Welcome to Let’s Talk Disability

Let’s Talk Disability was founded by Emma Shepherd in 2019. Let’s Talk Disability provides support, training and advice to businesses who wish to recruit disabled people into employment, ensure retention and opportunities become available to them in their career development. Let’s Talk Disability offers support on all matters regarding Equality, Diversity and Inclusion to Employers.

The Mission of Let’s Talk Disability is to encourage businesses to recruit and retain a diverse workforce and for those staff to feel like they belong.

It is also to improve the psychological safety at work so that staff, with a protected characteristic (under the Equality Act 2010), feel able to thrive rather than just survive, in the workplace.

Emma has supported people with disabilities and long-term health conditions and employers for over 20 years. Emma comes from an HR and training background. She started working with disabled people in Somerset by working in Day Services and Supported Living before moving into the Supported Employment field.  Emma then moved to Kent and managed a Supported Employment Service and has combined her background of understanding businesses working with disabled people, particularly learning disability, mental health and autism and training to form Lets Talk Disability.

Let’s Talk Disability is a B2B Consultancy, Assessing/Auditing and Training specialist organisation. It provides an outsourced Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging service, that specialises in disability and mental health conditions, whilst using a human rights and social model of disability approach to working with both small and large organisations.

Let’s Talk Disability also offers a psychological support service for your employees, should your business ever be sadly unfortunate enough to experience a devastating incident such as a death by suicide to a fellow staff member. We can usually be within your business in the London and Kent area in less than 24 hours.

By choosing to use let’s talk disability, you are committing to becoming an employer of choice for your staff.

  • Initiated and developed a number of Reverse Job’s Fairs, which turns the traditional recruitment fairs on its head and gets the job seeker to have a stand, whilst the employers make their way around the room offering opportunities and offers advice to those that wish to put on their own event
  • ‘Taken Over’ the Council for a day by people with Learning Disabilities who shadowed the Senior Leadership Team
  • Provided training in disability awareness, reasonable adjustments and Mental Health First Aid to local employers
  • A regular writer for Disability Horizons Magazine. All articles can be found via this link Emma Shepherd, Author at Disability Horizons
  • Won awards for innovation and management in 2019
  • Founded a mental health and learning disability cafe in 2022, called M’s Cafe
Beyond Words at the House of Lords Book Launch

Our Vision is to provide equity at work, reduce the disability employment and pay gap, whilst empowering employees to have a successful career – one business at a time.

By choosing to use Let’s Talk Disability, a business is committed to having a fair and safe place to work, where everyone can be their authentic selves and feel like that they ‘belong’.