Training

Why Have a Disability Training? 

At 14% of the U.S. population, disabled people are the nation’s largest minority group. Issues of disability and accessibility are vital across a whole range of policy domains, from health care to housing to transit.

Often, however, disabled people are treated less like a population—let alone a community with a history and a culture—and more like a problem. We are sometimes viewed as a negative health outcome, an inconvenience, or a source of liability. Even when decisions are made that will affect disabled people, we are often not consulted before they are made. Disabled people are frequently spoken about rather than spoken to.

While organizations have gotten better at celebrating many forms of diversity, disability is very rarely thought of in this way; the contributions of disabled people are often not highlighted, and the unique and valuable insights of disabled people are not sought out.  

For all of these reasons, a focus merely on complying with accessibility laws is welcome but insufficient. While it is good to be accessible in order to ensure that disabled people can access your school, organization, or business, accessibility is not the same as being welcoming. Just as there is more to building a diverse organization than not violating the Civil Rights Act, or to building a gender diverse organization than not violating Title IX, there is more to promoting disability inclusion than not violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

What our training provides is an answer to why organizations are so often inaccessible, why disabled people are subject to exclusion and discrimination, and what remarkable things can happen when disabled people are empowered to innovate in society and pursue their own solutions to making our world more inclusive. Keep scrolling to learn more about our training topics.