TORONTO — The Azrieli Foundation has awarded Montreal’s Zera Café with the inaugural INfinity Prize, honouring its outstanding commitment to fostering neurodiversity in the workplace and championing inclusive practices. The INfinity Prize is the first award of its kind and is designed to promote national dialogue and action, confronting the 26 per cent employment rate neurodivergent Canadians face.
The INfinity Prize awards $100,000 to a leading small- or mid-size social enterprise that prioritizes the aspirations of neurodivergent employees. This includes providing career-development opportunities, fair wages and comprehensive benefits while placing neurodivergent employees at the heart of organizational decision making. In addition to the financial award, the foundation will offer two years of professional coaching and support designed to scale the recipient’s neurodiversity efforts.
The foundation is also calling on employers nationwide to accelerate the inclusion of neurodivergent people into their employment practices. To support this call, it has assembled Putting Neurodiversity to Work, an action-oriented resource guide that offers five essential steps and links to resources to streamline access to the expertise needed to adopt neurodiverse employment practices with confidence.
“The team and I couldn’t be more excited to be the first-ever recipients of the INfinity Prize,” says Eve Rochman, founding director of Zera Café. “Now we’re ready to scale up and grow bigger and better.”
“Resources are available to Canadian companies, but it’s often hard to know where to look and what’s meaningful,” says Orly Fruchter, manager of Neurodiverse Initiatives at the Azrieli Foundation. “We hope the guide we assembled will help employers expand their equity, diversity and inclusion efforts to include neurodivergent workers.”
