Ad Age is marking Disability Pride Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, in which members of the disability community revisit some of their favorite creative projects. (Read the introduction here.) Today, Carlos Terrazas, disability inclusion lead at McDonald’s, shares his thoughts about creating spaces of representation and belonging at the fast food giant.

People often primarily refer to two groups when discussing company diversity—those related to gender and race. So it may be surprising for some to learn that the largest diversity group in the world is people with disabilities.

More than 1.5 billion people—15% of the world’s population—live with a form of disability, regardless of their race, gender or age, and individuals will likely experience disability at one point in their lives, whether it be permanent, temporary or situational. For example, if you have ever broken your arm and had to use an assistive device/technology, you experienced a temporary disability. Or if you have a difficult time understanding the speaker in a noisy room, you are experiencing a situational disability that could potentially be eased with live captioning.

As the disability inclusion lead at McDonald’s, I help employees understand the nuances of disability, and work with the company to shape and implement our global disability inclusion strategy. I’m particularly proud of the work our team has accomplished so far to help build a more disability-inclusive hiring process and workplace for employees in our offices and company-owned restaurants.

Employees with disabilities can sometimes be discouraged from seeking out the accommodation they need because the process can be confusing, involve multiple departments and take a long time to approve. Through internal collaboration, we revamped and centralized the company’s accommodations request process through the newly created Office of Disability Accommodations for McDonald’s Corporation, so prospective hires and employees can easily request an accommodation.

Alongside centralizing this process, we established a centralized fund to reduce the stigma of any costs associated with accommodations. Beyond infrastructure, our Disability Inclusion Group, an employee resource group that I help lead, produces monthly programming for our entire corporate staff and creates spaces of representation and belonging within the McDonald’s community through the lens of the social model of disability.

As I looked at how we could improve disability inclusion in our restaurant hiring process, we partnered with the Illinois State Vocational Rehabilitation office. Together, we built and ran a pilot program in one of our Chicago company-owned restaurants where we implemented a more inclusive interview process and provided job coaching as part of the onboarding. By the second month of the pilot, we saw a more robust talent pipeline and successfully had four disabled candidates accept offers. The State of Illinois later honored our work by awarding McDonald’s the Employer Innovation Award. We continue to monitor and learn from this program as we consider scaling it to other company-owned restaurants.

Having dedicated resources for people with disabilities is vital to attracting talent, as it signals that the company is truly living up to its value of inclusion. It is my hope, through this role, to continue educating more people on disability and building strategic initiatives that create a culture of belonging for the community. Because, as we say in the McDonald’s Disability Inclusion Group, there is no diversity without disability.