The organisation that helps people who have disabilities to get AHEAD

WORKING dogs are confusing. 

We’re all half-trained to cope with a dog that has a squared-off leash-substitute and which assists an owner who has a disability, be it blindness or autism, or some other challenge. We know, for example, that you’re not supposed to pet a working dog. At an AHEAD (the Association for Higher Education Access and Disability) conference in Farmleigh, where we met Louis Watters’ dog, we murmured wisely to each other that we shouldn’t stroke it, even though the dog had a hide as furry as a teddy bear and that retriever air of innocent nobility.

Posing for photographs, we revealed ourselves to be embarrassingly less competent than the dog. The photographer lined us up, Louis sitting in front with other conference speakers, the dog on the ground in front. I was behind with three others. Neat as you please. “Look at the camera,” Louis said crisply, and, I swear to God, every one of us looked AWAY from the camera to see if the dog obeyed instructions. Which, of course, it did. The photographer’s first shot, therefore, must have shown one disciplined dog looking fearlessly into the camera lens and seven humans looking gormlessly at the dog.

The reason I wanted to stroke Louis’s dog was that, having read up about Louis in a new booklet, called ‘WAMbassadors’, I was intimidated by the man himself. He has a masters in business management from UCD Smurfit Business School, a degree in journalism from Dublin City University, and he is studying for a degree in law in the Dublin Business School. He works in the legal services division of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and in the past couple of years has visited Beijing, Montreal, Lhasa and Yangsho. I mean, where do you start with so formidable a guy, other than getting pally with his dog? Which, of course, you can’t, the dog being a working dog.

AHEAD describes itself as “an independent non-profit organisation working to promote full access to, and participation in, further and higher education for students with disabilities and to enhance their employment prospects on graduation.”

AHEAD gives information to students and graduates who have disabilities (and to teachers, guidance counsellors and parents) on disability issues in education. But, of course, information isn’t enough to get people who have disabilities into the workforce.

“The inclusiveness and flexibility of the mainstream labour market still has a long way to go to fully tap into this new talent pool,” says Ann Heelan, executive director of AHEAD.

“Traditionally, people with disabilities have been seen as burdens rather than as resources. There are still fears for employers around legislation, supports reqired and work productivity. This thinking needs to shift.”

Helping to shift that thinking required not just achieving work placements for people who have disabilities, but helping them come to terms with the new ‘country’ that was their workplace, while helping the workplace to come to terms with their differences.

The end result was WAM, which stands for ‘willing, able mentoring’. WAM, piloted under EU Equal Opportunity Community Initiative funding nine years ago, sets up a mentor within the company that employs the person who has a disability.

So, to take an example, when Bank of Ireland or Enterprise Rent-a-Car employed someone with a disability, for a six-month internship, that person would have a boss the same as everybody else.

But they would also have a mentor, who very definitely wasn’t their boss and who probably also wasn’t from within their own department.

That mentor would be the go-to person for insights and for the removal of simple obstacles.

If someone is blind, for instance, they might need guidance on what constitutes the right clothing for the workplace, and, whereas it might feel strange to ask a colleague “should I be wearing a tie?”, it feels normal to ask your mentor. Mentors on the WAM programme are given guidelines, so they are comfortable and competent in providing ‘insider’ help to interns who happen to have a disability.

Based on nine years of practical experience, what started as face-to-face mentoring has developed into an online training programme.

The WAM programme has placed more than 220 graduates, who have disabilities, in private and civil service organisations and boasts a high retention rate.

In other words, in addition to gaining work experience, a satisfying number of those graduates have ended up with permanent jobs in the companies, or public bodies, that first offered an internship.

Several of those success stories were told at the conference in Farmleigh last week, which looked at mentoring, not just for people with disabilities, but — through Clive Lewis, OBE — also for people pushed to the margins by race or by other factors.

Mr Lewis has a mentoring system with a remarkable track record in keeping disadvantaged young men in education and employment, men who might otherwise serve only as a statistical confirmation of stereotype.

Some employers classify the employment of someone who has a disability as corporate social responsibility: being good to the less fortunate, in other words.

This misses the point that was first made, by people who have disabilities, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, which took bright, able-bodied young men who had the sense of entitlement that comes from being bright, able-bodied young men, and returned many of them to their homes, after the war, with grievous physical and mental disabilities, while leaving them with the same sense of entitlement.

These guys were not going to wear any aspect of American life that assumed, because they had been blinded, crippled, deafened or damaged by a war, they should now know their place, which was at the back of the queue, where they should demonstrate proper subservience and gratitude for what the rest of society was prepared to give them.

Because they refused to take up the roles handed to them, they changed everything, from the way paths were designed to the way laws around equality were shaped, thereby making the world measurably better for people who DON’T have a disability.

In similar vein, the WAM mentoring system developed by AHEAD could make a profound contribution to the culture and productivity of almost all employers, providing newcomers with someone to show them ‘how we do things, around here’, while, contrariwise, feeding back information to the organisation about the observations and ideas a smart outsider/insider can bring. The fact is that whenever business embraces disability in an unsentimental, respectful way, the person who has a disability gains, the business gains and — through seepage of emerging insight — society gains.