AFDA Charitable Trust

Beyond Survival CategoriesAwareness CSR and Companies

Beyond Survival: The People Our Inclusion Systems Are Still Leaving Behind

India’s corporate sector increasingly speaks about disability inclusion, neurodiversity hiring, accessibility, and workplace diversity. Yet one group continues to remain largely invisible within these conversations — individuals with high support needs. Most disability hiring models still define “job readiness” through neurotypical standards: independent communication, social fluency, quick adaptation, multitasking, and fast-paced productivity. As a result, […]

Esha beading CategoriesAwareness

Valued Roles, Valued Lives: Systems Thinking in Disability Inclusion, the AFDA model

For decades, disability support systems across the world have largely focused on helping individuals “fit into” society. The burden of adaptation has often fallen on the disabled person — learn better behaviours, improve communication, tolerate overwhelming environments, or become “work ready” for systems that were never designed with diversity in mind. But a growing movement […]

CategoriesAwareness

From Controlled Classrooms to Connected Lives:Rethinking Special Education & Inclusion

For decades, special education has been built on a foundation of care, structure, therapy, and specialized support. These systems were designed to help—and in many ways, they have. Yet despite good intentions, many models of support have also unintentionally created separation: separation from typical environments, separation from real-life experiences, and separation from the valued social […]