“Quite frankly you can’t claim to be a diverse company without disability representation. That’s not just quota filling or a check-the-box exercise. It’s engaging with and having people at your decision-making tables,” said Andraéa LaVant, president and chief inclusion officer at LaVant Consulting, Inc. (US).

Speaking yesterday at the Capsule Keynote: Speak Disability With Confidence, Ms. LaVant added: “Inclusion is ensuring disabled people are in every aspect of the business, not just as clients or consumers, but truly in a decision-making place.”

Ms. LaVant heads LaVant Consulting, a social impact communications firm that specializes in helping brands “speak disability with confidence.” Through her work, she assesses “where folks are on their inclusion journey in a nonjudgemental way.”

For organizations looking to forge a path in this area, becoming truly inclusive is essentially about moving beyond compliance, said Ms. LaVant.

She pointed to two necessary ingredients to accomplish this. First, it is crucial to have humility, so that you “can admit you don’t know what you don’t know” while also being open and seeking knowledge. Second, organizations must create room for “continued education, growing, and learning.”

Ms. LaVant, who was also the impact producer for the award-winning feature-length documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, added: “Inclusion is not a program. It’s not a one-time thing. It’s a process. It is letting go of or pushing past fear and accepting the fact that you might get it wrong. You can admit you’ve got it wrong and can continue to grow and open up a space for learning.”

Meeting People Where They Are

Crucially, Ms. LaVant never approaches two things the same way in her consulting work.

In working with organizations, there is “‘no one size fits all’ when it comes to engaging and including disabled people,” she said. “It’s not about coming in with a specific model. It’s meeting people where they are and building a tailored plan where we can properly see what the internal organizational structure looks like and how you want to show up to the world.”

The concept of “one size fits all” also fails to apply to the disabled community, and, because of this, said Ms. LaVant, you cannot have only one person living with a disability in the decision-making room.

“We are having more of these conversations around intersectionality and the understanding that disability is not a monolith. We don’t all have the same experiences,” she said. “My experience as a Black physically disabled woman is not going to be the same as that of a white cis-gender man who has a hidden disability.”

According to Ms. LaVant, organizations must question whether they have created and fostered a culture of inclusion where “people feel comfortable or open enough to disclose a disability—not just because they might have a specific accommodation need but so that they can be an owner, or even proud, of their identity and all the ways they show up in the world.”

To do this, leaders need to take decisive steps to foster an environment where these conversations around disability and disability-related experiences can take place.