Many of us may know, work or live with someone with a mental or physical disability. People with disabilities can bring often valuable aspects to our lives that we can be forever grateful for. Many may not know, but the month of October is dubbed National Disabilities Employment Awareness Month.
I am super excited because I feel this is a great opportunity to share with my university community what I have learned from working with people with disabilities and how we can further see the potential often ignored in this population and even within ourselves.
As of this month, I have worked with STARC of Louisiana in St. Tammany parish for about a year and four months now. STARC stands for Service Training Advocacy for Resources and Community Connections and has been serving people with disabilities of all ages since 1972. While STARC provides various resources to its clients, I work in the residential branch of the company. This means I work in two group homes where eight women with varying degrees of disabilities live together, and my job is to help assist them in living the most independent lives as possible. For example, my coworkers and I help our clients in cooking meals, bringing them safely around to community events and their workplaces and so forth.
I get to work very closely with these women, befriend them, get to know them on an individual level, see how each of them view the world and how they live. Working with each of my sixteen wonderful clients has taught me a lot about people with disabilities and also about myself.
My clients teach me, every time I go into work, how the word “disability” really doesn’t capture the potential of those with this label. STARC highly emphasizes to us in the early stages of training that we should approach each client looking at their abilities, and this honestly isn’t just a rosy platitude. I am impressed often by the resourcefulness, skills and insights my clients can exhibit every time I go to work. Yet, I don’t just look at my clients and what or how they contribute to their households or workplaces.
It’s also easy to see the value in my clients who are also very reliant on my coworkers and me for basic needs. There are a few women whom we still assist in activities that are seen as quite simple such as taking showers or going to the bathroom. However, by working with these ladies, I get many reminders about the basics of human value but also the value of myself. Serving these women shows me that their value isn’t defined by how they contribute to society or in doing overtly great deeds.
In my opinion, by simply being a fellow human being, a whole person with their own individuality and perspective of life, they have intrinsic value and deserve to be loved and respected. Working with them reminds me that often times, as a society, we put values on ourselves based off of what we own, what we do or how we can better society. And these are good things, bettering society and doing things for the good of others, but we may often times start to lose sight of what really defines our value as a person.
Working with these clients reminds me that I too have value, and to me, it’s not based off of anything I do or don’t do. I believe that my clients, no matter their degree of dependency, have value, and are worth being loved and respected just due to the fact that they are a human person with intrinsic value. And so the same must go for everyone else, no matter who you are.
Yes, National Disability Employment Awareness Month is designed to reflect on how workers with disabilities are valued members of the work force and that they too have a right to a place within our workforce. However, I wanted to move past this aspect, the idea of how this population does contribute to our society. I’m happy that I get to share with my community that this population can give back to our community, but I hope we can realize that they are far more than just what they can produce or contribute.
People with disabilities are valuable, lovable and deserve respect just as all of us do, and we may forget our own value amidst our fast-paced society. But yes, reader, you are valuable, deserve respect and are worthy of being loved.