Goldman, Sachs & Co. proprietary trader Kieran Prior has found a new passion: ensuring that disabled children and teenagers in the U.K. get the right mobility equipment, without which they have little chance of making their way down the street unaided — much less pursuing their professional goals. The U.K.’s National Health Service provides wheelchairs for children and adults but lacks the budget to offer high-tech indoor-outdoor powered chairs to any but the most profoundly disabled: A basic model costs £7,000 ($13,850) on average; the addition of special features can bring the tab to as much as £18,000.
Prior, who suffers from a rare condition akin to cerebral palsy and has never been able to walk, knows how critical such equipment is. In 1987, when he was eight, his parents appealed to a local charity, the Rotary Club of Salford with Swinton, for money to buy him his first powered chair. Twenty-one years on, families with disabled children still encounter tremendous difficulty trying to obtain such chairs through the government: Allocations are made through a postcode lottery system, and children’s needs are not considered separately from those of adults. Frequently, families make their way through the health care maze only to be told that their children aren’t considered sufficiently disabled to be eligible.
“The NHS does what it can, but the government takes a very practical view of the level of need,” Prior says. “I want to advocate for a more compassionate view: Every child who needs a powered wheelchair should get one, because without it, they simply won’t have a childhood.”
In February he and Mark Borland, a former head of international bonds at London-based Morley Fund Management, launched the Priority Trust (www.prioritytrust.org), a charity designed to give disabled young people greater independence by funding the purchase of powered wheelchairs and customized mobility equipment. Unlike a typical charity, however, the Priority Trust won’t entertain direct applications for funding; grants will be made to a diversified pool of U.K. charities that already have established programs for providing powered wheelchairs. The trust will allocate funds proportionately to those charities, based on their fiscal efficiency, scale and demographic reach in the pediatric market.
The need is great: Of 700,000 disabled children and teens in the U.K., 43 percent have significant difficulty with mobility. Statistics are hard to come by, but a study conducted by the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York in 1995 — and reaffirmed last year by the U.K.’s Department of Health — estimated that at least 70,000 disabled British children would benefit from wheelchair and mobility equipment.
“Basically, the government’s provision of wheelchairs is underfunded, underresourced and overcomplicated,” says Borland. “In simple terms, children should have the independence to be able to do what they want, when they want to do it.”
As the trust’s chairman and founder, Prior is tapping his professional network to raise funds, while Borland oversees administration as CEO. The pair hope to receive pledges totaling £600,000 in their first year and have enlisted a four-strong board of directors, including Edmund Adamus, director of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster; Phillip Hylander, global head of Goldman Sachs’ principal strategic investment group in London; David Kaplan, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, now CEO of online media company Pure Solo; and Ilene Lang, president of New York–based research organization Catalyst.
“Given the strength of his character, Kieran has the capacity to be a very influential person,” says Hylander. “I see no boundaries to what he can accomplish — and being a trader, he can help to raise people’s awareness that a career in the financial industry is achievable irrespective of physical challenges.”
Prior has also enlisted the support — “I just rang up his agent and begged,” says Prior — of Academy Award–winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, whose portrayal of wheelchair-bound author and artist Christy Brown in the 1989 film My Left Foot inspired a then-ten-year-old Prior to pursue his goal of independence. “Today there are still many thousands of disabled children who do not have the right mobility equipment that will give them the independence to achieve their potential,” says Day-Lewis in a statement to Institutional Investor. “In Kieran Prior the Priority Trust has a founder who proves what can be achieved given the right opportunity and is an example to all of us.”
Prior hopes to inspire kids by giving them the means to explore the world more freely — and pursue their far-reaching ambitions. “A number of people have asked me why I couldn’t do this through an existing charity,” he says, “but unless I bring my own direct experience to bear on the issue, and make potential donors aware of these children’s circumstances, I don’t think they’ll sympathize with our cause as deeply as they might.”
