The U.S. — Japan Business Leadership Institute on Youth Disability Employment — Webinar Series

This year, the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston (ICI) and the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) will present a 5-part webinar series featuring U.S.–Japan panels with business leaders, educators, and young professionals with disabilities.

This effort extends the work ICI’s Heike Boeltzig-Brown and Miwa Tanabe have done over the past 8 years in Japan around building capacity in disability, higher education, and employment. Specifically, the webinar series continues and deepens the dialogue with key stakeholders that was launched at the October 2019 “Inclusion Matters” symposium organized by ICI and held at the Nippon Foundation Headquarter Office in Tokyo.

Each panel in this webinar series will focus on a different aspect of youth disability employment within a cross-cultural context. This webinar series is free and open to the public.

While it is important for employers to examine their hiring procedures, the problematic aspects of disability employment cannot be fixed by adjusting hiring procedures alone. We must resolve barriers in education, built environment, and other areas as well to support youth with disabilities as they pursue employment.

Our first webinar, on February 19, 2021, How do we Access Employment? Japanese and American College Students and Young Professionals with Disabilities Share Barriers and Break-Throughs will feature a panel of college students and young professionals with disabilities from Japan and the U.S. sharing how their employment experiences have shaped their lives and the lives of other individuals in their communities.

Register for this webinar today!

Subsequent webinars in this series feature panels discussing topics of higher education and employment, experiential learning programs, inclusive workplaces, and the future of disability employment. Learn more about these webinars here.

This project is funded by the U.S. Embassy Tokyo and aims to promote shared understanding of practices and lessons learned from our ICI-ACCJ partnership.

We will provide language interpretation for all webinars in English, Japanese, American Sign Language, and Japanese Sign Language. We will also provide live captions (CART) for all webinars in English and Japanese.

Please contact Heike Boeltzig-Brown, PhD (heike.boeltzig@umb.edu) for more information about this webinar series and other ICI Japan projects.