in March 2026 to expand the Ascend Fellowship and accelerate development of responsible AI tools for employment access.¹² The company reports that it has supported over 10,000 disabled professionals and that its first Ascend cohort of 100 participants generated $111 million in projected lifetime earnings, a 123:1 return on investment.⁷

Why it matters

Industrialized economies built their labor markets around a default worker who could stand, see, hear, and process information without accommodation, and employers constructed hiring systems, training programs, and workplace infrastructure to fit that template. The entertainment industry sharpened this exclusion into a specific form. Studios and networks controlled who appeared on screen, who worked behind the camera, and who told which stories, and they built those pipelines around non-disabled bodies and non-disabled sensory and cognitive norms. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 22.7 percent of people with a disability held employment in 2024, compared with 65.5 percent of people without a disability.¹³ Behind the camera in British television, Ofcom's 2025 equity, diversity and inclusion report found that disabled people made up 12 percent of TV employees and just 10 percent of senior TV roles, against a national working-population disability prevalence of 18 percent.¹⁴ No major U.S. studio tracks disability status for behind-camera workers, so no one has measured the American figure. USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that only 2.4 percent of all speaking characters in the top 100 films of 2024 had a disability, while 27.2 percent of Americans report one.¹⁵ Cat-Wells founded Making Space in 2023 after the C Talent acquisition gave her both capital and industry relationships, and she built the platform to intervene at the requirement-setting stage where studios and employers define who qualifies for roles before any individual disabled worker ever applies.

Studios, networks, and production companies reproduce this exclusion through hiring norms and professional credentialing even when individual gatekeepers intend no harm. Entry-level positions in film and television production depend on unpaid or low-paid internships, long on-set hours, and informal referral networks that assume workers can navigate physical sets, read scripts in standard formats, and socialize in environments built without accommodations.⁹ Disabled workers who cannot access these pathways endure inaccessibility or switch to alternatives outside the industry entirely. Ameri, Schur, Adya, Bentley, McKay, and Kruse sent 6,016 applications to advertised accounting positions in a 2018 field experiment published in ILR Review and found that applicants who disclosed a disability received 26 percent fewer expressions of employer interest than identical applicants who did not disclose, even though the disclosed conditions (spinal cord injury and Asperger's syndrome) would not limit productivity in the role.¹⁶ Employers who survey well on inclusion attitudes still call back disabled applicants at lower rates, producing what sociologists call decoupling, where organizations adopt symbolic inclusion commitments that yield no measurable change in who gets hired. Making Space's Disability Confidence Training targets this decoupling directly, training hiring managers and production staff before they evaluate disabled candidates rather than after a complaint arrives.

A prospective investor told Cat-Wells to recruit a non-disabled, male co-founder as a condition of funding Making Space, and Cat-Wells interpreted the demand as evidence of "the deep-seated biases and systemic barriers within venture."⁶ She raised $2 million without the concession, but venture investors control which disability interventions reach scale and which founders they consider credible. Making Space sells employers a product, pre-qualified disabled talent plus training, and the employer pays for the service. Disabled job seekers access the courses for free. The builder-side cost of accommodation and pipeline-building shifts to the employer's budget rather than falling on the disabled worker's unpaid labor. Disabled Americans face what communities call the crip tax, the cumulative extra costs of living with a disability, and the employer-funded model relieves one layer of that burden. The National Disability Institute found in a 2020 study that American households with a disabled adult need an average of 28 percent more income to achieve the same standard of living as comparable households without a disabled member.¹⁷ When disabled workers must fund their own training, build their own networks, and negotiate their own accommodations without institutional support, they pay twice, once in the crip tax on daily life and again in the unpaid labor of asserting rights and giving feedback that their non-disabled peers never perform.

