Our newest sponsor is a twenty-year-old charity that has just hired its first executive director, and the story of how it got here runs through a supermarket shelf, a production floor in Pennsylvania, and a woman who lost her sight at seven years old.
Reach onto a supermarket shelf for a bath sponge and you’re using your eyes to tell one package from another. The color. The picture. The size of the type. If you can’t see, then you’re relying on somebody else, or on a guess.
Unless the package has Braille on it. Not a logo. Not a gesture in the direction of accessibility. Working Braille, printed on the box, that tells you what you are holding.
Getting here meant moving an entire product line off plastic packaging and onto paper, because plastic couldn’t carry the Braille. That decision traces back to a woman who lost her sight at about seven years old. It is also, by a route worth explaining, the reason this newsletter has a new sponsor this week.
Please join me in welcoming Jeremy Grandstaff and The Inspiration Foundation.
The Woman It Started With
Her name is Beatriz Shapiro. Bea.
Retinitis pigmentosa took her sight at around age seven. It did not take anything else. She became a long-distance runner. She founded a technology training centre for blind and visually impaired people. She worked as a vocational rehabilitation counsellor for the State of Arizona, which is to say she spent her working life on the precise problem this article is about: getting disabled people into work.
Her son is Isaac Shapiro. In 2006 he and his business partner Mike Ghesser founded a bath and body care brand called Cleanlogic, and they put Braille on it.
Translation: the accessibility feature was not added to the product later. The product was built around it.
A Company That Hires the People It Serves
Cleanlogic makes exfoliating cloths, sponges, buffers and scrubbers, at everyday prices, and sells them through Walmart, Target, CVS, Meijer, Nordstrom, ShopRite, H-E-B, Sprouts, Ulta and Amazon. Ordinary products in an ordinary aisle.
The part that matters is not on the shelf. It is in Audubon, Pennsylvania, where the company runs an American production floor staffed substantially by people with disabilities.
Mike Ghesser’s eldest daughter, Rosie, has intellectual and physical disabilities. He is the one who built the hiring model, and he gave it a name that removes any doubt about how it is funded: Purchase To Employ. You buy the sponge. The company employs somebody.
Now the numbers, and I want to be careful about which are which. In 2021 Cleanlogic moved work away from factories in China and back to Pennsylvania, hired seven people from the Overbrook School for the Blind, and packed its entire 2021 holiday gift-set run with blind and low-vision team members. In October 2024 it opened an expanded facility and brought twenty-nine jobs back from overseas. Chain Drug Review, which toured the operation, reported wages of seventeen to twenty dollars an hour with health insurance and access to a 401(k). NBC News filmed on site. The Eagles Autism Foundation took part in the opening. On April 30, 2025, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania presented the company with its Governor’s Achievement Award for Employer of Workers with Disabilities, alongside the state Office of Vocational Rehabilitation.
Twenty Years on, a First Executive Director
Alongside the company, Isaac and Mike started The Inspiration Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity named for Bea and built around a specific frustration of hers: that the technology disabled people were being trained on was so often out of date. For most of its twenty years the Foundation did one thing, quietly and well. Small grants, up to around two thousand dollars, to non-profit organizations serving blind and low-vision people, so they could buy current screen readers and Braille displays.
This year it decided to grow, and for the first time in its history it hired an executive director.
Jeremy Grandstaff is blind. He attended a school for blind children through fifth grade and was arguing for accessible books and Braille literacy long before he was old enough to vote. He holds two degrees from Bowling Green State University, a bachelor’s in management information systems and a master’s in organization development, and he has spent roughly two decades in organizational development and change management.
By twenty-six he was running a team of about fifty-five at IBM Global Services. He spent nearly twenty years as a principal of his own consultancy. He was Member Services Director at the Alliance for Biking & Walking, a coalition then representing more than two hundred advocacy organizations, and, a detail I enjoyed, being where I am, he wrote the strategic plan for Bike Cleveland. He gave a TEDx talk at TEDxYpsilanti on June 27, 2025, called “A Blind Man’s Path to Opportunity.” He works with a seeing eye dog named Ozzy.
In his first six months he reports having increased the Foundation’s grantmaking by roughly twelve thousand dollars across ten grants.
Two Pipelines, and a Deadline
Here is what he is actually trying to do, in his own framing.
