Biography

Lucia Rios, of Holland, Michigan, was born with spina bifida and has used crutches and a wheelchair since childhood. Her life in college and over a 20-year working career have included giving a voice to and empowering those with disabilities. During 15 years on staff at Disability Network Lakeshore, she helped businesses identify ways they could become more accessible and instructed young adults as they transitioned from school to career. As a journalist working with various publications, and through social media, Lucia’s writing has been instrumental in focusing attention on disability issues, including living with her own lifelong disability. Lucia spent two years as a Resource Navigator at The Source, a non-profit employee support organization. She assisted employees at Herman Miller, Inc. finding internal and external resources to help remove barriers impacting their work performance. One year ago, Lucia landed a dream role working at Salesforce, a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management services. She joined their Office of Accessibility's Workforce Navigators Program as a Workforce Navigators Program Associate. The program is an external facing workforce development program centered around people with disabilities. In her role, she creates programs for job seekers, volunteer opportunities for employees to connect with program participants with disabilities, and launched a 10-week virtual mentoring program with the Blind Institute of Technology this past summer. Lucia is active in the community and serves on the board of the Community Foundation of the Holland/Zeeland area, Michigan Disability Rights Coalition and Family Hope Foundation. Lucia is a founding member of Women of Color Give, a philanthropic collective for women from diverse cultural backgrounds—a place to connect and leverage resources to support each other and causes that matter. Lucia was included in the National Disability Institute’s 25@25 in July 2015. In 2013, she won National Disability Institute’s Third Annual “My American Dream: Voices of Americans with Disabilities” video contest.