Marta Russell, a disability rights activist with cerebral palsy who herself left the Los Angeles film industry after wheelchair use made retaining employment prohibitive, argued in Beyond Ramps (1998) that capitalism actively produces the exclusion of disabled workers.¹⁸ Employers constructed labor markets around bodies that maximize profit extraction, Russell showed, and workers whose bodies required accommodation fell outside that template by design. Russell called disabled people a "reserve army of labor," drawing on Marx, and demonstrated that entire industries profit from managing the exclusion of disabled people through sheltered workshops, rehabilitation services, and benefit administration. Cat-Wells's framing pushes against Russell's structural analysis without fully escaping it. Making Space treats disabled talent as an untapped market opportunity and packages inclusion as a revenue-generating product for employers. Cat-Wells told TechCrunch that "the disabled population represents a massive economic opportunity."⁶ Russell would recognize this move, the conversion of a rights claim into a market proposition, as both strategically necessary under capitalism and structurally limited by it, because a platform that depends on employer willingness to pay can only reach workers whose labor employers find profitable to acquire. The workers Russell centered, those whose impairments make wage labor impossible or whose care needs exceed any employer's willingness to accommodate, remain outside Making Space's model and outside the entertainment industry's calculus entirely.

Chronic unemployment and underemployment among disabled people produce elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease that compound the original impairment. Li, Li, and Wang found in a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics (2022) that unemployed individuals faced roughly twice the odds of major depressive disorder (OR 1.88) and depressive symptoms (OR 2.06) compared to employed peers.¹⁹ Chronic stress drives the pathway from exclusion to embodied harm. Losing employment eliminates income, reduces social contact, erodes identity, and elevates cortisol over months and years, producing cardiovascular risk, immune suppression, and accelerated onset of secondary conditions. Cree, Okoro, Zack, and Carbone reported in a 2020 CDC MMWR study that 32.9 percent of adults with disabilities experienced frequent mental distress, 4.6 times the rate among adults without disabilities (7.2 percent).²⁰ When studios and networks exclude disabled workers from behind-camera roles through inaccessible hiring pipelines, they deny income and concentrate biological risk in the population they exclude, and that concentration follows the same demographic lines, class, race, gender, and disability type, that the historical labor-market template created. Disabled workers who do find employment in entertainment face additional bodily costs. Long production hours, inaccessible sets, and the absence of accommodation infrastructure impose physical strain that non-disabled colleagues do not carry. Enduring inaccessibility on a film set or in a newsroom produces fatigue, pain, and delayed recovery that shorten careers and worsen health trajectories.

Making Space's NBC Sports partnership placed the first disabled hosts on a major U.S. Paralympics broadcast and created a free training pipeline that did not previously exist. The Netflix graphic design tutorial opened a pathway into key-art production for disabled artists who had no prior access to the streamer's design standards or contract opportunities. The Hello Sunshine first-look deal created a production entity co-led by disabled founders with development authority over unscripted content. Each of these moves advanced the frontier of the possible in disability employment within entertainment, but each rests on a voluntary employer partnership that no regulation compels and no enforcement mechanism protects. The ADA requires reasonable accommodation for disabled employees, but it does not require studios to build talent pipelines, fund accessible training programs, or track disability status in their workforce. Making Space operates in the gap that requirement-setting at the regulatory level has left open, and its reach extends only as far as employer demand for the product. When an employer's inclusion commitment contracts, the pipeline contracts with it, and the disabled workers who depended on that pathway return to the structural conditions that preceded it.

Real-world examples

In the news

A VC told Keely Cat-Wells to get a male, non-disabled co-founder. She balked, nabbed a $2M pre-seed round (July 2024)
-- Dominic-Madori Davis, TechCrunch

• Cat-Wells described the investor's demand as evidence of systemic barriers within venture capital, and raised $2 million without the concession. Venture investors control which builder-side disability interventions reach scale and whose labor those interventions ultimately serve.

In the news

Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine Partners With Making Space Media On Unscripted Content Placing Disabled Talent Front & Center (August 2023)
-- Max Goldbart, Deadline

• The first-look deal gave Making Space Media development authority over unscripted projects at Hello Sunshine, with emphasis on behind-the-scenes employment pipelines for disabled workers across production departments. Disabled founders now control the production of stories about disabled lives as a content intervention, rather than serving as consultants on non-disabled-led projects.

