What if the hurdles thrown your way became the very spark that lit a fire under you?

In this deeply inspiring episode of Becoming Bridge Builders, we are joined by Daniel Hodges—a lawyer, advocate, and founder who was born blind and lives with a rare connective tissue disorder. Rather than letting societal limitations dictate his path, Daniel flipped those barriers on their head, channeling his energy into a lifelong mission for healthcare equity, civil rights, and accessibility.

Tune in as Daniel shares his journey through law school, his advocacy work with Pieces of Me, and how personal adversity can be transformed into a powerful catalyst for community change. Discover how the qualities that make us unique can become our greatest assets in building a more inclusive and compassionate world.

Links referenced in this episode:

• piecesofme.org
• danielhodgesjd.substack.com

What if the limits others place on you become very the fuel that pushes you to build something greater, not just for yourself, but for the world. Today's gift is a lifetime redefining what's possible.

Born blind and living with a connective tissue disorder, Daniel has faced barriers most of us can't imagine. Yet he transformed them into a powerful mission for equity, inclusion, and and opportunity for all. Stay with us.

This is a conversation that will shift how you see resilience, advocacy, and the power of building bridges. Daniel has spent his entire life learning to thrive in a body that many might misunderstand or underestimate.

Born blind and living with a connective tissue disorder, he has experienced firsthand the challenges of lower expectations often faced by individuals with disabilities. Rather than being defined by those barriers, Daniel has turned them into purpose.

He's pursued law at the University of Baltimore, focusing on the intersection of health care and civil rights, and continues to advocate for a world where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential. Through his work with Pieces of Meat, Daniel has helped drive forward a movement rooted in equity, inclusion, and collective empowerment.

Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

I am, too, looking forward to having a conversation with you as well and talking about how God is using you uniquely to make a difference in the world.

Absolutely.

I'm going to ask you my favorite question, Daniel. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

You know, I think the best piece of advice I've received has been to let go of my fear of failure, my fear of exploration, and to engage the world with curiosity.

Because when you start opening up those doors, you find insights, you find opportunities, you find areas for growth that you otherwise would have foreclosed upon yourself.

I love that. And that's so true. Sometimes the doors that we close are ones we closed ourselves, Right?

Absolutely. Oftentimes.

Oftentimes. Right. So, Daniel, can you share with us what drew you to pieces of me and how it aligns with your personal journey?

Absolutely. So to give your audience a bit more of a picture, you mentioned in the intro that I was born blind with a connective disease disorder.

The latter, for those who don't know, is a category of illnesses that impact everything from chronic pain to chronic fatigue to more time than I would ever wanted to wish on anyone. It's been in, you know, the medical establishment.

And so I. I learned, kind of coming through those experiences, the needs that were out there, the doors that could be open that weren't.

That includes, in My case having some significant gaps in my education where the schools just did not know how to educate me and did not know where to turn.

It also includes moments where I was denied a job that I was qualified for or multiple times that I was qualified for, where the potential employers couldn't imagine doing the task without sight and rather than letting me prove that, I could just kind of close that door.

And it also includes moments where my ex wife and I had to fight for custody of our first kid based on our blindness, even though we had checked every box. And again, it wasn't some sort of demonstrable deficit in our parenting. It was, we can't see ourselves doing this without sight.

Therefore, we think it's safest for the kid to remove her, even though we had demonstrated that we were plenty capable of parenting successfully using alternative techniques and other adaptations that were available to us.

So the culmination of these stories and many others led me to a place where I said, okay, I need to take these experiences and look at a career in advocacy, which eventually led me to law because I had a couple of mentors who again, challenged me to really question my assumptions about my capabilities and whether I could make it through law school.

And while I was there, it gave me a platform to connect with my cousin who had struggled with her own questions regarding her own disabilities and a difference that her daughter was born with. And.

And saying, you know, your story and my story and so many other stories are different, but they are interwoven in a way that shows that if we can get to the roots of the problems here, we could start getting people to share their experiences and to connect authentically with each other.

We could address the stigmas that lead to lack of opportunity for people with disabilities and really start cracking open a new era of prosperity through that work.

Daniel, I'm curious. I've talked. I just had a guest on my podcast recently who was born blind also, and he was a top salesman in the company.

And when he walked into the company, most of the people didn't give him a chance. It's like, how can this guy be a salesman when he can't see? And he had a guide dog.

