Today at Davos, campaigner and activist Caroline Casey announced the launch of The Valuable 500, a global initiative to enlist the world’s biggest businesses in addressing the issue of disability inclusion.
Alongside global business leaders including Paul Polman of Unilever, Ashok Vaswani of Barclays and Janet Sweet of Accenture, Caroline, founder of #valuable, made the announcement an hour before her main stage debut in the panel session ‘The Business Case for Disability Inclusion’, having campaigned for 18 months to put disability inclusion on the main agenda of the World Economic Forum.
The Valuable 500 calls for 500 global businesses to put disability on their board agendas. It will work to unlock the value of people living with disabilities across the world and is backed by business leaders such as Sir Richard Branson and Paul Polman.
The announcement follows the publication of #valuable’s research with EY which found disability is still absent from the majority of board level discussions globally – with the majority (56%) of global senior executives rarely or never discussing disability on their leadership agendas.
Several global businesses have already pledged their support to the campaign including Virgin Media, Omnicom, Unilever, Microsoft, Barclays, Fujitsu, Cinepolis and Accenture.
The launch also saw the world premiere of DIVERSISH which challenges the businesses that exclude disability in their definitions of diversity.
#valuable’s strategic partners are Virgin Media, Omnicom and One Young World. Seven Hills is proud to be the lead communications partner.