Tapping untapped talent with Claire Cookson

Growing up in a family who advocated for change for people with learning disabilities Claire Cookson is now an award winning CEO for the DFN Foundation.

Claire relates her experience of changing lives not only for people with autism and other disabilities but also for the employees of the partner organisations her charity, DFN, work with to provide well paid sustainable jobs for people living with autism and other disabilities.

Working with the National Grid to provide work opportunities for the clients who are supported by her charity, Claire states the following experiences by the partnering organisation:

'We then started to find that our satisfaction went up, we heard all the time, people would say like, I've never felt more proud to work for national grid or that was my first experience. I never felt more proud. So actually, then what do you get from your employees, you get more commitment, you get them coming to work, feeling like hang on a minute, my job now feels really different. I suddenly feel like I'm making a difference to humans and actually, if we boil everything down, that's where you get a good feeling. That's where you feel like you've got a purpose, then grid started to benefit from this amazing talent pool'.

She goes on to share how the project creates safe spaces for employees to share personal experiences and employee networks for supporting people with learning disabilities at work.

About Claire Cookson

Chief Executive Officer of the DFN Foundation and DFN Project SEARCH, Claire is an experienced senior leader with an extensive background in education and best practice supported employment. Formally a headteacher of a broad spectrum special school, Claire now leads a fast growing charity that seeks to support best practice transition to employment for people with learning disabilities and autism. Nationally only 5.1% of people with these needs are in paid employment yet 70% of those supported by this charity secure paid roles. With the largest data set in the UK, DFN Project SEARCH’s evidence based model challenges misconceptions and changes the way society views and enables young adults with learning disabilities and autism to ensure that they reach their true and full potential.

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Sophia is a Transformational Holistic Life Coach, Mentor, Global Virtual Summit convenor, Host, Moderator, International Speaker, Educator, Disability Advocate and Outstanding Leadership award winner. Through coaching Sophia inspires and empowers her clients, to discover the life they dream of by assisting them to ‘get unstuck’.

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Founder of a small boutique, data strategy consultancy – focusing on AI governance, cybersecurity, and privacy compliance with Coaching programmes primarily for women in data, tech, or privacy. I have been leading business transformation programmes for over 15 years with a blended approach that combines my data management and privacy experience with my academic and professional interests in business psychology.

I work with B2B corporate clients to enhance their confidence with privacy compliance and AI governance requirements, enabling them to grow their business ethically while protecting their brand.

It’s great to now have a creative opportunity to apply my passion for privacy, as the Founder of the UKs first ever Black Privacy Professionals network. Our mission is to build a confident, resilient, and sustainable Black Privacy Professionals network to create and enable access to business, employment and learning opportunities.

The rich variety of professional disciplines within our professional network is great to see .Some of our members are lawyers or aspiring lawyers, others are early career privacy professionals and some of us apply our privacy skills in the cybersecurity and AI space too.

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Sophia is a transformational Life Coach. Through coaching Sophia inspires and empowers her clients, to move from limiting beliefs to a life of purpose and passion.

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