And what he discovered was, what they discovered was he became the top salesman because he understood empathy and how to connect with the clients. And the guide dog became kind of a magnet for more sales.

And then all of a sudden, the salespeople who were thinking he couldn't do the job were upset now because they didn't have a guide dog, a service dog that they had. So he has an unfair advantage now.

And I remember laughing with him going, you went from someone who didn't think could do the job to now all having what people considered having an unfair advantage because of your. Your service dog.

I'm just curious for you, knowing you had those limitations put on you by other people, not necessarily by yourself, how did you navigate through that with, you know, fighting, maybe your own self doubt about yourself?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think for me, what I had to do was first of all, learn which voices I could trust.

You know, there are people out there who genuinely love me the best that they know how, but who are not informed regarding what my capabilities are and what my strengths are, which thus limits their ability to provide me with salient advice. And I had to learn how to separate those concepts. I had to learn how to listen to the right people in the right moment to get the right feedback.

And as part of that, I had to really focus on where can I become elite in a certain area? Where can I develop my skill set such that it becomes a real differentiator?

And when you start to do that and you say, okay, that's not really a disability thing, it's a human thing. All of us have areas where we're strong and where we have struggles.

And when we learn to focus on those strengths and grow those strengths, that's where we start to feel more confidence, more empowerment, if you will, and where we can really start creating more opportunities.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. So tell me, what does Pieces of Me stand for and what gap are you trying to fill in society with that organization?

Yeah, so Pieces of Me stands for helping bring people back to the table to figure out how we can collaborate collaboratively solve the crisis of people with disabilities not being meaningfully included in the world. And that's really important thing to think about in light of the spelling of our name, because we spell it P E A C E S. And we do that for a reason.

We started off by saying disability doesn't equal broken.

That's what we initially started spelled peace is P E A C E S. And then we learned that another side of that coin is we're showing people that we can tackle difficult issues and we can prove our point without having to burn stuff down. And really, by meeting people where they are and calling them into the conversation, that's where we start creating more opportunity.

That's where we start getting people the resources they need to thrive. And when we start getting.

Getting different stakeholders able to picture together a world where disability is not seen as being the end of the world, but where those differences can be woven into the fabric of what makes being human so awesome and also what helps us move our, you know, ourselves and each other into a much brighter future.

How have your personal experiences with your blindness and your cognitive tissue issue really how does that. I guess I would say how has it accelerated your ability to be an advocate for others like your who are struggling as well?

I think for me, it came down to knowing the doors that were not open to me and understanding what it took to get past some of those barriers and then saying to myself, okay, I have been blessed in that I was able to find a workaround for some of these things. How can I then open those same doors for others or open other doors for people who need those doors to be open?

How can I combine my insights and my experience in such a way that it moves the conversation forward? And so for me, I talk about turning trauma into hope and turning pain into purpose because it is personally fulfilling.

But it also allows me to have conversations like this one and so many others where hopefully people walk away with a different understanding of these concepts and we can build upon those new understandings with new ideas, new options for success, new bridges to better destinations where everyone is able to participate at a level that is meaningful to them.

You have what I perceive as a very hopeful spirit. But people with disabilities may not be in that same spot, same space.

They may have more challenges that they've dealt with in life and they feel more beaten down by society. How do you encourage someone who is dealing with disabilities to see themselves differently?

Because if you don't see yourself differently, it's probably hard for you to advocate or even fight for what you think you can be.

Absolutely. I'm going to take a few minutes with this one because I think it's an incredibly important question and it's a very complex question. So let me.

Let me take this back a couple of steps and say that, yeah, there is a part of me that is by nature hopeful, that is by nature looking over the next horizon. That visionary part of me. There's also a side of me that has lived with chronic anxiety since I was a kid.

And it's funny to think about those things coexisting in one heart and mind. What they do. Am sure. You know, I think there's also the reality that on one hand, I try to focus on service.

I try to focus on creating the best out of the hand that I'm dealt And on the other hand, there is no denying the fact that, you know, take for instance, right now, I haven't been able to bend my left pointer finger and part of my left hand as we're recording this for almost a month because of an inflammatory attack that is probably originating from my left shoulder, which may or may not actually be in socket as we're recording. And I don't think it has been properly in socket for the last three weeks. There's no denying that that's hard. It sucks sometimes.

