When Andrew Horn founded the D.C. branch of Dreams For Kids three years ago, he admittedly knew nothing about starting a nonprofit.
“I knew this children’s nonprofit in Chicago [Dreams For Kids] and I knew I believed in it, so my natural inclination was ‘why don’t I see if I can start the first expansion branch in D.C.?’ So while in my office, I decided to Google how to start a nonprofit, literally got the documents and I filed for Dreams for Kids before even asking our CEO if I could do it and then called him retroactively and he said go for it,” the 25-year-old told Yeas & Nays.
Yet, during his time as executive director, he managed to develop sports programs for more than 2,000 kids with disabilities. “One of the things we started to realize is that there is this huge disconnect. The problem is not that there’s not enough programs, services and offerings for the disabled community, it’s that there’s not enough visibility and access for what’s out there,” Horn explains.
Like any bright, young entrepreneur armed with ambition and an idea, Horn began working on a way to fix that problem and built a website Abilitylist.com, an aggregator of everything disability related in a localized setting. “We’ve created a Craigslist-style platform that takes your two categories, people with disabilities and those affected and those who want to help people with disabilities and created a platform where people can share information about organizations, events, jobs, products and relationships,” he says.
Despite 56 million people living with disabilities in America, there is still a glaring need in the marketplace Horn says, and this is why the need for a community site like Abilitylist.com is long overdue. “The disability community is not a sexy sector and right now everything that is online for the disabled community is sub-par because no real entrepreneurs are taking a whack at this. What our site is going to do is actually empower people with disabilities and those in the community to share and create the content that they need and to help others so that if someone with a disability or a family member knows about an organization or event that’s been helpful, they actually have the power to post on the platform and to help other families find these things. So, it’s not just me, this is a website built by us for this community and supported by the community.”
Abilitylist.com will launch in beta in early February and Horn expects a full launch of the site on March 1.