In the news

Netflix, Making Space Partner on Tutorial to Expand Graphic Design Education for Disabled Artists (November 2023)
-- Abbey White, The Hollywood Reporter

• The five-course tutorial taught graphic design to disabled artists using Netflix's own standards, produced by a disabled and women-led team. Andy Lerma, Netflix's design lead, spoke from his experience with dyslexia and auditory processing disorder. Successful graduates could access temporary contract opportunities at the streamer, addressing the unpaid-internship barrier that typically blocks disabled creatives from entry into entertainment design roles.

In the news

How Hello Sunshine and Making Space Media's Unscripted First-Look Deal Could Change Hollywood's Disability Narratives (August 2023)
-- Abbey White, The Hollywood Reporter

• Morgan told The Hollywood Reporter that unscripted content avoids "cripping up," the practice of casting non-disabled actors in disabled roles. Cat-Wells stated that "stories shift the society that we live in" and that the partnership aimed at "systemic change." The deal positions disabled producers as decision-makers in content development rather than as subjects of non-disabled storytelling.

• NBCUniversal partnered with Making Space in October 2023 to produce a free on-demand training course for disabled sports commentators and hosts, and placed Sophie Morgan, Lacey Henderson, and Chris Waddell as the first disabled hosts of its Paris 2024 Paralympics coverage. Henderson and Andrea Joyce became the first NBCU commentators to host in-person at a Paralympic Games.⁸
• Whalar acquired C Talent in May 2022 as its first acquisition. Cat-Wells stated that the deal "recognizes the economic value of disabled talent."³
• Forbes named Making Space to its inaugural Accessibility 100 list in the Employment/Workplace category in 2025.¹⁰
• L'Oreal Paris selected Cat-Wells as one of ten 2025 Women of Worth honorees, with each honoree receiving $25,000 alongside mentorship and national visibility.¹¹
• The GitLab Foundation awarded Making Space a $500,000 grant in March 2026 to expand the Ascend Fellowship and deploy responsible AI tools for disability employment access across the United States.¹²
• Cat-Wells acquired a disability at 17 (ileostomy following chronic illness), lost a film role after a costume fitting revealed her ileostomy bag, and founded C Talent in 2018 in response to the entertainment industry's failure to build pipelines for disabled talent.¹²

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the requirement-setting and design stages involves building disability hiring and accommodation into production planning before a single role is posted:

• "We partnered with Making Space before pre-production to identify and hire disabled talent for behind-camera roles, and all staff completed Disability Confidence Training before the first day of shooting."
• "We built the commentator training course with ASL interpretation, captions, speed control, and customizable text display because the existing industry training was inaccessible to the people we wanted to reach."
• "We budgeted accommodations into every department at the start of the production cycle, not as a retrofit after someone discloses and asks."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect at these stages involves assuming that disability hiring will happen on its own, or that accommodations can wait until a disabled worker arrives and requests them:

• "We don't know where to find qualified disabled talent."
• "We'll add disability representation in post, maybe in the marketing materials."
• "Accommodations are handled case-by-case after someone is hired, if they ask. We can't build that into the budget upfront."
• "We'd love to be more inclusive, but we'd only consider investing if you brought on a non-disabled co-founder."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor disabled workers carry when employers build hiring, training, and production systems without them:

• "I trained myself on the industry software because the employer's training platform wasn't compatible with my screen reader, and nobody offered an alternative."
• "I didn't disclose my disability during hiring because I didn't trust the company to accommodate me, and I'd seen what happened to colleagues who disclosed."
• "I'm the only disabled person on set and I had to negotiate my own accommodations with no HR support. Every shoot, I do two jobs, the one they hired me for and the one where I make the workplace functional for my body."
• "I applied for every entry-level position I could find, but they all required unpaid internships with 14-hour on-set days and no accommodation process. I left the industry."

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All observations occur within the context of disability employment in the U.S. and U.K. entertainment, media, and creative industries, where disabled workers navigate talent pipelines, production environments, and hiring systems built for non-disabled bodies.

