Providing Customer Service to People with Disabilities

This interactive, full-day training supports helping professionals in building respectful, inclusive, and effective relationships with people with disabilities. Participants will explore disability through a strengths-based and person-centered lens, moving beyond compliance-only approaches to focus on psychological safety, communication, and access. Through reflection, discussion, videos, and hands-on activities, participants will examine how power, bias, language, environment, and assumptions can either create barriers or promote dignity and trust. The course emphasizes practical strategies for clear communication, welcoming practices, accommodation awareness, and repair when missteps occur—ensuring participants leave with concrete tools they can apply immediately in their work.

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Describe disability using a person-centered framework, including ADA foundations and disability categories, while recognizing the limitations of compliance-only approaches.
• Demonstrate strategies that promote psychological safety, including establishing trust, addressing power dynamics, and using clear, respectful communication.
• Identify and reduce environmental, material, and communication barriers by applying accommodation strategies and welcoming, strengths-based practices.
• Recognize the impact of implicit bias, microaggressions, and labeling language on service delivery and apply strategies to use enabling, respectful language.
• Apply skills for emotional safety and repair, including validating emotions, acknowledging missteps, and restoring trust through effective response and documentation.