“So… what do you do?”

It was one of the biggest cultural surprises for me when I moved to the United States. Within minutes of meeting almost anyone, that question would come up.

Growing up in India, introductions were different. You were someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Someone’s neighbor. Your identity was rooted in relationships, not work.

Here, work came first.

At first, I found that strange. But I realized work is about much more than a paycheck. It’s one of the ways we tell the world who we are.

And then I started thinking about Angad, my son, who has Down syndrome.

What would his answer be?

For decades, people with disabilities were largely excluded from work altogether. If one of the primary ways society defines us is by what we do, what happens when an entire community is excluded from that conversation—or limited to a narrow set of expectations about what they can do?

That question has stayed with me for years.

As our country marks 250 years of independence, I keep coming back to a different kind of freedom. Not just political freedom, but economic freedom.

The question is not about work or jobs; it is about economic participation. Yes, we’ve made progress. Today, people with disabilities are increasingly part of the conversation around employment and workforce participation. That matters, and I don’t want to undersell it. But I wonder if we’ve mistaken employment for economic inclusion.

We celebrate jobs. We measure employment. We fund workforce development. All worth doing. But is getting a job the highest expression of economic freedom?

I don’t think it is.

Economic freedom is about choice—opening a bank account, building credit, accessing capital, buying a home, starting a business, building wealth, and leaving something behind. It’s about ownership, not just a paycheck.

Yet our systems still ask people with disabilities to choose between economic participation and essential supports. Earn too much and you risk losing Medicaid. Get married and your benefits may change. Start a business and traditional underwriting often cannot see you. In many states, subminimum wages are still legal.

In almost every other corner of American life, we encourage people to earn more, save more, take risks, and build something. In disability, we’ve often built systems that encourage the opposite—that ask people to stay small instead.

Then we act surprised why the wealth gap persists.

This is why we built Synergies Work and the Synergies Seed Fund as one infrastructure, not two separate programs. One helps entrepreneurs move from ideas to viable businesses. The other provides access to capital by underwriting cash flow, not credit history. We realized that employment alone was never going to close the disability wealth gap.

Employment is one pathway. Entrepreneurship, ownership, and access to capital are others. When someone owns a business, they stop simply participating in the economy—they begin shaping it. They decide who gets hired next, what gets built, and where opportunity grows.

Maybe the next frontier isn’t employment.

Maybe it’s economic citizenship—not just being allowed to work, but having the same opportunity as everyone else to build wealth, take risks, own something, and create opportunity for somebody else down the line.

Because freedom isn’t simply being able to answer the question, “What do you do?”

It’s having the freedom to choose what you want to build—and who you want to become.

— Aarti