Becoming a Disability Ally:
British Embassy Berlin

Celebrating Disability recently delivered a bespoke talk on becoming a disability ally for the British Embassy Berlin.

After working with Celebrating Disability, employees at the embassy now feel much better equipped to engage in conversation about disability in the workplace.

The Background

Our Successful Proposal

Chris found Celebrating Disability through an online search. He reached out to Esi, and they quickly set up an initial consultation call. Chris described the call as “really, really helpful”, adding that the guidance Esi gave him would have been invaluable “even if we hadn’t had the funding to go ahead.”

“It was really easy and uncomplicated to work with Celebrating Disability in terms of designing the content of the session.”

After speaking with Chris about the embassy’s goals and objectives, we put together a proposal. Chris was impressed by how the content was designed so “that people would come away from the one-hour session, having learnt something tangible.”

Becoming a Disability Ally

The session, called “Becoming a Disability Ally” took place during the embassy’s yearly Learning and Development Week. Forty participants were in attendance; many of whom had “maybe never thought much about this topic before.”

Esi opened the talk by sharing some engaging facts and statistics about disability. Participants found many of these stats surprising: like the fact that 80% of disabilities are invisible, or that only 4% of disabled people are full-time wheelchair-users.

There was an animated discussion about inclusive language: what terms for disability are preferred, and how some of our everyday metaphors and idioms might unintentionally be offensive to disabled people. The group also discussed how microaggressions can be hurtful to disabled people in the workplace. Finally, Esi summarised some key takeaways from the talk, and participants were encouraged to set their own goals for becoming a better disability ally.

The talk got “really, really positive feedback from lots of people who said it was very eye-opening,” said Chris. “Many colleagues had never actually questioned some of the ways they work.”

Chris went on to suggest that “for lots of people, if you haven’t been affected, or you’re not from that community and you haven’t got direct experience, disability might not be on your radar at all.” So it was encouraging to find that after the talk, he and his colleagues were able to better empathise with the everyday challenges that many disabled people face:

“You start putting yourself in the shoes of somebody from the disabled community…You think: if I was using public transport and the lift was broken, and I can’t actually get out at the station, that’s obviously a huge issue and it’s not acceptable, is it?”

Chris and his colleagues understood that becoming a disability ally is sometimes – paradoxically – about recognising the limits of one’s own knowledge: they accepted “the fact that [they] didn’t know the answers to certain things.” However, they knew they were determined to learn, to improve their approach to accessibility and inclusion, and to ensure that disabled colleagues felt better supported.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding the social model of disability
• Knowing that barriers can be environmental, attitudinal, communicational or systemic
• Empathising with the disability community
• Recognising that they don’t have all the answers

Next Steps

Going forward, Chris and his team are determined to “keep the conversation going.”

“There was feedback at the end of the first session from some people saying they’d love to explore this topic more,” he explained. “So maybe we could work with Celebrating Disability again.”

Chris envisions working with us again to “deep dive into more of the issues” in a slightly longer session of more than one hour.