Matt Pierri – Founder Sociability App
Founder of the app www.sociability.app
Matt Pierri is the creator and CEO of the SociAbility app, which helps disabled people and their friends and family, find accessible spaces.
Matt uses a wheelchair after sustaining a spinal cord injury playing football when he was 16. He says he has a complicated but evolving relationship with disability: for a long time, he was very reticent to talk about it, but now feels proud to be a disabled man. One consistent thread is that Matt believes being disabled has given him is an incredible amount of perspective that has held him in good stead for many of the things that he has achieved since the accident.
SociAbility app is about trying to close the information gap, but the bigger mission is to empower disabled people and to foster inclusion, and to shine a spotlight on this as an issue. Matt says “If you make spaces welcoming to people, then people will come – it’s not that they don’t want to, but that they can’t. If we can show venues that becoming more accessible will benefit them, because it attracts more people to that venue, then that in itself becomes a data point; at some point it will tip and a venue will become the odd one out by not having an accessible space – that in itself will drive greater inclusion.”
