‘We fail disabled people when we fail to meet the legitimate needs of business’ – discuss!

I want to start 2025 with something a little different: my ‘Master Class’ for some Canadian disability organisations who were beginning to suspect that their traditional relationship with business did not help disabled people find meaningful jobs and careers. Some also sensed that their traditional messages aimed at the private sector as ‘the problem’, even ‘the adversary’ which needs to be educated and policed- just isn’t working.

To be honest they struggled to accept my initial premise: that just as business needs, without doubt, to become more ‘disability confident’- so the disability sector needs to become more ‘business confident’…and must begin to position people in the private sector as valued stakeholders, valued service users, and potential partners.

I explore the need for modern business engagement and communications strategies (and not just in Canada) – as disability organisations stop generalising about more than a billion people as they set out to prove that ‘they’ are employable…and begin to explain that it’s a jolly good idea for any employer to learn how to recruit everyone based on their capabilities and potential.

Imagine a campaign aiming to persuade employers that 38 million people labelled Canadians are ‘employable’…everyone knows you can't generalise about 38 million human beings: some can do this job- some can’t- some don’t want the job- some would need flexitime- some would not…… why on earth do so many campaigns targeting business still generalise about more than 1.billion people labelled ‘disabled’?

Hence the need for “the new business and ethical rationale for best practice.”

You can tune in via :

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIbq9GIPtBI (THIS EPISODE - AUDIO ONLY)

It’s also available on my website - https://www.businessdisabilityinternational.org/podcast/

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