Contributed by CanTRA

When Jeff Tiessen shares that he has worked in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space since he was 11 years old, it’s not a stretch. Tiessen was born with hands, but joined the amputee community after losing both to an electrical injury just before his 12th birthday.

Tiessen, a horse enthusiast, volunteers as an advisor to the Canadian Therapeutic Riding Association (CanTRA). An accomplished Paralympian, award-winning author, and winner of an American Horse Publications award for his firm’s title Blaze Magazine, For Horse-Crazy Kids, the highly sought-after public speaker brought his acclaimed Disability Literacy 101 presentation to CanTRA’s conference in May 2025.

“I truly believe that inclusion starts with familiarity and finding commonality,” explains Tiessen. “I learned at an early age how powerful conversations could be, particularly for others wanting to get past some of the fears that they experience related to my disability, like saying or doing the wrong thing.”

Tiessen’s Disability Literacy 101 workshop is an in-person version of an e-learning course of the same name that he produced and designed for disability inclusion education for the workplace. What might be most innovative about the course is that it includes a cast of 20 subject-matter experts with disabilities who share their lived experiences around ableism, unconscious bias, unnecessary praise, awkward language and etiquette, and importantly, the impact that those microaggressions can have on disabled persons.

“These everyday, subtle, and often well-intentioned microaggressions are in our language, in our words and expressions,” Tiessen shares. “We see it in the media, in our social media memes, and in what is thought to be brave and inspirational. And it’s in our biases of who’s normal, and capable, and productive.” He emphasizes the importance of recognizing these biases in our everyday lives and confronting them so we can change them. “Sometimes it takes some unlearning to move forward in our perspectives and mindset,” he says.

“Disability is complicated,” Tiessen acknowledges, “and the directory of disability categories continues to grow [including] episodic disability, like arthritis and diabetes, and relative newcomers in chronic health disabilities such as asthma, and persistent pain and fatigue. And of course, neurodiversity [is] finally recognized as part of the disability community. The disability community is as diverse as society itself. But even with all our differences we too often get painted with a very broad brush as ‘disabled’... or ‘the disabled.’”

Tiessen prefers to think of the community more like a canvas of fine strokes. “Even those of us with the same disability, whether it’s an amputation, or a spinal cord injury, or vision or hearing loss, each of us is very different in how we identify with it and how we manage it.”

Tiessen maintains that inclusion of the disability community doesn’t have to be difficult. “Disability gets a lot simpler by getting to know people from the disability community and learning from our experiences and perspectives,” he maintains. “Familiarity is a good starting point for finding your level of comfort and confidence and competence. With the expanded directory of disability categories, we now make up almost 25 percent of the population. We’re not hard to find.”

To learn more about Tiessen and the Disability Literacy 101 course visit Disability Today Network.

Photos courtesy of Jeff Tiessen