Turning The Exceptionality Into Exceptional

Project Inclusion is about the employment of persons with disability: not 1 or 10 or 100, but of 1,000, of 10,000. To make this happen, we had to approach it through the perspective of a business, and we need to have the visceral understanding of what it would take to employ persons with disability.

Thus, we started with the lay of the land: the current reality of employment of persons with disabilities in the Philippines as well as the business case for hiring them.

For this first action, we found the perfect partner in De La Salle University’s Social Development Research Center to conduct a research on the benefits of hiring Persons with Exceptionality. Our hypotheses were: 1) It is beneficial for the differently-abled person; 2) It is beneficial for the business; and 3) It is beneficial for the business organization.

Then we had to start experiencing Persons with Disabilities hiring ourselves. We hired Vico Cham, a person with autism to do, initially, what he did best: graphic design.

With the book and our workplace experience came our connections with different schools and organizations that shared the same passion, commitment and vision for workplace inclusion. We partnered with them to understand the challenges of parents, of schools, of advocates in pushing the boundaries of inclusion. We wanted to increase the safe space for every person with a disability to be his or her own person.

Hiring Vico enabled us to gain a first-hand understanding of what it takes for a workplace to be more inclusive, including: the challenges in mindset and behavior, the competencies that we need to learn in communication and management, the systems that need to be in place to ensure transferability of skills from one co-worker to another. In the process, we gained not only a deeper appreciation of the workplace requirement and improvement in our own managerial skills, but also the benefit of the best administrative support we have. We discovered that Vico’s exceptionality allowed him to contribute in a much bigger space. His visual acuity that enables him to draw, paint, and illustrate is the same gift that allows him to process reimbursements and check reconciliations with unmatched efficiency. His own predisposition added a value-adding bonus: discretion.

Thus, when the other parts of the business heard about Vico’s progress, the request for others like him came. Vico was the first of the three we currently have in Unilab Foundation and Unilab. After Vico, came Randy and Gian. There will be more, but they are just three of probably hundreds of thousands out there whose exceptionality are waiting to be tapped for the workplace.

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