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  • I’m Disabled — And Here Are 3 Meaningful Ways Companies Can Foster a More Inclusive Workplace | Entrepreneur

    I’m Disabled — And Here Are 3 Meaningful Ways Companies Can Foster a More Inclusive Workplace | Entrepreneur

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    Disability Awareness Month is not just about acknowledging the hardships that come with having a disability — it’s also about recognizing the work of disabled people and how we can make physical spaces, policies and practices more accessible in the workplace.

    I’ve lived with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, but I’ve never let it affect my corporate position for over two decades, and I’ve seen firsthand what true inclusion can do for an organization.

    Related: How to Revolutionize Your Organization Through the Power of Inclusive Leadership

    Here are three meaningful ways companies can observe Disability Awareness Month and make lasting changes:

    1. Organizing educational workshops and training sessions

    Team-building training and workshops are the best ways to celebrate Disability Awareness Month. Workshops can dispel myths and prejudices about people with disabilities and educate employees on appropriate etiquette and awareness when discussing and working with people with disabilities. This includes appropriate and inappropriate behavior and language, accessibility considerations and more. Workshops and training sessions can serve as the foundation for creating an inviting environment that can promote the inclusion of people with disabilities in the workplace.

    • Bring in guest speakers: Invite experts, advocates or a person living with a disability to share their insight and experiences. Real-world stories can help employees better understand the difficulties and triumphs faced by people with disabilities. These events are also a way for employees with disabilities to be guest speakers, further enhance the dialogue and build a sense of community and belonging.
    • Sensitization workshops: Conduct a workshop to educate employees on how to interact with people with disabilities and use correct terminology. The workshop should also create a safe environment where people can learn more about people with disabilities.

    Employees will have a better understanding of disabilities, which can lead to more sympathetic and supportive work policies and better accommodation practices and policies within the workplace.

    2. Heighten accessibility and accommodation practices

    In honor of Disability Awareness Month, take a closer look at the current accessibility and accommodation practices within your company. Ensuring that your working environment, from the physical perspective, is universally accessible to everyone gives a foundation for creating an inclusive environment. Accommodation policies are intended to provide a barrier-free environment that allows people with disabilities to access employment, public services and facilities as independently as possible.

    Accessible workplaces are not just about responding to minimum legal requirements; they ensure all employees can perform to the best of their abilities without unnecessary barriers.

    • Accessibility audit: Have accessibility experts conduct assessments of the physical and electronic workplace. This will reveal where accessibility might be lacking, be it ramps and signs or websites and internal platforms that are more friendly for persons with vision or hearing impairments.
    • Update accommodation policies: Frequently reevaluate your policies to ensure they are fully implemented across the workforce. Requests to update accommodation policies should not be met with friction — do not automatically refuse an accommodation request or have an inflexible policy that doesn’t allow exceptions. Implement a simple and straightforward procedure for employees to submit a request for accommodations via a dedicated portal with step-by-step instructions where they feel heard and supported. Doing this can alleviate potential aggression or harassment and create a more inclusive and supportive workplace environment. This can also lead to a great opportunity for empathy training for HR and upper management.
    • Invest in assistive technologies: All employees should be provided with tools and gadgets that will enhance their productivity, such as screen readers, voice recognition technologies, and ergonomic office supplies.

    Employers who make their places of work accessible to all consider this a good inclusiveness policy. Such actions would benefit not only the specified employees with disabilities but also all employees, as diversity is an aspect of mutual respect towards employees and results in higher morale and productivity.

    Related: How to Embrace People With Disabilities In Your Business: A Disability Advocate Explains

    3. Celebrate and recognize employee contributions by people with disabilities

    Another effective strategy for observing Disability Awareness Month is to celebrate employees with disabilities. Recognition and appreciation can be given in various ways, including honors, awards and talent performance.

    Recognition enlightens and accentuates a sense of worth that comes with having a disability among employees.

    • Spotlight stories: Feature stories of employees with disabilities in company newsletters, social media and internal communication channels. Share their stories, accomplishments and contributions because they will help the team feel inspired and educated.
    • Awards and recognition: Incorporate awards specifically devoted to honoring the hard work and achievements of all employees, including staff with disabilities.
    • Talent showcases: Organize an event where employees have a platform to showcase their talents and skills, such as art, music, writing or any other artistry, to appreciate the diversity of talent within the organization.

    Celebrating and recognizing the contributions of all employees boosts their morale and makes them feel like part of the team. It also sets an excellent opportunity to appreciate all forms of diversity in the workplace.

    Conclusion

    Disability Awareness Month affords companies the perfect avenue to increase inclusivity and support for their employees with various disability conditions. Ways to achieve this would be through educational workshops, raising office accessibility, and recognizing contributions by people with disabilities.

    These would not only benefit the employees with disabilities but also truly enhance the organizational culture by making it more robust and much more cohesive. Embracing all these makes for real change in life, whereby each employee feels valued and can contribute at their best. I, being one who has gone through the challenges and triumphs of being in the corporate world while disabled, can attest to what a tremendous difference genuine inclusion makes.

