Championing Diversity and Empowering People with Disabilities

March 17, 2026·34 min·2 clips

Satya Nadella spoke about losing his son to cerebral palsy at 26 and how that shaped his empathy as a leader.

1. HR Happy Hour Network hosts Steve and Trish interview Lloyd Lewis, CEO of Arc Thrift Stores of Colorado, about hiring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 2. Lloyd Lewis is a former municipal finance executive and CFO who joined Arc Thrift in 2005 after his son Kennedy was born with Down syndrome in 2003. 3. The episode argues that hiring people with IDD is not charity but a proven driver of business performance. 4. When Lewis joined in 2005, Arc Thrift employed 10 people with IDD; that number has grown to 450 employees. 5. Lewis says accommodations for IDD employees cost little more than the scheduling flexibility already offered to all staff. 6. New hires are typically referred through state vocational rehabilitation departments, Arc chapters, United Cerebral Palsy, or Special Olympics rather than found through standard hiring channels. 7. Arc's interview process for IDD candidates is described as a conversation about interests and past experience rather than a formal resume review. 8. Employees range from 18 (the company's insurance-driven minimum) with no upper age limit, working from one hour to 40 hours a week. 9. Lewis cites a Walgreens executive who built a 500-person distribution center in Anderson, South Carolina where half the staff had disabilities, calling it the facility's most successful, leading Walgreens to commit to disability hiring for one in ten new employees. 10. Arc has posted 17 record revenue years out of 18 since 2005, interrupted only by COVID, and now generates over $100 million annually across 34 stores. 11. Lewis says there are over 10 million open jobs in the US alongside 6.5 million people with intellectual disabilities and an 80 percent unemployment rate among them. 12. He recounts Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's University of Chicago MBA reunion speech about his son's severe cerebral palsy, who died at age 26, and a daughter with a severe learning disability. 13. Nadella linked the empathy gained from raising his children to better understanding of customers and employees in his role as CEO. 14. Arc runs three supplemental programs for IDD employees: an educational program with a degree-style certificate structure, a social program including museum trips and karaoke, and a community service program. 15. Lewis describes his own son Kennedy, now nearly 20, working part-time at Arc while in a high school transition program, with aspirations to eventually lead the company. 16. Arc operates 34 stores across Colorado's front range, collects over 100 million pounds of donations annually, and processes 200 to 300 million items a year. 17. The conversation is a warm, first-person interview between two hosts and a single guest, with light personal banter throughout. 18. The tone stays conversational and anecdote-driven rather than data-heavy, mixing personal family history with business statistics. 19. HR and DEI leaders exploring disability inclusion as a workforce strategy would find this useful. 20. Listeners looking for detailed data, research citations, or a devil's-advocate counterpoint may want a different source.

As heard by us

A grounded conversation about disability employment, real jobs, flexible schedules, and assumptions about who can work.

Workplace inclusion gets a practical stress test in this conversation with Lloyd Lewis, CEO of Bark Thrift Stores in Colorado. Rather than treating disability employment as an abstract principle, the discussion stays close to jobs people can actually do.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Want a grounded HR conversation on disability employment through the everyday reality of a thrift-store company?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from HR Happy Hour Network