Corrected, Feb. 14: A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed a survey to the National Library of Medicine. The attribution should be to the Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation.
When it comes to obtaining employment in the United States, people with disabilities face consistent challenges. A Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation survey asked human resource professionals and supervisors about their attitudes toward hiring and retaining workers with disabilities. More than half of respondents reported that employers didn’t hire workers with disabilities because they felt they could not perform essential job functions.
The unemployment rate for people with disabilities is 9%, which is more than double those without (3.4%), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This wide disparity surrounding employment rates between people with disabilities and those without continues to persist, only fluctuating slightly yearly, regardless of the value, talent, and vigor that people with disabilities can bring to the workplace.
Amy and Ben Wright, co-founders of Bitty & Beau’s Coffee, created an initiative that challenges these statistics and encourages employers to diversify their roster of employees. What started as a means to create jobs for people with disabilities in their hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, evolved into a human rights movement that’s expanded across the country.
Amy Wright, named the 2017 CNN Hero of the Year, believes that employing persons with disabilities can promote diversity, inclusion, and integrity both in and out of the workplace.
“Ben and I have four children, and our two youngest, Bitty and Beau, both have Down Syndrome. Prior to Beau being born, and he’s now 18, Ben and I really had no experience with people with disabilities. When he was born, and we got that diagnosis, we were scared, we were sad, and we felt like we were grieving the son that we thought we were going to have. But we quickly pushed through that and embraced who he was,” shares Amy Wright.
Roughly seven years ago, the Wrights started thinking about what the future might look like for Bitty and Beau, and they were shocked to learn that 80% of people with disabilities are not in the labor force in our country.
Nora Genster, senior director of the Employment Transformation Collective at the Northwest Center, sees the tight job market as an indicator for employers to consider active integration of people with disabilities.
In an opinion piece in USA Today in late 2022, Genster opined, “At its core, disability inclusion and anti-ableism at work are about creating enabling environments in which disabled employees do better work, stay longer, and contribute to higher revenue. For many disabled people, inaccessible environments and workplace cultures are the greatest barriers to success – not their disability. To create an enabling environment, employers must prioritize a culture of accommodation.”
Like Genster, Wright sees a mass opportunity to create sustainable and substantive opportunities for people with disabilities. “At first, we wanted to create jobs for people with disabilities, and the coffee shop idea was just one of those lightning bolt moments where we thought this could really be something. So we scoured the internet, learned everything we could about coffee and running a coffee shop, and two months later, in January of 2016, our doors were open,” says Wright.
The agenda for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos underscores the importance of examining the future of work for persons with disabilities.
Shanti Raghavan, founder of Enable India and Schwab Social Innovator, co-authored an opinion piece as part of the WEF agenda in Davos with Enable India’s CEO and co-founder, Dipesh Sutariya.
“Hiring a person with a disability requires a selection mindset rather than an elimination mindset. When companies receive thousands of resumes from mainstream sources, they try to eliminate people via eligibility criteria, such as educational qualifications or negative points towards recruitment. In the case of persons with disability, if the mindset is to eliminate a resume, the disability may seem like a negative point and hence get eliminated,” says Raghavan and Sutariya.
The mindset for the Wrights quickly transitioned from a vehicle to create job opportunities for their children to the subsequent experience of other employees and patrons of their establishment.
“We didn’t know when we started that it would turn into what it has today. But the real power of the coffee shop is the experience that every guest has because so many people have not spent time with people with disabilities and therefore undervalue them. They think people with disabilities don’t want jobs or don’t deserve a place in the workforce. But when you see what we’re doing in the coffee shop, you can’t unsee that. You go back into your life and think about people with disabilities differently, and you take that home with you,” says Amy Wright.
It takes courage, commitment, and creativity for substantive job creation to occur, believes Wright. “Quite frankly, the business world is uniquely positioned to embrace figuring out how to employ people with intellectual disabilities in all types of businesses, not just coffee shops, but any and everywhere, especially with artificial intelligence and all of the technological advancements that are out there.”
The stigma associated with the disabled community can impact employment opportunities from the start, says journalist Gus Alexiou, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 26 years old. “When one factors in basic human diversity and personality traits, it’s clear that no two disabled people are alike, and actually, some physically disabled people are extremely scatty and disorganized in the same way as a non-disabled person might be.
Alexiou continues in Forbes, “It is, however, this very same spectrum of diversity that renders assumptions about what disabled people cannot accomplish entirely futile. People with disabilities are experts in their impairments, and these impairments, apart from in the most severe cases, are rarely universal.
Wright contends that the problems in corporate America hiring practices predate current and public challenges in employing a more diverse workforce. “There are things that weren’t done when we were growing up to educate the masses on the general diversity of disabilities. It’s a social problem and it’s a cultural problem. It’s created a business problem, which has created an unemployment problem for this population. It’s not really a one-off business problem.”
Late last year Adam Ozimek, chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, shared in the New York Times that persons with disabilities can befall ingrained labor market practices that are generations old. “We have a last-in, first-out labor market, and disabled people are often among the last in and the first out.”
Employment rates for people with disabilities increased in 2021 to 19.1%, up 1.2% from the previous year. Amy and Ben Wright, along with Bitty & Beau’s Coffee, have demonstrated that the workplace can also be a place where lives are changed. To avoid the market assessment of Ozimek and others, the Wrights decided to impact change from their own stoop.
“What we’re really trying to do is, get people to begin to see themselves and people who already have disabilities, either congenital or acquired, and realize that it’s okay. We’re trying to normalize it because it needs to be normalized. It happens. I mean, it may happen to one of us before dinner tonight. We might be in a car accident, or have a stroke, or slip and fall and hit our heads too hard on the concrete floor, and then what does life look like?” says Amy Wright.
Today, statistics show hope that although people with disabilities have previously been underrepresented and undervalued in the workplace, where it trends in the future is up to us. Amy Wright’s initiative to employ disabled persons in her community has transformed into a movement across states, impacting how people with disabilities are represented and valued in the workplace.
Despite the perspective of the labor market and policymakers, Bitty and Beau will welcome their patrons with a wink and a smile for their parents’ forward thinking and guests recognizing good coffee and the talent serving them.
Bitty and Beau, regardless of the political winds, will continue to welcome guests with a wink and a smile. Patrons will most likely smile back for the good coffee and the talent serving them.
Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
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