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When Laura Wilhelm was growing up in St. Louis, her parents had two very different careers. Her father was a corporate lawyer, and her mother was a social worker who worked with families who had lost babies to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It looked like she was going to follow in her father’s footsteps when she got an undergraduate degree in government from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and went to law school.
But Wilhelm was also attracted to the helping side of her mother’s work, so she pursued a four-year joint degree at Washington University in St. Louis that combined a law degree with a master’s degree in social work. The two didactic approaches couldn’t have been more divergent, she says. “Law is a very intellectual, not practical degree. The goal is to learn how to be a lawyer. But social work is different. You put in lots of practicum time. You’re building experience in the field while you’re in school.”
After a job with a healthcare nonprofit and a three-year stint in Australia for her husband’s job, Wilhelm joined Disability:IN Chicagoland, a business-to-business nonprofit that works to increase inclusion of people with disabilities in the corporate world. The group is an affiliate of the international group, Disability:IN, which has partnered with more than 500 corporations to be the “collective voice to effect change for people with disabilities in business.” After almost three years as a director of the organization, Wilhelm became Disability:IN Chicagoland’s Executive Director in 2019.
Like its parent, Disability:IN Chicagoland has a strict Business to Business focus, Wilhelm says. “We’re not trying to be the subject matter expert on disability. There are so many organizations that already do that. We want to create opportunities for those organizations to connect with our business partners.”
To bring those two universes together, Disability:IN Chicagoland provides monthly virtual and in-person programming. Sometimes business competitors end up sitting at the same table, learning more about how their rivals are dealing with issues such as inclusive hiring and diversifying supply chains. “We try to meet companies where they are and then figure out what we can offer that helps move them further along in the journey,” Wilhelm says. “We hope our work translates into policy changes at the corporate level. It’s all about companies better integrating inclusion into their existing systems.”
Wilhelm understands many corporations view hiring people with disabilities as part of their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and that the acronym, DEI, has become a negative in certain circles in recent years. Last year, Florida and Texas became two of the first states to enact laws restricting or eliminating DEI initiatives at their public universities, and for a period under the Trump administration DEI training was prohibited at companies that do contract work with the U.S. government. (That policy was rescinded early on by the Biden administration.) Nevertheless, a recent survey by the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals found that the vast majority (96%) of major companies had maintained or increased their DEI commitments in recent years.
Wilhelm isn’t afraid to talk about controversial topics, but she also hopes that hiring people with disabilities moves beyond the DEI category to become viewed as a business imperative. “Disability inclusion can’t just be a corporate social responsibility initiative. There has to be a business reason to do it,” she says. “That’s why companies will invest in it: They have to see an actual connection to their results. The good news is that we now have data that show that. That’s a great change and an opportunity.”