Australian Paralympic Dylan Alcott has launched a new campaign to help Australians with disabilities find gainful employment.
The Remove the Barrier campaign was launched this week as part of the Dylan Alcott Foundation to raise awareness of high rates of unemployment among people with disability and encourage Australians to remove the visible and invisible barriers that prevent people with disability finding work.
Speaking to the ABC’s Hack program, Alcott said people think it’s going to be hard to hire someone with a disability but it’s not.
“One of the hardest things to overcome is the barriers that you can’t see,” he said. “Those invisible barriers and things like unconscious bias and discrimination. You can’t see unconscious bias but I promise you, as someone who’s faced it, you can feel it. We want to show organisations across the country how easy it is to remove those barriers and give people with disabilities the opportunity they deserve.”
According to statistics on the Remove the Barrier website, 66 per cent of organisations who employ people with disability identify positive benefits and 90 per cent of employees with disability record productivity rates equal or greater than other workers. However, only 54 per cent of the 4.5 million people with disability have a job in Australia.
Elly Desmarchelier, a 26 year old communications professional who has cerebral palsy, is part of the Remove the Barrier team.
Over an extensive career in politics and the not-for-profit sector, including working as a media advisor and campaign director, Desmarchelier has come across discrimination and bias in the workplace and during job interviews. As a result, she is determined to create change by seeing more people with disability employed and sharing in the benefits of work.
“I’ve often come across these really outdated, odd ways of thinking about disability and a lot of that comes from never having anyone else in the workplace that has a disability,” she said. “I really hope there are leaders out there who go: ‘you didn’t take the same path I took to get here but that’s okay, we’re going to make your path work for this business’.”
To learn more about the Remove The Barrier campaign, visit: www.removethebarrier.com
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