Employment, Housing, and Dignity—by Design

I’m Jared—a product designer with a disability.

I’m investigating ways to help disabled individuals in Ontario gain meaningful employment, not as a side program, but as a core economic system.

I’m looking to connect with:

• People working on similar initiatives
• Researchers, designers, operators, and policy thinkers
• Partners interested in building something real, scalable, and humane

According to 2022 Statistics Canada data, 27% of Canadians aged 15 and older live with at least one disability—approximately 8 million people nationwide, and 4 million in Ontario alone.

Disabilities span many forms: seeing, hearing, mobility, flexibility, dexterity, pain, learning, memory, developmental, mental, psychological, and others.

While disability rates increase with age, this initiative focuses on youths and adults aged 15–64—people who want to work, but are often excluded by poorly designed labor systems.

Unemployment doesn’t just remove income. It creates housing insecurity, displacement, and long-term precarity.

Design Thinking, Applied to Labor

This project applies design thinking—a research-based framework pioneered by IDEO and taught at Stanford’s d.school—to employment systems.

Instead of forcing people to adapt to broken jobs, we:

• Research human capabilities with empathy
• Design tasks around real abilities
• Align labor supply with actual market demand

Through focus groups and structured research with disabled individuals, we identify:

• Desired work-life conditions
• Task-level abilities and constraints
• What “meaningful work” actually means to participants

Capabilities are classified by:

• Dexterity
• Cognitive load
• Complexity
• Repetition tolerance
• Environmental needs

Success is defined by the workers themselves, using independent survey modules—not by abstract productivity metrics alone.

In parallel, we analyze:

• Government data on labor shortages
• Industry surveys across Ontario
• Geographic alignment between jobs and communities

Tasks are graded into matrices based on:

• Skill requirements
• Risk
• Training overhead
• Economic viability

This allows us to pair real people with real work, not hypothetical roles.

Data from both sides—capabilities and demand—is synthesized to identify:

• High-fit opportunities
• Scalable business lines
• Low-risk pilot programs

Profits are not extracted. They are reinvested.

First into operations. Then into housing for the people the system supports.

Employment becomes stability. Stability becomes dignity.

As a pilot, this model maps cleanly onto the out-of-home coffee industry, a $20.3B market in Canada (2024).

Dominated by large chains, the industry relies on: low-wage labor, standardized, often mediocre products.

This creates opportunity.

Coffee, sandwiches, and baked goods:

• Require limited dexterity
• Can be operationalized into repeatable workflows
• Can be supported by adaptive tools and environments

Imagine: hand-pressed espresso you can actually taste, alternative milks, cookies made from repurposed spent grains.

A local brand that supports local disabled communities.

A modest market share shift from incumbents translates into meaningful, recurring revenue—enough to fund employment and housing.

At the heart of Coffee Kibbutz is a nonprofit mandate:

To reduce housing insecurity by anchoring people in stable, meaningful work.

Business activity funds:

• Capital assets
• Support infrastructure
• Housing initiatives for participants

This is not charity. It’s designed sustainability.

If you’re working on:

• Disability employment
• Workforce design
• Social enterprise
• Housing innovation
• Or adjacent systems that deserve rethinking

I’d love to connect.

Through collaboration and intelligent system design, we can build positive feedback loops that benefit individuals, industries, and communities across Ontario.

Let’s build something that actually works.