Why we are thinking differently?

Enrich+ has received some funding from the ‘Making A Difference Fund ’ (managed by the Ministry of Social Development) to help us to understand the barriers that the people we support face in getting mainstream work, and also get some positive messages out to the general public about the benefits that employing someone with a disability can provide to both the employee and the employer. 

We will be running some focus groups with employers to get a better understanding of why they may or may not be willing to take on a disabled person in their business, what influences their decision making processes and how we can support them to 'think differently'.

We will be collecting a range of stories about successful placements of our clients and turn them into articles for local newspapers, which will help to highlight all of the positives that can result from someone gaining employment. We know that some employers often hesitate to take on someone with a disability, and yet in most cases they will discover that the person is just like anyone else in that they work hard, they are reliable, they develop friendships and they add value to the workplace in many ways.

We want the articles to demonstrate that the benefits can be significant for both the employer and the employee, and we want a wider section of the public to understand that. While it would be tempting to focus on just telling the employer and the employee’s stories, we also want to hear from co-workers and customers about their positive experiences.  

By telling these great stories, we hope to change a lot of people’s attitudes towards employment for disabled people, and therefore influence the key decision makers to change their perceptions as well. We are also  keen to use some professionally produced video stories to help get the message out as we know that they can spread quite quickly and extensively through the internet, and will have a longer life than a brief article in a newspaper.

We are very excited about the fantastic exposure that this project will give to the work we do with our service users to get them into paid work, and we are hopeful that it will produce some real progress in our goal of breaking down the barriers