So I think for me, it starts by giving ourselves grace and saying, my lowest moments, my darkest moments don't define me.

And who I am is not based upon those things, but the ability to look ahead and say, I'm going to acknowledge my struggles, I'm going to validate them, but I'm not going to let them linger any longer than I have to.

And I'm going to seek out people who help me develop emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually in ways that are meaningful, in ways that are bringing me closer to my full potential and understanding. That's a journey.

You know, before I was challenged by a couple of mentors to pursue law school in my 30s, I wasn't even confident telling people that I was smart. I wasn't confident, seriously.

I wasn't confident in believing that I could make it through the physical and accessibility rigors of law school, let alone building anything afterward. You know, before I started the nonprofit, I didn't see myself as being the leader of an organization.

These are all things that have come by virtue of me having the right people and the right opportunities in place and just having the faith to put one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, and see what happens.

I love that. So let's talk about your legal degree.

Because I thought about being a lawyer when I was younger, realized how hard law school was going to be, and took a different path. But how does your legal education really influence the work you do, especially when you talk about the intersection of health care and civil rights?

Absolutely. So I would say for me, I learned. I focused a lot of my degree on alternative dispute resolution as well.

So I did a 40 hour mediation course, worked on interviewing, negotiating and counseling, those sorts of things. And I think that I'm.

It was, it was good that I focused on how to build coalitions, how to meet people where they are and work across the table from somebody. Because as it turns out, my health and other circumstances didn't permit me to sit for the bar.

So I'm Not a practicing attorney, but I don't really need to be in order to have the impact I want to have.

And so understanding how to break a concept apart or a case apart and examine it from multiple angles, how to evaluate and synthesize information and how to convey those thoughts, convey that analysis in a way that makes sense to people, that outlines your best argument and really opens up that conversation for further progress. Those are all skills that I gained in law school or honed in law school. And so for that reason alone, I'm glad that I went.

Even if I'm not a practicing attorney, even if that's not the road that I ended up taking,.

I love it. So let's talk about a moment where you saw the impact of inclusion and advocacy truly change someone's life that you've worked with.

Yeah.

You know, one of the beautiful things about the Pieces of Me foundation team is that we are disability led, but we do not require every board member or advisory council member to have a disability.

So we have had people on our team, even on our board, who say, you know, I'm unfamiliar with disability, I'm unfamiliar with all of the history and the context around this, but I love what you bring to the table, and I believe in justice. Use me. And to watch some of those people step into being profound advocates because we met them where they were and we nurtured that curiosity.

And this includes some of my own mentors as nonprofit leaders who, you know, when we first met, they're like, you know, I don't even know what to do for accessibility. Please teach me.

Several years later, we get on a zoom call with somebody, and he can recite the stats about how many people have disabilities and how important accessibility is.

He can recite those stats almost as well as I can, and I'm like, this is something that he has just folded into his consciousness because it resonates with him, because of how we approach that conversation.

Wow. That's powerful for the listeners who don't realize how systems unintentionally exclude people.

What do you want them to understand from the work that you do and the. The experience you've personally had with dealing with people with disabilities and your own.

Yeah. So let's start with a. Let's start with a brief fact or not, maybe not fact, but a premise.

Kind of going back to your previous kiss that you were talking about, where his hurdle wasn't the talent, his hurdle was the expectations and the bias. And that's a common thing. I often tell people when it comes to vision loss.

70% Of the hardships I face in the vision loss arena are by virtue of something is either structural or societal in nature. So it's the inaccessible website, it's the misconceptions that make me have to try, try twice as hard to prove myself.

It's, you know, that constant need to fight to be in the room. Those are way more impactful in my life than the actual loss of eyesight.

So getting to the core of your question, what I want people to understand then is that curing disability isn't really the answer. For most of us, the impact we're seeking is, is creating a society that is more accessible, more inclusive, more.

More able to see the inherent worth of every human and to cultivate it. And when we talk about accessibility and inclusion, those are design choices.

You know, the tools and the techniques are out there to make the world more accessible, to make it to where people have the ability to play on a more even playing field. It's out there. It is at our fingertips if we work together and usher it into existence.

So I'm curious, as you think, as you said, that maybe ask you this other question is in your mind for a vision for the future. What does it truly look like to have a world that's truly inclusive? And how close are we from to achieving that goal?

