The National Business & Disability Council (NBDC) at The Viscardi Center is a comprehensive resource for businesses. With so much potential on the horizon for people with disabilities, NBDC isn’t taking a back seat but rather repositioning itself as a leader for Fortune 1000 companies and other public/private organizations seeking to improve workplace diversity, disability marketing and accessible information & communication technology.
Beginning January 2014, through NBDC’s new tiered-model, NBDC offers its corporate partners research, consultations, workshops and trainings, publications and benchmarking strategies on how to create, implement, grow and measure first-rate disability programs.
Please reference our NBDC 2016 Corporate Partnership Prospectus to learn more about the many resources, services and tools offered to our corporate partners. It highlights some of our new initiatives, including our Daily Disability News Report e‐zine, Industry Roundtables, Marketing Anthropology Project (MAP) and Business Summits. These initiatives build on our proven programs, including our Job Posting Service and Emerging Leaders Summer Internship Program for College & Graduate Students with Disabilities.
It can be downloaded using this link: www.viscardicenter.org/nbdcprospectus
Some of our key programs include:
- Marketing Anthropology Project (MAP): MAP is the first-of-its-kind in the disability market, offering a platform for businesses to understand better the pockets of the global disability culture that influence consumer attitudes. Please download our one-page flyer.
- Accessible ICT Founder’s Group: Accessible information and communication technology (ICT’s) is the process of making sure communication devices, web applications, computer tablets and mobile devices are user-friendly and beneficial to everyone including people with disabilities. ICTs offer people with disabilities the opportunity to participate fully in social and economic activities within their communities. This is especially true for those with severe disabilities. In the case of individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, closed captioning and video relay services among many other communication interfaces, gives people with disabilities use and access to information in real time. Accessible ICTs can lead to significant opportunities for people with disabilities with regard to employment as well as increased productivity. This is because as stipulated in section 508 of the rehabilitation act, it allows people with disabilities to use and access data and information that is comparable to those without disabilities. More importantly, ICTs offer an improved quality of life for people with disabilities because it allows communication interfaces to be designed to match the needs of an individual’s specific disability while proving to be beneficial to those without disabilities. Screen readers and speech recognition software are examples of ICT tools that are widely used with a continued demand for development. Evidence has shown that an increasing number of individuals without disabilities are using these same ICT tools to leverage their productivity as well. Accessible ICT’s make good business sense because it identifies with those of different needs and abilities and encourages participation in the market while tapping into the nation’s largest unused resource.
- Emerging Leaders Internship Program for College Students with Disabilities: The Emerging Leaders program, funded by the UPS Foundation and coordinated by NBDC, focuses on matching college students with disabilities with member companies for a summer internship program that could potentially lead to full-time employment. From a business perspective, it is a way for companies to bring new talent to their workforce since these students come from well-recognized colleges and universities across the country and represent a bright, diverse, and growing future talent pool.
- Job Postings: The Job Posting Service is a signature service that allows members to post jobs on our website and directly reach out to qualified candidates with disabilities about potential job opportunities. It provides an opportunity for member companies to diversify and expand its reach to a vast, qualified labor market. Please download our one-page flyer.
