How "You Belong Here" inspired a movement

Whether Kevin Fitzpatrick is recruiting veterans to work at PepsiCo or coaching his 8-year-old daughter’s soccer team, he leans into it like he’s taking a hairpin curve on his motorcycle. “I’m all-in on anything that I do,” he says.

The driving force behind PepsiCo’s “You Belong Here” campaign, Kevin is equally committed to giving a voice to the disability community within the company. A key part of the signature program, the “You Belong Here” video highlights the contributions of associates with disabilities and caregivers, to encourage anyone with a disability to voluntarily self-identify year-round. During National Disability Employment Awareness Month each October, Kevin reminds associates why self-identification is so important. “We need to know if we’re serving the disability community within PepsiCo,” Kevin says. “This is the first step.”

Asking people to share this information, however, means opening the door on what historically has been a private subject. “There’s a certain fear and stigma that goes around with talking about disability in the workplace,” he says. “We had to take that head-on.”

An additional factor: An estimated 70 percent of all disabilities are invisible. “People manage it as part of their daily life,” Kevin notes. For example, depression, cancer, migraines, anxiety and all types of diabetes qualify as disabilities. Since these conditions often don’t require special accommodations in the workplace, Kevin says people can be reluctant to come forward to disclose something they’ve grown accustomed to hiding from employers.

“The whole initiative of ‘You Belong Here’ is full acceptance of an individual,” Kevin says. “And bringing your whole self to work really gets to the core of what the PepsiCo DNA is overall.”

When employees come forward, Kevin explains, the company is able to make them more comfortable — say, by adjusting lighting or allowing for flexible schedules. And ultimately, having a more diverse workforce ensures PepsiCo is also representing its consumers more wholly. “Having the voice of the disability community in mind as we develop products makes us a stronger company,” he says.

As Equal Opportunity Affirmative Action Compliance Director, Kevin is the face of PepsiCo for the U.S. Department of Labor. In his 23 years with the company, he's gone from driving a Frito Lay delivery truck in central Chicago to handling federal updates to labor law. "I really learned the business from the ground up," he says. He first proposed the video campaign for “You Belong Here” back in 2016, stepping away from his familiar world of spreadsheets and government conference calls to get the project rolling.

Kevin worked with PepsiCo’s EnAble Employee Resource Group to find associates across the company who wanted to share their experience on camera, from a soda fountain technician in Las Vegas, Nevada to a finance manager in Plano, Texas. His hunch was that seeing how common disability can be — one in four adults in the U.S. has a condition that qualifies — would inspire more people to come forward. “I wanted to bring disability out of the darkness and into the light, to start conversations,” he says.

His instincts were spot-on. After the launch of the 2019 video, Frito Lay alone saw a 25 percent increase in voluntary self-identification. That same year, PepsiCo won the first-ever Department of Labor Excellence in Disability Inclusion Award. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Kevin is hoping for even more engagement in the October 2020 push for associates to voluntarily self-identify. He plans to update the video for 2021 with stories from still more people at different brands around the world.

Kevin conducted many of the “You Belong Here” interviews himself, and though he initially worried about asking the right questions, he quickly found common ground with his subjects. “I had a bonding moment with Candice over handling our kids’ scheduling,” he says — much of their conversation focused on juggling extracurriculars rather than her vision impairment. After another associate, Brian Johnson, explained what it was like to work with multiple sclerosis, the two compared notes about spending two decades with the company. “Brian and I had the same experience calling on stores and building displays,” he remembers.

“These individuals need to be recognized for their honesty and bravery,” Kevin says. Each story fuels his passion for bringing awareness to the disability community, and also bolsters his pride at having created a platform for an underrepresented group. “I think a weight is lifted for some,” he says, “by being able to share these things they’ve harbored in silence for so long.”