So let me give you my favorite catchphrase on this, and it is, let me compete in an arena free of bias and barriers, and may the best candidate win. To me, that's inclusion.

It's the ability to succeed or fail by virtue of our own grit and by virtue of our own talent, not the external forces that are placed upon us.

And I think it is on a macro level, it may be far off, but on a micro level, each of us has an opportunity to make our own middle world a lot closer to that reality today.

I love that, you know, there are people who argue the opposite way, and that is we have to have a certain number of. Of individuals who check a certain number of boxes to make sure everybody gets a seat at the table. You're promoting something a little different.

And I appreciate the way you said that.

Absolutely. And I think I've spent a lot of time thinking about the metrics. I am by nature an analytical thinker.

And so if you show me a roster that survives the question or sampling error.

So maybe not 10 or 20 people, but if you got a thousand people on your team and 95% of them fit certain characteristics, I'm going to say there's a deeper issue Here. And there's probably some sort of structural or process barrier that is keeping your organization from being as diverse as it can and should be.

And by the way, that's harming your organization. Now, the answer for that is not to retrofit.

Nobody wants to be a token, and nobody, you know, nobody wants to be in that spot where they have to question whether they were chosen by virtue of their skills and talents. So that's where you have to start by saying, I need to build a culture where difference is embraced and we can.

We know how to make unity out of difference. Those are not competing concepts. Those are the same two sides of the same coin when told off correctly.

We need to have curiosity and innovation baked into the culture. And when you build your culture on those platforms, then over time, you will have the metrics that you need to have. But so it's not an either or.

It's a yes.

And I love it. So I'm going to ask you some lightning round questions. What's one word that describes your purpose?

Hope.

Oh, I like that. A daily habit that keeps you grounded.

Reading.

One person who inspires you the most.

You know, I'm going to highlight Governor Spencer Cox out of Utah, who has put forth a Disagree Better campaign that I think is awesome. You may or may not like his politics. I don't agree with everything he stands for politically. That's not the point. It's the spirit of saying we can.

We can build bridges to dialogue while preserving our unique perspective.

I love it. A misconception about disability you wish people would unlearn,.

That we can fix everything regarding disability by virtue of a magical cure that is neither tenable nor is it really productive. Instead, embrace people as they are and help them become what they can become.

A book, podcast, or resource that has shaped your thinking.

Early in this journey, I had the opportunity to read originals by Adam Grant, and I went back and reread it because it is so important to remember that even if we're operating in similar spheres, each of us who does this kind of work has our own unique voice. And that voice matters.

That's awesome. One more. And that is one small action everyone can take today to be more inclusive.

Get curious, check your assumptions, check what you think you know, and reach out to somebody and learn.

I love to ask my guests this question. What do you want your legacy to be?

I want my legacy to be that I took the hand that was dealt and I brought as much light, hope and peace into the world as I possibly could.

That's great. So on the show, Daniel, we have a new thing now, and that's a surprise question. Pick a number between 1 and 10. For your surprise question.

Let's go with 3.

3. And that one is, Would you rather have unlimited sushi for life or unlimited tacos for life?

Oh, tacos in a landslide.

Not a sushi guy, huh?

No. You know, there's a line from it from an Alan Jackson country song that says, I like my sushi Southern fried. That's me.

There you go. So, Daniel, where can people best connect with you on social media and learn more about you and your work that you do with Pieces of Me.

So I am Daniel Hodgesjd MHA on LinkedIn. Find me in one of my cowboy hats. Also, you can find me substack Daniel hodgesjd?

MHA and you know, if this speaks to you, what we're doing, I would also encourage you to Visit pieces of me.org, p E A C-E-S-Of me.org and I'm going to say, if you've been inspired, if you've been intrigued by this conversation, please reach out. One of the reasons I do these conversations is to build relationships.

So I hope that if this conversation has spoken to you that you will, that you'll reach out and we can continue it.

Well, Daniel, thank you for sharing your story, your wisdom, and the incredible work you're doing to help build a more inclusive world and to our listeners, if this conversation has moved you, here's how you can take the next step. Learn more about Pieces of Me and support their ministry, challenge assumptions and advocate for inclusion in your own circles.

And most importantly, be intentional about building bridges where barriers exist. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, share it with someone who needs to hear it and leave us a review until next time.

Keep showing up, keep listening, and keep building bridges. Daniel, thanks so much for this wonderful, amazing conversation.

Thank you.