Making Space Ascend

Making Space

Making Space Ascend

A workforce platform moving disabled talent into quality jobs, combining AI benefits navigation with employer training at scale.

Los Angeles, CA, USA

United States

Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit

Over 61 million Americans live with a disability, yet they are twice as likely to be unemployed and twice as likely to live in poverty as non-disabled people. The barriers are systemic: fear of losing benefits, inaccessible workplaces, lack of community, and lack of employer readiness. The largest of these is benefits navigation. Most disabled Americans rely on SSI, SSDI, Medicaid, or Medicare to access healthcare, housing, and personal care. The average SSDI recipient lives on roughly $1,483 per month, and these supports often disappear when earned income crosses arbitrary thresholds. Taking a job can mean losing the services that keep someone alive. The rules governing this trade-off span federal, state, and local programs and change constantly. Even Vocational Rehabilitation counselors, the public workforce system serving 1.2 million disabled jobseekers each year, lack the tools to model these scenarios in real time. The result is that disabled Americans turn down jobs, employers lose talent, and roughly $400 billion in untapped GDP sits on the table annually. The 2026 ABLE Age Adjustment Act expands eligibility to 6 million additional Americans, creating an urgent window to deploy infrastructure that helps people work safely without losing essential supports.

Making Space is a workforce platform that helps disabled people build sustainable careers and helps employers build accessible workplaces. We combine four integrated tools on a single platform. A job board of accessible roles from enterprise employers including Microsoft, Salesforce, Walmart, Visa, Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Red Bull. AI-powered career tools. Our Skills Extractor uses Anthropic's Claude to surface transferable competencies from a user's lived experience and translate them into language employers recognize. Our AI Job Recommendations engine uses vector embeddings stored in PostgreSQL to match users to roles based on skills, bios, resumes, and completed courses, with Claude generating plain-language rationales for each match. ABLE Navigator, our Safe-to-Earn benefits navigation tool. A hybrid architecture combines a deterministic rules engine encoding state-by-state ABLE eligibility, Medicaid Buy-In, and SSI/SSDI thresholds with a Claude-powered conversational layer that translates complex policy interactions into personalized, plain-language earnings roadmaps. Self-paced learning and the Ascend Fellowship, delivering courses on career development and disability inclusion, with full ASL, captions, and transcripts. The Ascend Fellowship provides high-touch career advancement support to cohorts of disabled professionals. The platform serves 11,000+ disabled users and powers training for 200,000+ employees across enterprise customers. https://youtu.be/vrXWVUj-xyI

Making Space directly serves disabled adults living below the poverty line in the United States, a population of 61 million people who are twice as likely to be unemployed and twice as likely to live in poverty as non-disabled people. Our users include disabled professionals at every career stage, with the average Ascend Fellow entering the program reliant on SSDI income of approximately $1,483 per month. This population is underserved across every dimension of workforce infrastructure. Benefits navigation is delivered one-on-one by a shrinking pool of certified counselors who cannot scale. Hiring algorithms screen out candidates whose resumes show employment gaps or non-linear paths. Workplace accommodations are inconsistent, slow, and often denied. Training programs are rarely accessible, and most workforce platforms are not designed with disabled users in mind. Making Space addresses these gaps directly. Users gain a free, fully accessible platform that delivers AI-powered career tools, personalized benefits navigation, accessible learning, and a pipeline of vetted accessible employers. Outcomes from the Ascend Fellowship demonstrate the impact: $37,200 average annual income increase, 80% of participants moving above the local living wage line, 75% securing employment or advancing to final interviews, 81% reporting reduced isolation, and 72% reporting increased confidence.