Levelling the Playing Field
Kush Kanodia is an experienced and influential social entrepreneur who has a portfolio career focusing on four main areas of activity – health and wellbeing, technology, sports and finally employment and entrepreneurship.
Kush has multiple epiphyseal dysplasia which means that all his major joints have grown differently, causing significant pain. As a child he didn’t identify as disabled, not thinking of himself as any different to other people, being disabled has not has any impact on his dreams and what he wants to achieve in life.
Much of the work Kush now undertakes draws upon his lived experience as a disabled person: challenging mindsets and cultures to help empower disabled people to have confidence and belief in themselves. He believes that disabled people often lack confidence and self-belief because society repeatedly tells them that disability means you’re not able or you’re less capable than everybody else.
Kush is a passionate campaigner for disabled rights and believes that focus should always be on what a disabled person can do rather than what they can’t do.
“Focus is rarely on the unique skillsets associated with disabled people: things like resilience, perseverance, motivation and problem solving. There are so many wonderful attributes that disabled people have and use on a daily basis.”
As an influential disability rights campaigner Kush has been instrumental in transforming a number of significant systems in the UK. This has included working with the Premier League to develop and implement guidance on accessible football stadia. He also campaigned to remove charging for disabled parking at hospitals – which resulted in guidance being issued at the end of April this year, making it mandatory for all 206 hospitals in England to abolish disabled parking charges, helping 2.5 million disabled people to access critical healthcare during the covid-19 pandemic.
Kush has recently turned his campaigning efforts to focus on the impending ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) in London, looking for blue badge holders to have the same exemption that they currently have for the congestion charging zone.
Kush continues to tackle difficult problems and inspire system change, read more in his blog here.
