It’s My Job!

A Need for Work

When the world wakes up Monday morning and goes to work, many people with disabilities ask a simple question. What am I supposed to do today? Watching television, playing computer games, and similar activities all day may feel unsatisfying and unwholesome. Most people with disabilities want to take part in a workplace.

They want the full experience of employment—the innovation, the relationships, and the productivity. They also want to be good citizens who contribute as well as consume.

One slogan for the Disability Employment Movement says, “We don’t want charity; we want a job.”

October, Disability Employment Month, is a time to invite interested people with disabilities to the workplace where they belong.

Joanna Has a Job

It’s Thursday morning 6:00am in small-town upstate New York, and Joanna is just waking up from a sound sleep. She asks her mom what the menu is for the day as well as the schedule, in that order, because she wants to know what to expect. She wants to plan her day. Joanna loves calendars and schedules of all sorts. If she is not given one, she will write her own! But it’s Thursday. That means that Joanna needs to wear her work uniform for which she is very proud. So, she puts on her black Pizza Supreme tee shirt, because all employees at Pizza Supreme wear them. Make no mistake, she is an employee. But how does her job work for a thirty-five-year-old woman with a diagnosis of Down syndrome?

Meet Team Joanna

It takes a team. In fact, employment for people with disabilities is a community effort. Meet Joanna’s employment support circle:

• Becky is Joanna’s Care Manager. She helps Joanna and her family create a life plan, a map that identifies Joanna’s needs, goals to meet those needs, and supports that will help reach goals. Think of the plan as a calendar of life activities that Joanna enjoys and dreams about. The plan can change at any time and helps team Joanna to achieve goals together.

• Jessy is broker, basically a personal program designer. Jessy takes the life plan and helps Joanna and her family design how Joanna will spend her days. Jessy and Becky work together to help Joanna achieve her plan by working behind the scenes and conducting regular meetings with Joanna and her parents. The day-to-day work falls to Zara.

• Zara is a disability services professional (DSP) who works one-on-one with Joanna for around five to six hours a day on weekdays. Zara is like family in our home, more like an adopted daughter than an employee. She knows Joanna extremely well and helps meet Joanna’s needs. She even understands what Joanna is saying when other people don’t due to speech challenges. Zara helps Joanna with all aspects of her job including transportation. Zara has celebrity status.

• Frank and Tony are Joanna’s employers at Pizza Supreme, a thriving pizza parlor just down the street from Joanna’s house. When Joanna was in high school, one of her teaching assistants took her to many different job sites to try different kinds of jobs by helping her to sample small tasks. It was in one of the trial jobs that Joanna first started assembling pizza boxes for Frank and Tony. Twenty-years after first visiting Pizza Supreme, Joanna still works one afternoon per week making pizza boxes. She also has other weekly work like holding and walking dogs and cats at a local animal shelter. If asked, Joanna enthusiastic says, “I love my jobs!”

But Why Work?

Let’s take an honest look at job benefits for Joanna. These include –

• Enjoying creative activity. Researchers tell us that creativity in our work is important to all of us. For some, it is the number one condition for their employment. Joanna enjoys the mental concentration and physical exertion of putting together pizza boxes, but particularly the careful hand-to-eye coordination required to assemble a box. She also likes looking at the finished product. Thirty-seven pizza boxes stacked is impressive. As people come into the store to pick up their pizzas in boxes Joanna made and go on their way to eat them with their families and friends, this creative work makes Joanna happy, an important part of the employment experience.

• Staying active to prevent troubled thoughts. It’s estimated that thirty to forty percent of people with intellectual disabilities like Joanna will experience a secondary dual diagnosis of mental illness at some point in their life. Many experts argue that the rate is much higher. Some try to make arguments for one hundred percent based on the propensity factor for which all are in danger. The physical activity required to assemble a pizza box keeps Joanna thinking about the work, a major deterrent to unhealthy thoughts due largely to her interacting with fellow employees and customers.

• Connecting with other people. Loneliness is a killer.[1] People with disabilities, like everyone else need to connect with other people when they choose to, but perhaps especially at a job where they must learn to work through the challenges and the blessings of work. Joanna enjoys close working relationships with her fellow employees. She’s even been known to do the chicken dance with her boss, Frank between customers!

It may sound like a lot of work to employ one person. But let’s recall that it takes teams of supervisors and managers for any of us to work. People with disabilities may need a little extra support. But many employers discover that they need no more attention than other employees. In fact, they are such good workers, they may need less. The greatest payoff comes when a person with an intellectual disability loves their work and those with whom they work love being with them on the job.

On Thursdays, when someone asks Joanna why she has her black Pizza Supreme tee shirt on, she simply responds, “It’s my job!” Says it all, doesn’t it?

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Written By—Dave Deuel, PhD

Dave Deuel is married with four adult children, one daughter has Down syndrome. He also has a sister-in-law who has an intellectual disability. He is Academic Dean Emeritus for the Master’s Academy International, Senior Research Fellow Emeritus and Strategic Alliance SME for the Joni Eareckson Tada Disability Research Center, and Catalyst for the Disability Concerns Issue Network, the Lausanne Movement.

He served as Old Testament professor and department chairman at the Master’s Seminary for 10 years and in pastoral roles of local churches, five of which were church plants. He is currently elder for pulpit and interim pastor for area local churches in upstate New York.

[1] Breccan F. Thies, “Loneliness as deadly as smoking: Surgeon general” The Washington Examiner (5.2.23) https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/loneliness-as-deadly-as-smoking-surgeon-general/ar-AA1aDTEY