The long form brain dump. 7-8mins read
When I started my 10-day campaign to raise £6k to get Kelly Gordon to Cannes, I thought several things:
It would be a great way to focus attention on Disabled talent in this industry, a demographic that is seldom seen in industry long lists—including my own.
It would help Emma and Kelly's business With Not For —which I have great respect for. They are so accomplished, professional and ambitious.
It would be easy.
Over the next 10 days I was going to learn a lot.
This Was Never About One Person
Let me be clear from the start: Kelly's brilliance as a business woman was never in question. She's the kind of strategist who sees angles others miss, who brings perspectives that make campaigns genuinely better. When I launched that crowdfunding campaign, it wasn't charity. It was just an obvious business decision to help me tap into her network as well as help her make her mark at the industry's most revered festival.
Kelly represents thousands of Disabled creatives who never make it to industry events—not because they lack talent, but because our infrastructure assumes everyone moves through the world the same way. When I saw Kelly's work and realised she couldn't attend Cannes due to accessibility barriers, I didn't see someone who needed help. I saw wasted potential on an industry scale.
This was about proving there's an entire talent pool we're ignoring, and that our neglect is costing us innovation, creativity, and profit. Every Disabled producer, creative, strategist, business manager we exclude represents perspectives we're not hearing, solutions we're not seeing, and audiences we're not reaching authentically.
The Hardest Sell: Why This Wasn't Charity
The biggest challenge wasn't just raising the money fast—it was shifting how people understood what we were doing. The charity was wrong from day one, but it kept creeping into conversations. "What a lovely thing you're doing." "So generous of you." "Kelly must be so grateful."
No. I build production teams in top agencies and production companies - I need to know the best people. Disabled creatives bring lived experience of adaptation, and problem-solving that you simply cannot replicate. When you've spent your life navigating a world not built for you, you develop skills in lateral thinking that make you invaluable in creative work. Look at agencies like Purple Goat, Diverse Made Media, Media Misfits, Making Space and Expedia - they're already seeing the competitive advantage.
I'm not being generous—I'm being strategic. I'm actively seeking Disabled talent because they can make my work better, and my business more successful. The fact that others haven't figured this out yet just gives me a competitive advantage.
The Relentless Reality of Crowdfunding
Here's what no one tells you about running a crowdfunding campaign: it becomes your full-time job on top of your full-time job. Every post had to be crafted, tested, tweaked. I was monitoring engagement constantly, adjusting messaging based on what resonated, creating new content daily to keep momentum.
I tried fifteen different ways of explaining why this mattered. Some versions focused on Kelly's individual story. Others emphasized the business case. The messaging that finally worked was the simplest: "It's just the price of a sip of rosé—£4." That tiny, concrete comparison made the ask feel manageable rather than overwhelming.
But managing that campaign meant early mornings crafting posts, lunch breaks responding to comments, evenings creating new content. I had spreadsheets tracking donors, messaging strategies, and engagement metrics. It was exhilarating, and absolutely worth it.
The real momentum shift came when industry publications stepped in. LBBonline, Shots, Campaign—when they started running features, it transformed from my little corner of the internet into a proper industry story. Suddenly this wasn't just about one crowdfunding campaign; it was about the industry's relationship with accessibility. That coverage didn't just bring in more donations—it legitimised the conversation and made it harder to ignore.
Why Individuals Stepped Up
The most surprising discovery was where the money came from. Individual donations vastly outpaced company contributions, and I'm still unpacking why that happened.
Companies move slowly. Even when decision-makers want to contribute, it had to go through committees, budget approvals, and brand alignment discussions. By the time they were ready to act, we'd often already hit our target through individual contributions.
But I think there's something deeper happening. Emma, Kelly and I all understood there's a lot of things to donate to at the moment, and it's hard to find cash. Yet individuals could see this as what it was—an investment in talent and a stand against systemic barriers. Companies seemed to get stuck seeing it through a CSR lens, as charity rather than business strategy. That framing made it harder for them to justify and slower for them to act.
