ABOUT JESSICA PELASKY
Jessica Pelasky is the Founder & Disability Inclusion Consultant of Coffee, Kindness, & Inclusion, where she helps organizations turn empathy into action and build workplaces where disability inclusion extends beyond hiring.
Drawing on nearly a decade of corporate experience in global learning and development and disability inclusion, Jessica brings together professional expertise and lived experience as a disabled professional and wheelchair user. Her work focuses on the systems, leadership behaviors, and workplace experiences that influence whether disabled employees are simply hired—or genuinely supported, included, developed, and given opportunities to advance.
Jessica is the creator of The Inclusion Gap, a framework that examines the employee experience across five critical stages—Hire → Support → Belong → Grow → Advance—and the gap between bringing disabled talent into an organization and creating the conditions for long-term inclusion and career advancement.
Known for combining candid storytelling with practical strategies, Jessica speaks on disability inclusion, inclusive leadership, psychological safety, allyship, career advancement, and the power of lived experience in organizational decision-making.
Her goal is simple: move organizations beyond awareness and toward meaningful, sustainable action.
Book with Jessica Pelasky
SPEAKING TOPICS
Included but not limited to:
- The Inclusion Gap: Why Hiring Is Only the Beginning: Hiring disabled professionals is an important milestone—but it isn’t the outcome. This signature session explores what happens after someone gets through the door and the systems that determine whether disabled employees are supported, experience belonging, have opportunities to grow, and ultimately advance. Through lived experience, workplace insights, and practical strategies, Jessica challenges organizations to examine the entire employee experience and close the gap between representation and true inclusion.
- Disability Inclusion 101: Moving Beyond Awareness to Action: Disability inclusion is about more than accommodations and accessibility. This engaging session helps audiences better understand disability, challenge assumptions and unconscious bias, explore respectful language and communication, and recognize the everyday actions that contribute to a genuinely inclusive culture.
- Inclusive Leadership & Psychological Safety: Policies alone don’t create belonging—leaders do. Jessica explores how managers and organizational leaders influence whether employees feel safe asking for what they need, sharing ideas, taking risks, and bringing their full perspectives to work. Participants leave with practical ways to foster trust, psychological safety, and inclusion within their teams.
- Nothing About Us Without Us: Why Disabled Voices Belong at the Leadership Table: Organizations routinely make decisions about accessibility, accommodations, talent, technology, workplace policies, and employee experience that directly affect disabled people. This session explores why lived experience is expertise and why disabled professionals must be meaningfully included in the conversations and decisions that affect them.
- From Lived Experience to Leadership: A Conversation About Disability, Work & Belonging: Through candid storytelling and professional experience, Jessica shares her journey navigating corporate America as a disabled professional—from building a career and advocating for accessibility to confronting barriers to advancement and ultimately creating Coffee, Kindness, & Inclusion. The conversation challenges audiences to reconsider what inclusion looks like when we move beyond simply getting someone through the door and begin building workplaces where they can thrive.