In 2016, Katy Talikowska, an advertising executive with over two decades in the industry, was working at AMV BBDO, a global advertising agency, when a single email ignited an awareness for disability inclusion. Now, she leads an organization aimed at increasing visibility of disabled people in the business world.
Talikowska was leading the Maltesers (part of Mars) account when she received an email from the UK’s Channel 4 News about a competition giving away £1 million worth of air time for the Rio Paralympic Games.
“The previous year, they’d run a study and they’d done an audit of the UK advertising,” Talikowska explained. “And under 1% of protagonists within the advertisements were people with disabilities…What was even worse, is the majority of the people who did feature were effectively able-bodied people who had just been told to hold a cane or sit in a wheelchair.”
She’d never thought about disability representation before, but decided to pursue the campaign. Maltesers entered the ad competition with the “Look on the Light Side” campaign and won, with positive feedback from the community. “It became a campaign that we ran for three years. We then rolled it out globally,” Talikowska said. She added it was the single most successful campaign that Maltesers ever ran, noting sales increased thanks to it.
Her relationship with the Valuable 500, a CEO collective focused on “accelerating disability inclusion through business,” started two years after the campaign, when she was introduced to its founder, Caroline Casey, a disability activist with a vision impairment. Casey was calling on businesses to make disability part of business priorities. With her communications background, Talikowska developed a pro bono awareness campaign for Casey and continued developing their relationship while her passion for disability equality grew.
When Casey decided to step down from her role as CEO in early 2023, Talikowska was one of a number of applicants for the CEO job, and brought to it a desired background of communications and advertising strategy along with her long-standing connection to the organization. While Talikowska understands not everyone will be comfortable with her not having a disability, she believes she still can lead Valuable 500 through its next phase.
“I cannot claim to have all the answers. I don’t have that direct personal experience, but it doesn’t stop my understanding. It doesn’t stop my motivation,” she said.
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She’s listening to and learning from the advisory board, which contains over 50% disabled people, and her many disabled colleagues. “I am learning and I’m continuing to learn…and I genuinely have no concerns about the fact that I don't self-identify as a disabled person,” she added.
Neil Milliken, who serves on Valuable 500’s advisory board and is also the VP and global head of accessibility and digital inclusion at Atos, an IT consulting firm, said that Talikowska is an open leader, driving the organization towards a focus on the intersection of disability and corporate social responsibility, and he isn’t concerned about her lack of lived experience. “There are numerous members of the team that have lived experience and actually, what Valuable 500 needed at this juncture was a steady management hand to be able to go to the next phase.”
Driving disability inclusive companies. Since taking over from Casey as CEO in June, Talikowska has focused on the next phase of the organization, which is moving from awareness to delivery and accountability, encouraging CEOs to increase disability representation in their organizations.
Milliken told HR Brew that Talikowska will turn engagement into action, “actually really trying to map not just activism and engagement, but how does disability align with the pulse of business?”
“If you want to be authentically representative, talk to the audience that you wish to authentically represent,” Talikowska told me. “[We are] working with our 523 companies, with support from the disability community, to drive systems, change the delivery industry, synchronize collective actions around representation, leadership, and reporting.”
Talikowska emphasized that everything at a company should be examined through an accessibility lens. For example, she said employers should make sure the recruitment process is accessible and that recruiters ask applicants if they need accommodations every step of the way.
At present, Milliken said that companies doing disability inclusion well are rare, “It should be unremarkable because everybody should be doing it. So, it’s that level of collective maturity.”
Update 11/17/23: This article has been updated to clarify that Casey stepped down as CEO in 2023.