Mission
The underlying idea in the Business Disability Forum approach is that corporate disability confidence presents a huge potential to businesses as they learn how to recruit and employ disabled people on the basis of capability, and as they learn how to become fully accessible for disabled customers and stakeholders in the wider community.
Given this the organisation aims to enable employers to become competent in disability inclusion, and to support a broader systems and culture change in terms of policies and practices related to disability. It serves its members through advising and supporting businesses in all aspects of disability confidence, conducting training on disability issues and providing a range of services and resources.
The most powerful thing the group did in the beginning to trigger change was to run the world’s first Leadership Development Programme for People with Disabilities. The programme, run by the former EFD for seven years, enabled disabled entrepreneurs to access leadership and management training courses organised by major corporations for their own employees. Participating corporations found that their management expectations regarding people described as ‘disabled’ were transformed by this opportunity to work alongside them during the courses.
Read more about this topic: Employers' Forum On Disability
Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal “the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry].” He said he didn’t know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate’s coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“When you’re dealing with monkeys, you’ve got to expect some wrenches.”
—Alvah Bessie, Ranald MacDougall, and Lester Cole. Raoul Walsh. Captain Nelson, Objective Burma, giving a subaltern a mission (1945)
“Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)