Northeast Arc, a not-for-profit organization that helps children and adults with or at risk of developing disabilities become full participants in the community, has announced the winners of The Arc Tank 4.0 competition.
The event was created to positively disrupt conventional methods of providing services to persons with disabilities.
Out of all the submissions received, four applicants were asked to present to a panel of judges via Zoom. Two of these proposals were selected to receive awards from the Changing Lives Fund, which was established through a $1 million donation from Steven P. Rosenthal, founder of West Shore, LLC.
“The Arc Tank has now awarded over $850,000 to proposals that promise to break down barriers for people with disabilities who are too often marginalized, not included as equal participants in everyday life, and prevented from taking advantage of opportunities,” said Jo Ann Simons, president and CEO of Northeast Arc. “We look forward to watching our two new Arc Tank winners disrupt the status quo and make significant changes for the better for people with intellectual disabilities and autism. “We cannot thank Steve Rosenthal enough for the generosity and creativity that have made these awards possible.”
The first winner is GAB-on! of Barrington, R.I., which was awarded $125,000. GAB-on! is patented technology that is unique in the market with a student-led approach to parent engagement in education and beyond. GAB-on!’s innovative approach, simple design, and singular focus on the goal of getting students to lead conversations with their families about school every day, empowers students and families to have more frequent, more engaged, and more powerful conversations around the dinner table, in the car, on a walk, or anywhere they have a few minutes to connect.
The second winner is the Alliance for Citizen Directed Supports of Media of Pennsylvania, which was awarded $75,000 for its Lives-In-Progress Collaborative. Unique and disruptive, Lives-In-Progress will use the funding to create a national collective of leaders with disabilities focused on transforming self-direction; provide a national resource that allows individuals to build self-direction from the ground up; offer multiple pathways and perspectives based on real, lived experience; pay disabled people for their expertise and lived experience; offer fast, easy access to the various resources, programs, and supports used by others who are self-directing; and assist people who want to move out of state for college, employment, and/or personal reasons.
Visit Northeast Arc’s YouTube channel to watch presentations from all four Arc Tank finalists.
Over the past four cycles of The Arc Tank, approximately 350 proposals have been submitted from across the globe and throughout the U.S. by an array of inventors, engineers, human-service providers, parents, college students, and persons with disabilities.
“The Arc Tank is truly changing lives for the better for the disability community,” said Rosenthal. “The goal of the Changing Lives Fund is to encourage the kind of creative disruption and innovation that drives entrepreneurship to help persons with intellectual disabilities and autism. I’m very happy these two worthy projects received funding and look forward to future disruptive ideas and more positive changes for years to come.”
Other proposals that did not make it to the final round but have worthy ideas went into “The Holding Tank,” where they will have the opportunity to be reviewed by other funders.
The judges were: Ralph James, entrepreneur, higher education administrator, and philanthropist; Matthew Kennedy, founder of Kennedy Merchant Partners; Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung; Massachusetts Department of Youth Services security officer II Matthew Millett; and Marylou Sudders, secretary of health and human services for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Judges received support from David Chang, an entrepreneur, active angel investor and CEO of Gradifi; Margaret Ake, moderator of Harvard Business Publishing; and Bonnie Leavitt, a vice president on the product management team at EBSCO Information Services. NBC10 Boston news anchor Raul Martinez served as the event emcee.