InFocus Magazine

What do you do for a living?” This one simple and ubiquitous question embodies the enormous value that our society places on employment. Yet for Ken Davidson, and others like him with developmental disabilities, it was a question without an answer.

That was until two years ago, when Davidson discovered Vancouver Island Community Connections (VICC), a Courtenay-based organization that helps adults with developmental disabilities find meaningful employment in the Comox Valley. Thanks to the training and support he received through VICC’s Community Employment Service, Davidson landed a job as a customer service clerk at Safeway, where he’s been employed ever since.

“It’s been really good,” says Davidson of his experience with VICC. “I got lots of help and lots of guidance. Having a job is really neat because I’m able to meet the public more and know exactly what the public’s thinking.”

To the majority of us who grumble over the obligation of going to work day after day, who complain that work is a necessary evil in our otherwise carefree lives, it’s easy to forget just how important working is to our quality of life and to our sense of identity.

But to the 360,000 British Columbian adults with disabilities, many of whom receive no income other than a meagre Persons With Disabilities Benefit of about $900 a month, it’s everything.

“That’s a pretty low number if you’re trying to live off it,” says Lesley Gibson, VICC’s director. “The money is important, but even more important than that is being seen as a valuable member of society.

“Almost everybody works,” she explains. “It’s an expectation of our society. People want to work and feel the benefits of self respect and respect from others.”

In principle at least, VICC’s Community Employment Service is simple. First, an adult with a developmental disability gets a referral from Community Living BC to access the service. That person then meets with one of VICC’s job coaches and embarks upon a “discovery process”—essentially finding out the employee’s areas of interest and expertise, from which he or she can then be matched with a local employer.

The coach learns the duties and responsibilities of an available position through job shadowing, and then trains the new employee for the job. Since this training comes at no expense to the employer, the result is a win-win. The employee benefits from a much-needed source of income, as well as a heightened sense of self esteem, and the employer gains a dedicated worker without the expense of training.

Plus, because the employee is able to access VICC’s services for up to three years, there is plenty of opportunity for skill improvement or re-training for additional responsibilities, once again at no cost to the employer.

While Gibson says that her organization strives to make the process as beneficial as possible for employers, and she acknowledges that participating employers often benefit from positive community goodwill, she makes one point very clear: This isn’t charity.

“Employers tell us that employees accessing our service tend to be dedicated, long-term workers who are devoted to their jobs,” she says. “I’d say that 90 per cent of them stay employed once the service ends. If I were a business with a high staff turnover rate, I’d be looking for people with disabilities to join my team.”

Unfortunately, however, most employers aren’t as open-minded or as far-sighted as Gibson. In fact, VICC’s job coaches spend the vast majority of their time simply looking for jobs and trying to educate employers “When businesses use policies and procedures like that they’re actually just being discriminatory,” she says. “They’re not thinking at all, and they’re missing out on opportunities to save themselves money.”

Only one out of about every 20 businesses approached agrees to participate in the Community Employment Service, and sometimes only after multiple time-consuming meetings and phone calls. With one employer who eventually did participate, the process took more than a year to complete as the decision had to be approved by every layer of a multi-tiered corporate structure.

If inflexible policies are the recurring obstacles to VICC’s job-finding efforts, then myths and misconceptions that abound about people with disabilities are the ongoing frustration that meets them at every turn. Gibson and her staff have heard them all, from assertions that employees with disabilities aren’t able to meet performance standards (they are) to fears that an employer won’t be able to fire an employee with a disability should the employment not work out (it can).

By far the most pressing concern to would-be employers, and the most widespread misconception, Gibson says, is that hiring an employee with a disability will inevitably lead to a workplace accident and a WorkSafe BC claim.

“I don’t think I’ve ever not addressed that one,” she says. “There’s absolutely no statistical evidence that hiring people with disabilities leads to a higher rate of WorkSafe BC claims. It’s actually less, because these employees are so focused and they’re very conscientious.”

VICC’s job coaches have developed a number of creative strategies to help them find jobs, not the least of which is a technique they call “job carving.” Job carving is essentially removing one or several small components out of an existing position and offering just that portion of the work to an employee with a disability. When done correctly, job carving can often result in increased productivity and efficiency, as well as higher employee morale right down the line.

“Maybe there’s a job that doesn’t get done, it’s left at the end of the day and everyone sort of has to do it,” explains Gibson. “Well, if someone came in and just did that job for two hours, then they wouldn’t have to worry about whether it’s getting done or not.”