Our Story

The Association of Accessible Employers CIC was founded by Viki Carpenter and Lucy Green. Today we are joined by Helen Martin.

Viki is neurodivergent herself with a neurodivergent family and has worked to support a variety of organisations, helping those with a range of disabilities and learning differences.

Lucy has a passion for inclusivity, wellbeing and effective ways of teaching new skills, confidence and ways of thinking through her outdoor learning and forest school training.

During conversations, it occurred to us that the focus is always on supporting individuals to cope with their own accessibility barriers rather than supporting employers to remove those barriers. Often employers wanted to be more inclusive, but lacked the knowledge required and often feared the costs would be prohibitive. 

We also felt much existing training was either very superficial ‘tick box’ online training or lengthy sessions that focused on broadcasting facts about disability and neurodivergence without a focus on practical outcomes.

We thought a lot about what would actually work and we realised that a new way of doing things would be to combine immersive ‘walk in my shoes’ experiences and storytelling, with new environments and disruptive learning techniques.

We set about creating a new training model and with support from a range of L&D experts and individuals at the University of Exeter, and created new models of training geared towards engaging interest, enhancing empathy and conveying a deep understanding of the person-centered approach needed for any kind of reasonable adjustments in the workplace.

With the arrival of Helen, who has her own inspiring story as mum to Holly who suffered a tramatic brain injury at 15, we have also moved to conducting accessibility audits. Here we provide reports and insights on environmental design that can support a range of needs, from neurodivergence to mobility, vision and hearing impairment.

Today we offer free resources to many organisations that struggle to find the time and the funds to access good, effective accessibility support.

 We aim to spark deep-seated cultural change in organisations that results in ongoing recruitment and progression of staff who are disabled, neurodivergent or who have long-term health conditions. 

The benefits to staff and to organisations are powerful and important.