History
Established in 1986 as the Employers Forum on Disability the group pioneered the first employers’ organisation of its kind. At the time of its formation, the initiatives to promote the employment of disabled people in the UK were largely developed in isolation of employers’ needs, so the creation of EFD started addressing that gap.
EFD was launched with support from the Prince of Wales' Advisory Group on Disability and Business in the Community (BiTC), a business-led coalition promoting corporate social responsibility. The original founding members at the official launch in 1991 were Barclays, BBC, Pearl Assurance, Prudential Assurance, Shell International and Shell UK.
EFD was created when its founder, Susan Scott-Parker, proposed to business leaders that companies should jointly fund a central expert resource which would allow employer members to benefit from best practice and disabled people to benefit from economic and social inclusion. Many of these business leaders had personal contact with disability through connections with disability NGOs and/or family members.
EFD was re-branded to become the Business Disability Forum on 1 October 2012.
Read more about this topic: Employers' Forum On Disability
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“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (18741946)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by handa center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)