    Let this month not just be about awareness but about concretizing actions that will make life different for employees with disabilities. Together, we can build workplaces where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

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    Jose Flores

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  • She was 88, a widow for 40 years and she got Raleigh’s first Meals on Wheels lunch

    She was 88, a widow for 40 years and she got Raleigh’s first Meals on Wheels lunch

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    Juliette Singleton serves Raleigh’s first Meals on Wheels lunch to Ellen Dortch Shore 50 years ago.

    Juliette Singleton serves Raleigh’s first Meals on Wheels lunch to Ellen Dortch Shore 50 years ago.


    File photo

    The News & Observer

    RALEIGH

    Fifty years ago, Juliette Singleton drove across Raleigh with her first carload of roast turkey, sweet potatoes and peas — a lunchtime savior for the home-bound, the arthritic and the 95-year-old craving chit-chat and gravy.

    Along with her partner, Singleton made Raleigh’s first-ever delivery for Meals on Wheels, a daily hot lunch aimed at seniors no longer capable of frying chicken, chopping salad or driving to the Piggy Wiggly.

    The first stop on her route that day took Singleton just a few blocks from her starting point at Hillyer Christian Church: the home of Ellen Dortch Shore, a widow for nearly 40 years.

    At 88, the widow pulled up a chair, tucked into her lunch and smiled at her new friend.

    “Normally,” she said, “I just have a glass of sherry, crackers and cheese.”

    A ‘very rewarding’ experience

    This month marks a half-century for Meals on Wheels, which started out in 1974 serving nine people — a total now topping 1,400 across Wake County. Volunteers now exceed 2,200 people.

    “It was very rewarding for me,” said Singleton, who still remembers her first stop after thousands of deliveries. “I had this one lady who was so sweet, she’d been to her granddaughter’s wedding, so we was very insistent that I stay and see the pictures, and whenever I’d leave she’d say, ‘Will you put this letter in the mailbox for me?’”

    Juliette Singleton holds a photograph that documented Raleigh’s first-ever Meals on Wheels delivery 50 years ago in 1974, when she served Ellen Dortch Shore.
    Juliette Singleton holds a photograph that documented Raleigh’s first-ever Meals on Wheels delivery 50 years ago in 1974, when she served Ellen Dortch Shore. Josh Shaffer

    I should note on this anniversary that I carry a deep fondness for Meals on Wheels, mostly thanks to my Grandma Irene Kern. A plucky Baptist and ardent crossword puzzler, she drove a weekly route around suburban Los Angeles well past the age of 90.

    Grandma would often take me along with her when I was a boy of 8 or 9, showing me off to the shut-ins who spent lonely days watching soap operas or playing canasta. I’d hand them their low-sodium entrees and their 2 percent milk, and Grandma would ask about their cataracts or their hypertension.

    The last time I her, a few years before she died, Grandma was several decades older than most of her clients — still driving her little Plymouth Champ full of hot trays.

    Back in 1974, a lunch from Meals on Wheels cost $1.75, and sponsors picked up what the neediest couldn’t afford. Now, one meal costs $4.75 if a client wants to pay it. If you’re over 60 with a chronic disability, you can get a meal regardless.

    Meals on Wheels began in Raleigh in 1974, prepared at Wake Memorial Hospital and transported to volunteers by Red Cross van.
    Meals on Wheels began in Raleigh in 1974, prepared at Wake Memorial Hospital and transported to volunteers by Red Cross van. News & Observer

    But here’s something you learn going door-to-door: Nutrition and poverty come in many forms. When some people answer Meals on Wheels’ knock, it’s the first and last time they’ll open the door all day.

    Take Ellen Dortch Shore, their first-ever client.

    Singleton confessed some Meals on Wheels volunteers wished The News & Observer had chosen a different photo for the inaugural run in 1974, considering Shore is pictured in front of her silver and her art collection.

    She was 88 at the time, but in 1914, she had married Dr. Clarence A. Shore — the first director of the State Laboratory of Hygiene and a worldwide authority on the treatment of hydrophobia.

    Dr. Shore’s widow

    The N&O described all of Raleigh society fawning on the young couple at their wedding, filling a gift room with silver, glass and china. “A testimonial to the popularity of the couple,” the reporter raved. “A more beautiful display has not been seen here.”

    Dr. Shore would build his reputation in the growing field of public health, speaking at international conferences and enjoying a high status in Raleigh. But he would die young of thrombosis in 1933, meriting two columns above the fold on the N&O’s front page and a headline that called him “a notable figure of progress.”

    His widow kept very much in the public eye afterward: turning the first shovel that broke ground for Rex Hospital in 1935, traveling to London by steam ship in 1958, lending a 19th-century Chinese bronze tiger for an art exhibit in 1967.

    But whenever she got mentioned, she appeared under her husband’s name: Mrs. Clarence A. Shore.

    And when she died in 1981 at age 95, her death merited three sentences on page 29.

    Imagine a loneliness so large it fills 48 years.

    Imagine how nice it would be, as an 88-year-old woman with so much of life taken away, to answer the door and find someone standing there with a tray full of hot food.

    Related stories from Raleigh News & Observer

    Josh Shaffer is a general assignment reporter on the watch for “talkers,” which are stories you might discuss around a water cooler. He has worked for The News & Observer since 2004 and writes a column about unusual people and places.

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    Josh Shaffer

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