Board Member Marcus Soutra on Helping Realize the Foundation’s Vision for Disability Storytelling
“I'm thinking about what we can uniquely do as an organization, and how we scale that work to have the largest impact.”
Marcus Soutra Credit: Courtesy of Subject
By Inevitable Foundation Staff
Marcus Soutra, Inevitable Foundation’s newest board member and the former president of the nonprofit Neurodiversity Alliance, was in third grade when he was identified as being dyslexic and ADHD.
“That experience of being part of the neurodivergent community really informed who I was as a young person, and how I navigated through school, the stigma I experienced, and what I thought of myself and my own potential,” says Soutra, who is currently working as a social impact strategist.
That early life experience shaped his decision to study education in college and become a teacher, one who “really gets these kids on a different level,” he says. “I was a kind of secret spy of the learning disability community within the public school system.”
That chapter of his professional trajectory—during which he was also doing advocacy work such as speaking at conferences and events around neurodiversity—is also where he realized there was value in his own story. “Talking about my disability and communicating it with younger people transformed the culture of my classroom. So if I could change one classroom with my one story as a 23-year-old teacher, fresh out of college, how could you really scale that type of opportunity for others?”
That led Soutra to co-found the organization formerly known as Eye to Eye. Through its arts-based curriculum, the Disability Alliance uses young learning disabled mentors in high school to teach younger mentees in middle school who also have disabilities various strategies around self-esteem and self-advocacy. “It took the form of a mentoring program, which evolved into a speaker's bureau, which then evolved into working on documentary films and awareness campaigns,” he recalls.
For Soutra—a father of two, former educator, social entrepreneur, and founder of For The Good Consulting firm—storytelling was always part of doing the work that mattered to him. Now he’s joined Inevitable Foundation to help the organization fuel narrative change through TV and film.
“I want to bring my 20 years of experience in working in nonprofits, boards, and leadership teams to help solve problems. How can I be a voice getting us to that place where we don't need to exist?” he says. “I'm thinking about what we can uniquely do as an organization, and how we scale that work to have the largest impact.”
Learn more about how and why Soutra joined Inevitable Foundation’s board below.
How did you get connected to the foundation? Why did you want to join the board?
Richie was starting as a social entrepreneur, and someone connected me as a thought partner. When I left my organization in 2024 and launched my consulting business, Richie and I got coffee in New York, and he brought me on as a client to help support him. I was impressed by the work the organization is doing, by the leadership, the commitment, and the values. It felt like a natural extension of the storytelling work that's always informed my experience as an advocate and a nonprofit leader. Then we started talking about board service. It's a difficult moment for this space, but I think, if anything, it's a more important time for this type of work, a time to be pushing forward, not cowering away.
You said being open about your disabilities transformed the culture of your classroom. What does impactful, transformative work look like to you?
In the classroom, in that one space, it was the way those young people were able to talk about their experience, the way that they were able to feel valued in that space, that they were able to advocate for each other the way they were able to advocate for themselves. A lot of it in the beginning was about perception. The world perceived them differently, and then internally, they perceived themselves differently. So I asked, “How do I transform that?” In the beginning, it became about the airplane analogy. I had to put my mask on, and then I could help put on the mask for someone else. When I think about change, I still think about that element of it. How do we empower those within the community to not only be able to be valued and to have the ability to advocate for themselves, but then, when they gain those skills, be able to help others around them and help those who are allies that maybe don't have that lived experience, engage with that.
Nonprofits focus on fixing structural issues within a certain ecosystem, but one that almost needs to persist to stay “in business.” Inevitable Foundation takes the approach that we should solve the problem so we don’t have to exist. How do you understand being a change agent within that framework?
A nonprofit should be working to put itself out of business. It should not exist to perpetuate existence. We're trying to solve a problem, and I know that's a mindset that's alive and well in the organization. That was also something very clear for Eye to Eye as an organization. When I was building that, we hoped that we would influence, to your point, others—the education system, the policy players—to be able to create the conditions where we don't need to exist. That there could be an education system where students don't feel stigmatized, where they are receiving the accommodations they need to be successful. That world can exist, and you need organizations to be able to push policymakers and larger institutions to make that kind of change. The education system moves like a cruise ship. It changes very, very slowly. The idea that you can have speed boats and jet skis that are more agile and are pushing that boat to shift and change is a necessary element.
The foundation works in a number of lanes and deploys different strategies to execute its mission and vision. Is there a lane of the organization’s work that you feel most compelled or energized by?
I love documentary films—I'm a consulting producer on one right now—and narrative change work can have such a massive impact on people's perceptions and a broader reach in how we communicate ideas. The gay rights movement went through a transformative change, and if you talk to people who were early in that movement, they'll cite things like Will and Grace having an influence on policy. Joe Biden specifically said that Will and Grace had an influence on the way he viewed the LGBTQ community. And I know some people were in those writers’ rooms that were making choices that might be dated now, but at the time, were revolutionary and progressive. Adolescence sparked a national conversation about young boys and their access to the internet, what kind of messages they're receiving, and how we're framing masculinity. Those conversations were already happening in pockets — within organizations focused on mental health and on young adults — but that show pushed the story forward and turned it into a national conversation in a way no single organization could have.
Essentially, the entire country got together, watched one show over the course of a month, and then we were able to make that leap forward and have a more substantive conversation while bringing in those organizations that were already pushing for this. The idea of narrative change work being this tip of the spear that opens up the opportunity for other organizations to jump in and say, "I know you like that movie or that show, and it brought this idea to light. We've actually been working on that for about a decade now. Here are some ideas and strategies about how we make changes in that area,” is huge. Especially in the way we consume media now. We saw podcasts having the largest influence on the last election. We have to stop thinking about how we want people to be influenced and recognize how they actually are. What's actually shifting minds and perceptions. And it seems to me that people are much, much more likely to engage with narrative programming than anything else right now.
The foundation focuses, in part, on how storytelling and narrative change can have material impacts. Was there a story where you felt a shift in your understanding of yourself and the potential of others’ treatment of someone with a disability?
When I grew up, there was little to no disability representation, no disability storytelling. If there was, it was always negative, patronizing, or about supporting this individual who was othered. There wasn't this idea about how we communicate young people's stories from a variety of backgrounds and differences. That wasn't valued in any way. Someone would mention that they were struggling in school, and then it was like, "Don't worry, they're just dyslexic, not stupid." That was often the language that I would hear.
Honestly, the aha moment was when I started connecting with other people with disabilities in college. I went to Keene State College in New Hampshire and was part of the [student group] Keene State Disability Advocates. It began as people telling their stories. Then we got asked to tell our stories to graduate students, who were taking education and special ed courses. That was the moment when I saw people who had different disabilities than I did, from different backgrounds than I was, and who grew up in different places, but had this common story of misunderstanding. Also, an understanding of what their disability meant for them, how to advocate for themselves, and, often, lucky enough to have had someone in their life—like my mom, a classic dyslexic, brilliant but barely graduated from high school—who said, “You're not broken, the system is broken. You're intelligent.” It was those moments in college where I started feeling safe. That was the transformative moment.
