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Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: August 5, 2025: Interview with Meghan Connolly Haupt, Founder, Inclusive Saratoga

Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: August 5, 2025: Interview with Meghan Connolly Haupt, Founder, Inclusive Saratoga

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 In this engaging episode, Dr. Kirk Adams sits down with Meghan Connolly Haupt, founder of the New York - based nonprofit consultancy Inclusive Saratoga. Reuniting after their days in the Lighthouse for the Blind network, the pair trace Meghan's winding road from Carnegie Hall intern and Jesuit Volunteer Corps case manager on L.A.'s Skid Row to corporate-social-responsibility pioneer (she launched the CSRwire news service 23 years ago), craft-beer marketer, and now disability-inclusion entrepreneur. Launched in February 2025, Inclusive Saratoga helps hospitality venues, music halls, breweries, and museums turn accessibility into a competitive edge, offering everything from staff training and sensory kits to service-animal protocols — while an in-house line of “inclusive” apparel underwrites the mission. Meghan credits her sense of “relentless forward progress” to two powerful forces: parents who modeled community service and a second daughter, Tatum, who survived a 24-week birth and now navigates multiple disabilities. Those experiences, she tells Adams, taught her that togetherness is the core of healthy societies and that businesses prosper when they welcome everyone through the door. The conversation brims with optimism—citing data that disability-inclusive companies outpace peers by 30 percent on the bottom line—and closes with a call for partners who want to warm up their workplaces for both customers and future employees with disabilities. TRANSCRIPT: Podcast Commentator: Welcome to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams, where we bring you powerful conversations with leading voices in disability rights, employment and inclusion. Our guests share their expertise, experiences and strategies to inspire action and create a more inclusive world. If you're passionate about social justice or want to make a difference, you're in the right place. Let's dive in with your host, doctor Kirk Adams. Dr. Kirk Adams: Hello, everybody, and welcome to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. And I am that Doctor Kirk Adams. I'm talking to you from my home office in Seattle, Washington. And I have a special guest here today. Meghan Connolly helped. And Meghan and I met several decades ago when she was involved in resource development fundraising at the San Francisco Lighthouse for the blind. I was working for the Seattle Lighthouse for the blind. I started working there because I was hired as the first development director. So we have that resource development background in common. Hi, Meghan. Meghan Connolly Haupt: Hi. How are you? Dr. Kirk Adams: I'm great and so cool to reconnect. I'm so glad you reached out. And Meghan is the founder of Inclusive Saratoga at Saratoga in New York State. And I think Saratoga Springs, Saratoga, Saratoga Springs there, there's horse racing there. And I think potato chips were invented there. That's what. Meghan Connolly Haupt: I. Yes, yes that's true. Dr. Kirk Adams: Springs. Meghan Connolly Haupt: So if you go on jeopardy, if you go on jeopardy, that's going to be that's going to be your million dollar answer right there. Saratoga Springs and the home of the birthplace of of potato chips. Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. I'll hope they ask that question. Well, here we are. For those who don't know me, I am the managing director of my consulting practice, which is called Innovative Impact, LLC, and I am the immediate past president and CEO of the American Foundation for the blind AFI, which was Helen Keller's organization. And prior to that, I held that those same roles, leadership roles at the Lighthouse for the blind here in Seattle, which is a nonprofit social enterprise employing blind and deaf blind people in a variety of businesses, most notably aerospace manufacturing, making parts for all the Boeing Wing aircraft, which is a really cool thing to see 120 blind and deaf blind machinists making parts with very sophisticated computer numerically controlled equipment, but equipped with jaws and zoom text and braille display and all the assistive technologies we use. I am a blind person myself. I retinas detached when I was in kindergarten, and I went to school for blind children for first, second and third grade. Got got my blindness skills down rock solid and then sink, sink or swim into public school after that and was always the only blind student in my schooling from fourth grade through my through my doctoral program and after graduating from college, had the experiences that so many of us have with challenges to finding employment wound up in the securities industry, selling tax free municipal bonds over the phone for ten years, and then pivoted to the nonprofit sector. Dr. Kirk Adams: And through a twisting, winding road became a resource development person and a certified fundraising executive and was hired by the lighthouse here and then Those Things unfurled was invited to join the board of the American Foundation for the blind and then given the ...
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