Event Details at a Glance
- 📅 Dates: June 2–4, 2026
- 📍 Location: Anderson University, Anderson, South Carolina
- 💵 Cost: $250 per person, with lunches and dinners included
- 🏢 Company Visits: Bon Secours St. Francis (Project SEARCH healthcare inclusion) and the Walgreens Distribution Center
- 🎯 Who Should Attend: executives, HR and operations leaders, and any organization exploring or already committed to inclusive employment
- 🏨 Hotel Block: The Bleckley Inn and Home2 Suites by Hilton Anderson Downtown, conference rates valid through May 2, 2026
- 🔗 Register: https://voyage.andersonuniversity.edu/register/transformingculture
- 📧 Questions: Prof. Jeffrey Moore, Ph.D., jmoore@andersonuniversity.edu 📧️ | +1 (864) 322-3088 📱️
I’m thrilled to share that Anderson University is hosting one of the most useful three days any leader interested in inclusive employment could spend this year. On June 2 through 4, 2026, Prof. Jeffrey Moore and his team will convene Transforming Culture Through Disability Employment, a working conference built not around slides and breakout rooms but around live company visits, practitioner panels, and nearly two decades of research on a single, stubborn finding: inclusive employment is not a concession to conscience. It is a strategic advantage. And the clearest case study American business has for that claim sits just a short drive from the conference venue, inside the Walgreens distribution center that Randy Lewis opened in Anderson, South Carolina nineteen years ago.
What One Father’s Question Built
For almost every conversation I have about disability employment, we begin with a moral claim and end on a balance sheet. The moral claim is the easy part. The balance sheet is where the argument has always needed help, and where, nearly two decades ago, a distribution center in Anderson, South Carolina quietly put the question to rest.
In 2007, Randy Lewis, then Senior Vice President of Distribution and Logistics at Walgreens, opened a new distribution center in Anderson, SC. Randy’s son Austin has autism, and a question every parent of a disabled child eventually asks, how will he take care of himself?, reshaped how Randy thought about who a warehouse was for.
The Anderson facility was designed, from the blueprints up, around the premise that roughly thirty percent of every team, in every department, would be held open for employees with physical or cognitive disabilities. When the center opened, forty-two percent of its workforce disclosed a disability. Today, close to two decades in, the facility continues to run at around thirty-eight percent. The standard was never lowered. The performance expectations were never lowered. The pay was never lowered. What was redesigned was the work itself, the job, the supervision, the training, the pathway in.
The Numbers That Settled the Argument
What Anderson produced was not a feel-good narrative. It was a performance case file.
Employees with disabilities at Anderson demonstrated retention roughly forty-eight percent better than their peers, and turnover roughly forty percent lower. Safety incidents dropped to the lowest rate in Walgreens’ network. A 400,000-hour internal productivity study found parity between employees with disabilities and those without. Deaf forklift operators, by one of the most striking findings, were twice as safe as hearing operators.
Randy said it plainly: “This is a business, not a charity, and our employees with disabilities earn the same pay and benefits as other employees for the same work.” That is the frame every leader needs to adopt before inclusive hiring becomes real. The question is not whether we can afford to include. The question is how much longer we can afford not to.
From One Warehouse to a Network
Inside Walgreens, the Anderson model did not stay in Anderson. The same design was carried into all twelve of the company’s full-service distribution centers. It migrated into retail through pilots in Dallas–Fort Worth, then Houston, then New York, then nationally. More than a hundred companies have walked the Anderson floor, Procter & Gamble, Lowe’s, Best Buy, UPS, Toyota, Marks & Spencer, and others have adapted some version of it into their own operations. The National Governors Association has called Anderson the gold standard of disability employment.
In November 2022, Walgreens Boots Alliance became the first S&P 500 company to tie its annual bonus plan to a disability representation metric. For seven consecutive years through 2023, the company earned a perfect score on the Disability Equality Index. Those are not gestures. They are how institutional commitment shows up on a scorecard.
The Research Underneath It All
What makes the Anderson case so unusually durable is that a researcher was watching, carefully, the whole time. Since the facility opened, Dr. Jeffrey Moore, Professor of Management at Anderson University, together with his graduate students, has been collecting data on what inclusive employment does to teams, supervisors, culture, and performance, not only at Walgreens, but at Sephora and at a sister facility in Pendergrass, Georgia. Dr. Moore’s published work shows the same pattern every time: inclusive hiring does not merely tolerate high performance. It produces it. His research team was honored for that work with the 2015 Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Collaboration award from Benedictine University.
I had the privilege of spending a full day with Dr. Moore at the Anderson campus, and several more days with him at Randy Lewis’s annual gathering on the shores of Lake Michigan. What stays with me from those conversations is how little of this is magic and how much of it is method.
Where It Still Gets Hard
I do not want to pretend this is plug-and-play. It is not.
Designing a role around a worker, rather than forcing a worker into a role, demands more from managers, not less. It requires job analysis, supervisor training, thoughtful onboarding, and a willingness to rethink assumptions about how a team is built. Transportation remains a barrier many organizations never fully solve. Culture is the hardest variable of all: without executive sponsorship, inclusive hiring fragments into a pilot that quietly disappears. The companies that have replicated Anderson most successfully are the ones that committed to the full stack, hiring, design, supervision, and culture, not just the headline.
What This Means
For executives, the Anderson story reframes the conversation from compliance to competitive advantage. Recent cross-industry research from Accenture found that companies leading on disability inclusion outperform peers by 1.6 times on revenue and 2.6 times on net income, with twenty-five percent higher productivity. Those are numbers boards notice.
For HR and operations leaders, Anderson is a design pattern, not a slogan. Retention, safety, and turnover are all measurable, and all three move in the right direction when the work itself is inclusively designed.
For organizations just beginning, Anderson is an invitation to stop debating the question and start visiting the answer. That is precisely what Dr. Moore and Anderson University have organized for June 2–4, 2026: a three-day working conference that takes leaders onto the floor at Bon Secours St. Francis and Walgreens, into practitioner panels with the people actually doing the work, and into honest conversations about what inclusive employment looks like in an AI-shaped economy. I cannot think of a better use of three days for any leader still wondering whether this is real.
The Moral of the Story
Nineteen years ago, a father asked an unfashionable question and a Fortune 500 company took it seriously enough to build a warehouse around the answer. The warehouse is still running. The numbers are still good. The model has scaled. The research keeps confirming what the shop floor already knew.
Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do. It is, by now, one of the best-documented strategic advantages in American industry. You don’t need another white paper to prove that. You need three days on the ground in South Carolina with the people who have been quietly proving it for almost two decades.
Registration is open at https://voyage.andersonuniversity.edu/register/transformingculture. The hotel block at The Bleckley Inn and Home2 Suites holds conference rates through May 2, 2026, so earlier is better than later.
Let’s build something meaningful. Together.
” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “
Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation
Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI)
Executive Director
Strengthening individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.
Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here
American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.
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