PCG’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Sophia Thwaites, recently launched a new internal initiative to increase awareness of and engagement in organizational efforts to advance a diverse, inclusive, and engaged workforce culture. Marking Our DEI Journey is a new quarterly letter of reflection to employees that Sophia introduced earlier this quarter to encourage a dialogue around the Office of DEI’s key strategic priority areas, like Disability Workplace Inclusion, which was the focus of her first letter to the PCG community. Our Corporate Communications team connected with Sophia at the beginning of March—which also happens to be Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month—to learn more about Disability Workplace Inclusion.

The concept of person-centered planning has been at play for decades, yet the publication of the Home and Community-based Services (HCBS) Settings Final Rule (“Final Rule”) in 2014 was the first time person-centeredness was explicitly tied to ongoing funding of home and community-based settings under the various Medicaid waiver authorities. As states work to comply with the Final Rule, agencies and service providers should embrace the important role they play in a state’s ability to make the shift to person-centeredness.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 30 percent of the 15.3 million Americans of working age (between ages 16 and 64) with disabilities participated in the workforce in 2018, compared with 74 percent of Americans without a disability. An Accenture analysis of the research suggests that shifting recruitment efforts to focus on disability inclusion would therefore provide companies with access to a new talent pool of more than 10.7 million people.