I had a really great experience when we vistited the Durham Exchange Club Industries yesterday with class. Coming from a background of working with children who have physical and mental disabilities it was nice to see a place that would help these folks vocationally and help them pusue a job. With the young lady that I work with now, who is 22 and has down syndrome, we have looked for her a job and have found it very hard to actually find an employer who will see her as an employee and not just a volunteer with no pay. She is capable of doing the same things that the people who are getting paid are doing but she is only ever seen as a volunteer there. It is hard to see that when you know that just becuase of her title she can't get paid to do that job as others do. Steming from this, it was great to see these folks out there yesterday being treated like regular adults who are working, and I saw a few folks with Down Syndrome and it made me think why there wan't more places like this out there who would treat these people like real adults and not categorize them because of their "disability". Is it because of the stigmas placed on the diagnoses? Do they not trust them to do the job correctly? Or do they even give them a chance to prove themselves? It may take a little longer to learn the correct way of doing something but at least give them a chance to be put on the same line as someone who is "normal".
There is one place in Greensboro, NC that offers full and part time positions to people who are blind. They are pretty similar to DECI in what they do for work, but just thought it interesting to see a different site based on a limited diagnosis (blindness).
www.industriesoftheblind.com
I totally understand how you feel now that I am in the OTA program, but when I was a manager at Hardee's, I had a different opinion concerning giving jobs to people with disabilities. I had a young lady who was my biscuit maker because that was the only job we could give her that she wouldn't be seen by the customers. She did an okay job but not as proficient as a "normal" person. The only kicker is that I could only have a certain amount of people on the clock and she counted as 1 employee just like everyone else, so often I would have to go help make biscuits just to keep up, and then I was unavailable to manage the store properly. After doing this day in and day out, it wore on my mental status, and although it wasn't her fault, I often thought to myself how unfair this was to me. It would have been nice if she could have worked at a slightly lower rate so that I could have had another employee to help out like they do at DECI.
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