JOE ZESSKI: Hello. Welcome to Ask About the ADA, the podcast where we answer your questions about the Americans with Disabilities Act and how it applies to your everyday life.
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On this edition of Ask About the ADA, we're going to talk about the National Disability Employment Awareness Month, what it is, its history and its meaning. A lot of what we talk about on this podcast is how the Americans with Disabilities Act is designed to create equal access and equal opportunity for people with disabilities. That's an ongoing mission though, and it's a goal that our community is constantly working towards. We're not there yet, certainly.
In 2018, according to the American Community Survey, 37.8% of people with disabilities were employed who were seeking employment. So obviously, there's a large gap in terms of meeting the number of people with disabilities who are able to work and interested in working and the reality. And in this month in October, we take the time to celebrate the National Disability Employment Awareness Month. This is a federal event that has its roots all the way back to 1945, and let's explore what those roots are.
In 1945, Congress established the first week of October as National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week. Seventeen years later in 1962, the name was changed to be more inclusive, and it was changed to the National Employee the Handicap Week. Of course, language continues to change. And as many of you who our listeners to the podcast know, the word "handicap" has gone out of favor as a term to describe people who have disabilities. This was reflected a number of years later in 1988. The name of the celebration was changed to National Disability Employment Awareness Month. And as the name suggests, it was expanded from a single week to the entire month of October.
Every year, the Office of Disability Employment Policy chooses a theme for the month. And this year's theme is America's Recovery Powered by Inclusion. This highlights one of the recent themes that we've talked about here on the podcast, COVID-19 related to individuals with disabilities. Part of the intention of the Office of Disability Employment Policy's theme is that employees with disabilities and people with disabilities in general need to be included in the recovery work from COVID-19 and the pandemic to be integrated into the workforce as we recover.
With this theme from ODEP, they have suggestions about how organizations and employers can celebrate National Disability Employment Awareness Month. And they have a lot of ideas, one for every day of the month. They range from ideas like sharing posts on social media, promoting public service announcements to more practical tips. For example, for employers, they suggest training staff or supervisors and perhaps participating in Disability Mentoring Day. Other suggestions for employers include beginning an employee resource group, fostering inclusive internship programs, or perhaps assessing the accessibility of e-recruiting programs.
There are a lot of different steps and a lot of different ways to celebrate NDEAM, and every organization can choose to do it in a different way. If you're an educator, there are ways to include students with disabilities. If you're a community advocate or service provider, you can educate your consumers about employment or partner with small businesses in a local community to educate them or to promote the employment of local people with disabilities. There are a lot of ways to make the National Disability Employment Awareness Month part of your work and thereby increase greater awareness of the need to hire and retain individuals with disabilities in the workforce to make it a more inclusive and integrated workforce representative of all of the community.
To learn more about the National Disability Employment Awareness Month, I encourage you to visit the Department of Labor's Office for Disability Employment Policy, www.dol.gov/odep, where you can learn more about the celebration as well as resources that might be helpful to you in your everyday work and life. And of course, as always, please feel free to visit us here at the Northeast ADA Center, www.northeastada.org, or contact us at 1-800-949-4232.
Thank you for listening this week. I look forward to speaking with you again in the future. Thanks as always to Grace Fairchild, our producer and editor, as well as Peter Quinn from the Yang-Tan Institute's media team for doing additional editing on the podcast. And as always, let's continue the conversation.
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