Upcoming events

Think2act conferences

The team running the fantastic (from everything I‘ve heard anyway!) think2act conference is back. There’s another one on in NCI on the 31st August. Registration is now open and it’s well worth a look. For €25 it could really make a difference to you – and appears to have for the people attending. I’m very much looking forward to getting an insight into how it works myself (I’m not taking one of the places, just have kindly been invited to come along), and seeing if there’s lessons we can take from it. However, there’s not many places left, so get going and register!

NCI Career Bootcamp

NCI are following the think2act conference with a free week long career bootcamp This is another excellent opportunity to build your skills, make sure you’re doing everything you could be. Have a look at the site, see if any of it is of interest to you and drop in!

AccessDublin.ie

On the 9th September there is an information workshop on Dublin City Council’s new online accessibility consultation tool: www.accessdublin.ie. I’ve written about this before, but unfortunately, I can’t be there because I’ll be at this in Slovenia.

Interested in learning more about the Equal Status Act?

Access to Equality: A Training Course on the Equal Status Acts is being run in UCD by UCD & ICCL. If you’re interested in attending, have a look at the above link and remember closing date for applications is the 11th September.

NUIG Public Lecture in the Centre for Disability Law & Policy

On 11th September in NUIG Professor Oddny Arnardottir, Reykjavik University, Iceland, Co-Author of ‘ The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – European and Scandinavian Perspectives’.

will be speaking on: ‘What does Equality Mean for Persons with Disabilities’ Lessons from the new UN Treaty on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’.

All are Welcome. Podcasts from the event will be available afterwards at www.nuigalway.ie/cdlp

Flyer with more information available here

NDA event

On the 23rd September the NDA are hosting a conference on Safe Evacuation for All. “This event will provide practical advice on planning for the safe evacuation of all building users, including people with disabilities. There will be a number of interesting case studies showing how Irish organisations are dealing with evacuation planning. The conference fee (including lunch and refreshments) will be €50 per person, with a concession rate of €40 for people with disabilities, staff of disability representative organisations, IOSH members and other affiliated bodies.”

 

Does access matter? Dublin City Council have a new campaign…

Over the past couple of weeks, I have noticed seen this sticker (can’t find an image) but I didn’t have a clue where it came from or what it meant. All I saw were the words “access matters” and the Dublin City Council logo. I’ve seen it a few times but keep forgetting to look more closely.

So when back in the office, I remembered to look it up.  According to the press release (here ) this was launched last September and you can find out more about it here. On one level I’m delighted, but at the same time I’m slightly dismayed that I’m only finding out about now – nevertheless, I applaud it and really really hope it gets taken on and spreads right across Dublin. I was disappointed that I hadn’t heard anything more about it and that it had such a low profile. Then this afternoon, I spot this breaking news.

So it is getting some attention at last. Which is great. The site is here, if you want to look at it yourself. I guess I’m welcoming it with reservations and I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this.  I’ll turn it over in my head and come back  on it.

 

Barriers

Following on from my last post, I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the other barriers to employment for graduates with disabilities. While access (and by this I mean physical infrastructure) is probably the biggest barrier, its also the hardest to tackle. It’s not complication that makes it hard to tackle, but simply the scale of the task. It is pervasive. And talking about access will probably make up several posts all on its own – in a constructive manner I hope (no pun intended!)

But what of the other barriers? Another project of AHEAD (the WAM Project) has done a lot of work with employers and graduates trying to identify where some of the barriers lie. And unfortunately, it’s not one giant wall in the way, but rather an obstacle course or minefield of smaller issues. The report from the last round of that project can be found here. Barriers identified included perceptions, recruitment & selection processes, support mechanisms (or lack of), welfare rights, disclosure, accomodations, and grants. I plan to look at each of these over the forthcoming months, but in the meantime I’d like to know if anyone thinks I’ve missed any in my list?

 

Access – the biggest barrier?

Enable Ireland have just published the results of a survey “Access All Areas” as part of their Action Week and I’ve just taken a quick read of it, and some of the media reports on it. You can find the survey here, but I’m just pulling out the things that struck me on reading it.

“Infrastructure was viewed as the biggest barrier to access in the daily lives of people living with a disability in Ireland who partook in our Access All Areas survey. The biggest proportion (28%) of contributors voted this their biggest access barrier out of the five options. This was followed…by employment (21%)”

Surely if infrastructure is a problem then getting to anything is going to be difficult – if you can’t get around without difficulty then that’s a barrier to employment before you even get to the interview. This survey corroborates what we knew from our experience & research, reinforces the anecdotal evidence, and each survey, each piece of research backs up the other which is both useful and frustrating. But it comes up time and time again – access (or rather lack of it) is a huge barrier to employment. Policy makers need to take a long hard look at these facts – because as long as basics like transport and access to shops & buildings are challenging for some disabled people, as long as “it’s easier to stay at home” for some people, then figures like these are going to remain the same:

“Adults with a disability had struggled with employment; with over two thirds (70%) saying they had not found the process very accessible. While just under a quarter (23%) had found it quite accessible, only seven percent had found it highly accessible.”

And I don’t think that’s good enough.