Since becoming Disabled in her teens, Keely Cat-Wells has dedicated her life to advancing the rights and representation of Disabled people. As the CEO of Making Space, a venture-backed accessible talent acquisition and learning platform, Keely empowers companies to train, access, and retain pre-qualified Disabled talent. Making Space creates clear pathways to employment and career advancement through employer-supported education and has partnered with leading organizations, including NBCUniversal, Netflix, and Amazon.
A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Keely is the youngest Presidential Leadership Scholar in the program’s history and has served on the advisory board of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation. Before building Making Space, Keely founded C Talent, a talent agency representing Disabled artists that transformed disability representation in media and reshaped societal perceptions. The 2022 acquisition of C Talent marked a milestone for the creative industries, signaling a significant investment in Disabled talent.
After the acquisition, Keely also co-founded Making Space Media with Sophie Morgan, a division of Making Space that produces film, TV, and promotional content centering the Disabled voice. With a first-look deal with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, the division continues to amplify authentic representation.
Keely’s leadership and advocacy have earned her recognition as a Storyteller in Residence at the Clinton Global Initiative and participation in the inaugural Mental Health Youth Action Forum at the White House. Currently, she is one of two Gloria Steinem fellows.
Company history & bio:
Making Space is a talent acquisition and learning experience platform that enables companies to train, access, and retain pre-qualified Disabled talent.
Our goal is to provide the necessary resources and opportunities for Disabled people to create meaningful careers and become influential leaders.
Making Space offers accessible skill-based learning for talent sourcing, career advancement and mobility, boosting productivity and delivering clear ROI for employers. Our model improves key metrics like time-to-hire, quality of hire, retention rates, and employee performance.
Making Space raised an oversubscribed pre-seed round from notable venture capitalists and impact investors in June 2024.
Q: What unique strategies set your business apart from the competition, and how have they contributed to your success?
At Making Space, our strategies are deeply rooted in the lived experiences of our team, our community and our commitment to dismantling barriers for Disabled talent. Our team is composed of Disabled leaders, advocates, and innovators and brings authentic, powerful insight into the systemic barriers that exist and the solutions needed to break them down. This lived experience allows us to design with empathy and authenticity, ensuring our platform and programs resonate with the communities we serve.
Q: What challenges do you anticipate facing in 2025? How do you plan on meeting those challenges?
In 2025, the next administration could significantly impact Disabled people, particularly in employment. At Making Space, we’ll work to ensure our community can still succeed by pulling all of the levers we possibly can, supporting and educating employers and equipping Disabled talent with high-demand skills for high-demand roles.
Q: How much or how little are you using A.I. or automation in your marketing efforts
Our team uses AI in various ways:
Hannah Holmgren, Head of Product & Ops: “I view AI as assistive technology. When I have my ideas scattered everywhere, AI helps me organize them. This especially helps with project management. I give AI a summary and high-level goals for a project and prompt it to create a succinct, ordered outline of where to start to ensure the project goals are met”
Jet Gates. Social Media Manager and Graphic Designer. “I love using AI to help me research topics for content in a fraction of the time. For Disability History Month, I used Copilot to find sources for posts and to come up with polls to engage our audience.”
Noa Porten. Outreach and Community Engagement Manager. “AI helps me with marketing strategy. When setting metrics for a campaign I ask an AI LLM to find me benchmarks for those metrics in our industry so I can set SMART goals. I also ask AI to show me its sources so I can fact check.”
P.S. check out our free AI Prompt Engineering course on Making Space! – https://app.making-space.com/courses/114
Q: What is something you’ve learned in your career that you would like to share with young SMB marketers entering the industry?
Lead with lived experience and share your story as a way to engage, drive empathy and reach the people you want to serve.
