IDEA is a social innovation laboratory; IDEA 
stands for Inclusive Design for Employment Access.  

Our goal, broadly as an organization, is to create 
stronger and more inclusive labor markets that  

include persons with disabilities. And a big 
part of this is developing evidence-informed  

tools and resources through co-design with 
partners to help advance employer capacity to  

be inclusive. And that's across the employment 
cycle, from recruitment to hiring, onboarding,  

retention, mentorship, promotion, and also things 
like organizational exit. So this initiative is  

spearheaded by teams of researchers. community 
leaders, global experts, industry leaders, policy  

makers, and many others. And many of us involved 
in the IDEA team also identify with disability  

in one form or another, uh kind of in keeping 
with the concept of "nothing about us without  

us." Our mission is to help create stronger and 
more diverse labor markets that include persons  

with disabilities by developing, evaluating, and 
sharing evidence- informed, knowledge-to-practice  

solutions. Our vision is to see every workplace 
in Canada have the capacity to recruit, higher,  

onboard, retain, mentor, and promote persons with 
disabilities across the full range of employment  

opportunities and to see all persons with 
disabilities in Canada who can and want to work be  

able to find, keep, and flourish and meaningful, 
suitable, and good quality work. We value  

inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility 
in all areas of society, particularly in the labor  

market. We value strong and diverse labor markets, 
where all persons have equal opportunities in  

careers, jobs, and work. We have quite a number 
of partners from research, from the disability  

community, from labor organizations, industries, 
service providers, and government. This is a list  

of organizations that partnered with us at 
the outset of our initiative, but we have new  

organizations joining all the time. It is a space 
that is really growing and people are excited  

about making change and we are super excited 
that people are keen to make change happen,  

so we are looking to partner with organizations. 
This can only happen if we all work together.