Sarah Petherbridge

Disability awareness trainer for businesses and public speaker on disability & inclusion

Fields of expertise:

Disability Equity

Passionate and authentic disability awareness trainer helping businesses of all sizes become more disability confident and create inclusive workplaces for people with disabilities. She was born profoundly deaf and communicates by way of hearing, lipreading, some BSL and intelligent guesswork! Sarahh draws on her experience of working as a professional with a disability in a corporate environment for several years. She rose to the challenge of becoming a very experienced senior manager with a profound deafness in a large global organisation, EY.

While at EY, she helped set up an employee network called Ability EY which at the time of my departure had over 500 members. This network provides support to people working at EY with disabilities/conditions including mentoring and coaching. Sarah also provided awareness training to help EY become more inclusive for people with disabilities and collaborated with various operational strands of the business to improve accessibility. As the Co-Chair of Ability EY, Sarah took part in several public speaking engagements both internally and externally to promote disability awareness including awards events, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Bristol. Nominated and won awards for my work as Co-Chair of Ability EY. Her disability awareness training for businesses is bespoke and would complement any formal D&I training rolled out by HR managers/directors or D&I leaders as it is based on real life experience and personal stories.

Speaking Topics Include:

- Why belonging and inclusion matters in the workplace and how you can create that sense of belonging for disabled people in the workplace. This covers psychological safety too which is incredibly important.

- How to be an effective ally to a disabled employee (by way of everyday inclusive behaviours). This is a very popular topic

- How to be a disability smart manager of a disabled employee - how best to manage an employee with a disability

- What is disability discrimination, how this impacts on disabled people and how you can reduce this in the workplace (involves checking your stereotypes and unconscious bias as well as inclusive behaviours)

- Understanding the types of barriers in the workplace that disabled people face and how to remove them to create an inclusive workplace

- What are the different models of disability in terms of how people perceive disability and how each of these models impact disabled people. This leads to the topic of barriers as above and hence inclusion.

What our clients say about this speaker

Sarah is an extraordinary woman who has done so much to build the ERG networks at EY - she is fearless, imaginative and a wonderful collaborator.

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Talks & Presentations

The term " Disability"

What we mean by the term “disability” and what lies beneath the surface for people with

With

Sarah Petherbridge

Disability awareness trainer for businesses and public speaker on disability & inclusion