06/08/2026
🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #89: Interview with Ben Akuoko, MSW, Advocate of Diversity & Inclusion, Public Speaker, Consultant, Entertainer, Community Connector | By Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-Op
https://donnajodhan.com/rwc-05-12-2026/
In this candid and deeply motivating episode of Remarkable World Commentary: Donna sits down with Bernard “Ben” Akuoko, social worker, disability advocate, and founder of The Brightside Scope, to trace his journey from a two-year-old diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa to one of Canada’s most thoughtful voices at the intersection of race, culture, and disability. Ben opens up about the moment in grade three when he realized the other kids could see the board and he could not, the years he spent pretending to read books just to earn classroom stars, and the disorienting friction of growing up in a Ghanaian household where disability was tied to religion and curses, while his school was already teaching him Braille and a white cane that his parents told him to put away the moment he came home. He shares the loneliness of his teenage and twenty-something years, the racial profiling and false theft accusations he has weathered as a Black man with low vision, and the cognitive-behavioral counseling that finally helped him stop hiding his disability, even from friends who had known him for ten years and still did not know what was going on with his eyes.
In the second half, Donna and Ben walk through his improbable academic climb from a D-grade elementary student who was almost held back, through first-year university academic probation, to a Bachelor of Social Work at Laurentian University, where he was the only Black male in his graduating class, and finally to a Master of Social Work at Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. They close on the work Ben is doing now through The Brightside Scope, his platform for showing what race, culture, and disability look like when they are finally talked about together, on his life as a boxing-training, marathon-running, Ghana-colors-on-his-cane advocate who refuses to victimize himself, and on the book he has already begun drafting, one Donna has promised to be among the first to read.
