Diversity, Equality & Inclusion, Guest Conversations and Highlights

Podcast Episode 165: The Disability Opportunity – with Hardeep Rai

27th June 2022

3,641 views

4 min read

This Episode: `The Disability Opportunity – with Hardeep Rai`

Lucinda is joined by Hardeep Rai, the co-founder and CEO of the Kaleidoscope Group, which aims to transform the lives of people of determination by maximising their potential and offering them access to genuine employment opportunities.

Hardeep discusses his incredible work across the last seven years, involving meeting with over 1300 people of determination across 65 different different disabilities from 28 countries, and the highly personal story of how his own experiences have led him to see the potential in everyone.

Key Takeaways

Disability is, unfortunately, one of the things in life that we cannot truly feel unless it has impacted our lives in some intimate way. It has to resonate emotionally.
Defining disable people has proved troublesome and contentious, even in the modern world. People of determination is the most accepted way of describing them, as it highlights the positive connotation.
If you are genuine in your heart with your intentions, then nothing you say can possibly be wrong. It simply displays curiosity.
There is a misconception that in order to fund the additional means required to level the playing field for a person of determination, the cost must be met by the employer. but the government has means in place to pay for these costs.

Best Moments from ‘`The Disability Opportunity – with Hardeep Rai`‘

‘He inspired me to set up Kaleidoscope’

‘How you define disabled people is one of the most controversial topics of the modern time’

‘We’re all conditioned according to our biases, whether they’re conscious or unconscious’

About the Guest, `Hardeep Rai`

Hardeep is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Kaleidoscope Group (www.Kaleidoscope.Group). The purpose of the organisation is to help to transform the lives of people of determination, by maximising their potential and then offering them access to genuine employment opportunities or supporting them to become successful entrepreneurs.

Over the course of the last 7 year’s he has personally met / interacted with over 1,300 people of determination across 65 different disabilities from 28 different countries. He has worked with over 50 people of determination within his own team over the years. This exposure and experience has given him a unique insight into how to help them to maximise their potential from a multitude of different perspectives.

On a personal level, Hardeep is the father of a severely disabled child of 15 years old so he understands first hand, how to overcome the alternative challenges that life can sometimes offer. On a professional level, he has had a successful career in Financial Services for over 25 years in London. In his spare time, he is an ‘Expert by Experience’ for the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and is a member of their inspection team when visiting care homes for residents that are people of determination.

He is educated to Master’s level in International Business law and graduated from the University of London.

About The Host

Lucinda Carney is a Business Psychologist with 15 years in Senior Corporate L&D roles. Lucinda also has a further 10 as CEO of Actus Software where she worked closely with HR colleagues helping them to solve the same challenges across a huge range of industries. Certainly, it was this breadth of experience that inspired Lucinda to set up the HR Uprising community to facilitate greater collaboration across HR professionals in different sectors, helping them to ‘rise up’ together.

“If you look up, you rise up”