Hi, I'm Esi. I am owner and Managing Director of Celebrating Disability. I founded and established Celebrating Disability in January 2017. I realised I could be part of the solution to eradicate disability discrimination in the workplace.

Alongside professional experience, my personal experience of being a disabled person and a wheelchair user has exposed me to years of inequalities when attempting to enter the workplace and interact with businesses.

Before starting Celebrating Disability, I worked for a charity in North Hampshire supporting disabled people to make meaningful decisions and choices over their lives. After working in that role for just over a year, I was promoted to the head office (which was 100 m away). My new role required me to plan, influence and implement an inclusion strategy for the organisation.

So why leave?

As well as working internally with employees in the organisation, I worked a lot externally to engage with companies to share best practice.

What I realised was that whilst I was supporting both disabled people and employees within the charity to feel empowered and confident when engaging and interacting with disabled people, external businesses did not have the same levels of confidence.

The businesses did not understand the barriers that faced disabled people when attempting to enter and have a successful career in the workplace. As they did not have an awareness of the barriers, they did not know what to do to mitigate these. Therefore, many of the businesses I came across did not successfully employ and retain disabled people. Often, when approaching a business that was not accessible for disabled customers, their response when asked would be; "we don't have disabled customers so we don't need to be accessible".

I saw an opportunity for my expertise and personal lived experiences to support other businesses and not-for-profit organisations to develop the awareness, knowledge, tools and strategies they would need to be inclusive of disabled people.

So, I handed in my notice and over Christmas, whilst my family were watching Christmas movies and eating mince pies, I went about putting in place the first steps to establishing a new business.

There were many bumps along the way. Least of all, finding a decent office space that was also accessible for me. The thing that kept me going was the knowledge that disability awareness, inclusion and equality in the workplace was essential for not just business growth but for human rights, personal autonomy and self worth.

I soon realised that talking about disability awareness, equality and inclusion from an external business perspective alone was not enough. Whilst my clients benefited enormously from my professional background of engagement and inclusion, real changes occurred when I coupled this with relevant personal stories. This helped make concepts tangible for the people I was working with.