Bedayati

Udiversity

This week we celebrate the Diet Center @dietcenterleb, which has recently signed the Bedayati Inclusive Employer Pledge, joining a growing movement of organizations using their work and workplaces to help build an inclusive and more sustainable economy in Lebanon.

In 2020, the Diet Center launched Udiversity @udiversity.me, a culinary academy that specializes in training people with special needs for careers in the culinary sector. Instead of emphasizing disability, Udiversity celebrates ability, creating a safe and supportive working environment for people with diverse abilities, including students with autism, mental delay, ADHD, Down syndrome, and neurodivergence. Students are accompanied over a period of three years, where they are equipped with the basic culinary skills to enter the food sector.

Udiversity is hosted at the Diet Center and founded by the same visionaries who established the Diet Center four decades earlier. “If we didn’t have the Diet Center facilities and human resources, we couldn’t have set up Udiversity,” said Sawsan Wazzan Jabri @sawsanwazzanj, General Manager and Co-Owner of the Diet Center. Several Udiversity graduates from the first cohort are now employed full time with the Diet Center, in a targeted effort by the latter to equalize opportunities for people with disabilities in the labor market.