The goal is to increase employment for people with disabilities by ten percent over the next five years. He calls it aggressive. And he’s right.
He’s building it out of two pipelines. The first is a stronger pipeline of candidates, and that is what the technology grants are for, making sure disabled jobseekers are trained on equipment that is current, rather than on whatever was donated a decade ago. The second is a pipeline of employers who are actively hiring, promoting and retaining disabled staff.
Read those three verbs again. Not “open to.” Not “willing to consider.” Hiring, promoting, retaining. The third one is where a great many corporate disability initiatives quietly come apart, and it is telling that it is written into the goal rather than left as an afterthought.
The employer half of that work is being formalised into a certification called the Inspiration Seal, which is at present a pilot with its criteria still being written.
Translation: the Foundation spent twenty years improving the supply of well-prepared candidates, and has now concluded that improving the supply alone was never going to be enough.
How This Happened
I will say plainly how these introductions came about, because they came from the same person both times.
Dr. Kirk Adams introduced me to Jeremy in October 2024, having seen the two of us circling the same work. Nearly a year later, in September 2025, he reconnected me with Isaac. Kirk sponsors this newsletter himself and sits on the editorial team at our sister publication, Top Tech Tidbits. He has honed carefully the incredible superpower of knowing which two people in this field ought to be talking to each other.
Regular readers will also already know the Driven By Purpose Podcast, which has sponsored Access Information News since November 3, 2025. It is co-hosted by Isaac Shapiro, by Mike Ghesser, and by Evan Rosenblum, a Daytime Emmy-nominated journalist who spent about two decades building TMZ and TMZ Sports. Rosenblum’s daughter Sydney was born at twenty-five weeks and lives with severe cerebral palsy; he founded the Sydney Strong Run Club, whose members run 5k and 10k races alongside participants using running chairs.
So this week’s new sponsor does not arrive out of nowhere. They arrive from a group of people several of you already read every week.
What a Sponsorship Actually Buys, in Both Directions
For those who want to know what sponsorship does here: it keeps this newsletter free to read for more than 47,000 blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing, deafblind, neurodivergent and/or disabled readers every Monday morning, along with the caregivers, companies and organizations that serve and support them. Access Information News is operated as a not-for-profit project. Funds go to distribution, and when sponsor slots do not fill, my company, Mind Vault Solutions, covers the difference.
It also opens a door the other way. Sponsors join the PWD Media Distribution Co-op, a network in which people and organizations with verified blind, low vision and disability audiences share their distribution channels with one another. As of this writing that is thirty members across forty-six connected channels, reaching 199,512 disability-specific readers with every post.
Which is the honest description of what happened here. In his words and mine, we maximize each other’s reach. The mission statement of the PWD Media Co-op reads: “Amplifying disability voices through collective reach.”
One more thing, since it is the question I am asked most often by readers and least often by advertisers. Yes I vet everybody, and no, I do not accept everybody. Just ask around. I will not write an article about any person, product, service, company or organization (potential sponsor or not) that I have not vetted first. And if that check does not come back clean, I decline the money. A welcome in this newsletter is designed to carry weight.
In His Own Words
“I’m really excited to lead the Inspiration Foundation to sponsor Access Information News. Not only is it a great publication putting out fantastic ideas and actionable things that people can mimic within their own organizations, it’s an opportunity to connect and share, not just what we’re doing, but what other people can learn from us, and what we can learn from them.”
— Jeremy Grandstaff, Executive Director, The Inspiration Foundation
Welcome aboard, Jeremy. Thank you so much for joining us.
Where to Find Them
- The Inspiration Foundation: https://inspirationfoundation.org/
- Technology Grant Program: Jeremy Grandstaff, jgrandstaff@inspirationfoundation.org 📧️
- Cleanlogic: https://cleanlogic.com/
- The Driven By Purpose Podcast: https://thedrivenbypurposepodcast.com/
- The PWD Media Distribution Co-op: https://at-newswire.com/pwd-mdc/
” The greatest barrier to accessibility is indifference. “
Aaron Di Blasi, PMP
Engineer, Educator, Advocate, Publisher & Journalist
President & Sr. PMP, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd., PR Director: AT-Newswire, Publisher: AI-Weekly, Top Tech Tidbits, Access Information News, Title II Today
Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd.
President, Sr. Project Management Professional (2006 — Present)
Innovative ideas. Solutions that perform.
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