Disability Experiences in Business Guidelines: PolicyLink
Project at a Glance
LaVant worked with PolicyLink to ensure that the Corporate Racial Equity Alliance’s forthcoming business standards reflect the experiences of disabled people and disabled people of color in the workplace. LaVant conducted detailed material review of the draft business standards, facilitated interviews with disability community stakeholders, led a digital accessibility audit, and hosted a training series for internal staff.
A Team Creating Tools for Socially Responsible Business Practices
Founded by PolicyLink, FSG, and JUST Capital, the Corporate Racial Equity Alliance is dedicated to supporting businesses in meeting today’s challenging environment and achieving their highest potential. Together with a broad ecosystem of partners, the Alliance has undertaken a multi-year effort to develop corporate performance standards, entitled the Business Standards for 21st Century Leadership. Informed by extensive research and consultations with hundreds of stakeholders, the standards provide businesses with a clear roadmap to advance equity and inclusion, combat discrimination, and embody the best of socially responsible business within their organizations and across society.
The challenge
Achieving a Disability-Inclusive Workplace With Equity Principles
Achieving true racial equity is an impossible mandate if disability is treated as an afterthought. PolicyLink recognized this common fallacy and proactively partnered with LaVant to verify that their corporate performance standards accurately reflect the lived experiences of disabled people and disabled people of color. By inviting external experts to critique and refine their drafts, PolicyLink avoided an equity gap where disability is acknowledged in theory but ignored in practice.
LaVant’s Approach
LaVant approached this work by creating multiple avenues for advancing knowledge about accessibility and disability experiences, understanding that each method has unique and invaluable benefits.
- Engaging with professionals with disabilities: LaVant sat down with over a dozen professionals of color with disabilities to understand the issues the community is facing in the workplace. LaVant used this valuable insight to shape the recommendations they provided to PolicyLink when drafting the business standards.
- Providing detailed feedback in documents: Consultants closely read 500+ pages of drafts of the standards to understand how disability and accessibility could be integrated into its messaging. This included providing in-line edits and practical suggestions.
- Auditing against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): Digital accessibility audits provide hard data backed by standardized rubrics about how an organization is creating content that is accessible to people with disabilities. LaVant audited website pages and social media content.
- Delivering customized training: LaVant designed a three-part training series that started with foundational knowledge and expanded into more nuanced and advanced modules for staff.
- Synthesizing findings into an actionable report: At the culmination of the engagement, LaVant summarized its findings using data visualizations and other digestible formats to create clear recommendations for future actions.
The Impact
PolicyLink recognized the importance of working with experts with lived experience of disability and chose to re-engage with LaVant to act on the recommendations they provided at the culmination of their first engagement together. In so doing, LaVant and PolicyLink created plans to build on the work they accomplished by reviewing additional drafts of the standard and external community messaging, hosting office hours for strategic advising, and creating further training opportunities.
