Beyond barriers: building inclusive work cultures for disabled employees to drive innovation

The Churchill Fellowship is a UK charity that supports individual UK citizens to follow their passion for change, through learning from the world and bringing that knowledge back to the UK. Together the community of Churchill Fellows use their international learning to lead the change they wish to see across every area of UK life.

The fellowship allowed me to combine my lived experiences as a disabled person with my expertise as a business consultant. I wanted to explore how disability, accessibility and inclusion are driving innovation in organisations on an international level, bringing the best practice I found back to the UK.

Over the course of my research I travelled to Washington DC, New York City, Cornell University, Vienna, Amsterdam and Paris. The culmination of the research resulted in four key themes relating to employment, reasonable adjustments, culture, senior leadership engagement, and how AI (in 2023 only just entering main-stream consciousness) was shaping how disabled people were accessing employment.