The individuals who contributed understood immediately that this was about fairness, opportunity, and unlocking potential.
The Conversation I Didn't Have
(But Should I?)
Throughout the campaign, people kept asking why I wasn't calling out Cannes Lions directly. "Make them provide accessibility funding!" "Demand they fix their infrastructure!" "This is their responsibility!"
Kelly asked me not to take that approach. She and Emma are in it for the long haul and didn't want to damage relationships. I respected that decision. Their call.
But after the week sorting it out and being in Cannes I can see that the problem isn't Cannes Lions—it's everything. When speaking to Kelly about this, she echoed this sentiment: "It's not just about Cannes, it's about the world. It isn't set up for Disabled people. Knowing that we (Disabled people) will most definitely come up against at least one barrier every time we leave the house can be EXHAUSTING and frustrating. Sometimes they are physical barriers like a lack of a real accessible bathroom, "small steps" into buildings that are deemed accessible or whether it's the attitudes and interactions we face there is something to contend with daily."
Cannes Lions could do more, absolutely. But we can't ask them to solve systemic infrastructure problems. The real issue is that we've built a world that excludes people, then act surprised when they can't participate in the things that world offers. That surprise is our privilege talking.
The conversation we should be having isn't about one event's responsibility—it's about how every barrier Kelly faced reflects our collective failure to design inclusively from the start.
Kelly Wasn't Alone (And That's the Point)
One assumption that kept surfacing was that Kelly was the only disabled person at Cannes Lions. She absolutely wasn't. There's a proud community of Disabled talent making their mark in our industry, and many were at Cannes this year. Some with visable disabilities, some with invisible disabilities. Ass-kicking representatives from companies like Diverse Made Media, Media Misfits, Making Space, Purple Goat and The Diversity Standards Collective to name a few.
But they were largely invisible in main stream coverage and conversations, which tells us everything about whose stories we choose to amplify. Kelly's fundraising campaign got attention partly because it was unusual—but it shouldn't be.
Meeting other Disabled creatives at Cannes reinforced everything I believed about untapped talent. These aren't people who need our help—they're people whose perspectives we need. The creative companies that figure this out first will have a significant advantage.
£4 Rose and £200 Bottles Left Behind
The "price of a sip of rosé" messaging worked because it made the barrier feel absurdly small. £4 to remove an obstacle keeping brilliant talent away from our most important industry event? Of course that's worth it.
But walking around Cannes, I saw something that put that £4 in perspective: table after table with opened bottles of wine that cost £200 or more, barely touched, left behind as people moved on to the next event. The casual waste was staggering.
We'll spend hundreds on wine we don't finish, but need a committee to invest in ensuring anyone with talent can attend the festival?
What I'm Doing Differently Now
This experience changed everything about how I market my services to clients and to candidates, new accessible website on the way, better alt text and contrast checking in my posts. I'm actively recruiting Disabled production talent—not as a diversity initiative, but as a business strategy.
Most importantly, I'm not waiting for systemic change to make individual change. Kelly shouldn't have needed crowdfunding to get to Cannes, but she did, so we made it happen. The industry shouldn't exclude Disabled talent, but it does, so I'm building my own business advantage by including them.
The Real Lesson
The biggest thing I learned isn't about fundraising, or accessibility, or even business strategy. It's about how we mistake individual action for systemic change.
Getting Kelly to Cannes was important, but it didn't fix the trains, the hotels, or the assumptions that create barriers in the first place. What it did was prove that Disabled talent bring immense value, that barriers are often smaller than they appear, and that competitive advantage goes to whoever acts first.
If you're reading this thinking about your own hiring, your own career in production as a Disabled person, your own assumptions about who belongs in our industry—good. Because while we're all debating whose responsibility it is to fix these problems, I'm just cracking on - get in touch!