Footnotes

1. Keely Cat-Wells, "I Lost Out on a Job Due to My Disability — I Became an Activist So That No One Else Has To," Global Citizen, December 15, 2022. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/keely-cat-wells-disability-activist/ ↩ ↩²

2. Allison Norlian, "She Was Denied An Acting Role Because Of Her Disability. Now She Runs An Agency Representing Disabled Actors," Forbes, September 18, 2020. ↩ ↩²

3. Whalar, "Whalar Acquires Award-Winning Disabled-led Talent Management and Consultancy Company, C Talent," PR Newswire, May 17, 2022. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/whalar-acquires-award-winning-disabled-led-talent-management-and-consultancy-company-c-talent-301548567.html ↩ ↩²

4. Max Goldbart, "Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine Partners With Making Space Media On Unscripted Content Placing Disabled Talent Front & Center," Deadline, August 18, 2023. https://deadline.com/2023/08/reese-witherspoons-hello-sunshine-making-space-media-partnership-1235521435/ ↩

5. Abbey White, "How Hello Sunshine and Making Space Media's Unscripted First-Look Deal Could Change Hollywood's Disability Narratives," The Hollywood Reporter, August 18, 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/making-space-media-hello-sunshine-first-look-deal-1235569931/ ↩

6. Dominic-Madori Davis, "A VC told Keely Cat-Wells to get a male, non-disabled co-founder -- she balked, nabbed a $2M pre-seed round," TechCrunch, July 12, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/12/a-vc-told-keely-cat-wells-to-get-a-male-able-bodied-co-founder-she-balked-nabbed-a-2m-seed-round/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Making Space, "About," https://www.making-space.com/about (self-reported figures; last accessed May 2026). ↩ ↩²

8. NBCUniversal, "100 Days Out from the 2024 Paris Paralympics, See How NBC Sports is Partnering with Making Space to Amplify Disabled Talent," May 2024. https://www.nbcuniversal.com/article/100-days-out-2024-paris-paralympics-see-how-nbc-sports-partnering-making-space-amplify-disabled ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Abbey White, "Netflix, Making Space Partner on Tutorial to Expand Graphic Design Education for Disabled Artists," The Hollywood Reporter, November 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/netflix-making-space-graphic-design-tutorial-disabled-artists-1235647311/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Forbes, "Accessibility 100," 2025. Making Space listed in Employment/Workplace category. https://www.forbes.com/lists/accessibility-100/ ↩ ↩²

11. L'Oreal Paris, "Women of Worth 2025 Honoree: Keely Cat-Wells," 2025. https://www.lorealparisusa.com/women-of-worth/honorees/2025/keely-cat-wells ↩ ↩²

12. "GitLab Foundation Awards $500,000 Grant to Making Space to Expand Workforce Pathways and Responsible AI Tools for Disabled Talent," PR Newswire, March 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gitlab-foundation-awards-500-000-grant-to-making-space-to-expand-workforce-pathways-and-responsible-ai-tools-for-disabled-talent-302714470.html ↩ ↩²

13. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "22.7 percent of people with a disability were employed in 2024," February 2025. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/22-7-percent-of-people-with-a-disability-were-employed-in-2024.htm ↩

14. Ofcom, "Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Broadcasting 2024-25," November 2025. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/equity-and-diversity/disabled-people-remain-underrepresented-across-broadcasting-workforce ↩

15. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, "Inequality in 1,800 Popular Films," 2025. https://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-2025-inequality-popular-films-full-report.pdf ↩

16. Mason Ameri, Lisa Schur, Meera Adya, F. Scott Bentley, Patrick McKay, and Douglas Kruse, "The Disability Employment Puzzle: A Field Experiment on Employer Hiring Behavior," ILR Review 71, no. 2 (2018): 329-364. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793917717474 ↩

17. National Disability Institute, "The Extra Costs of Living with a Disability in the U.S. — Resetting the Policy Table," 2020. https://www.nationaldisabilityinstitute.org/reports/extra-costs-living-with-disability/ ↩

18. Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998). ↩

19. Yijia Li, Tao Li, and Huiying Wang, "Unemployment associated with major depression disorder and depressive symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis," International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics 28, no. 4 (2022): 2080-2092. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10803548.2021.1954793 ↩

20. Rashid A. Cree, Catherine A. Okoro, Matthew M. Zack, and Eric Carbone, "Frequent Mental Distress Among Adults, by Disability Status, Disability Type, and Selected Characteristics — United States, 2018," MMWR 69, no. 36 (2020): 1238-1243. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6936a2.htm ↩