By Amy Porterfield, She/Hers, President, Saavi Services for the Blind
Blindness can affect people of all ages and backgrounds. And yet, many people will go through life having never interacted with someone who is blind. Hopefully, our connection to you through the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce will change that.
Let us dive right into what I believe are the top five reasons that blind people should be part of your diverse and inclusive workforce.
- Reliability: in a world where the importance of people showing up when they are supposed to matters, employers know that the reliability of their workforce is key. As a core part of our mission to prepare blind students for the workforce, we focus on ensuring that students understand how to plan for and adjust to the changes that come up in life. They learn the value of and ability to be present when others are not.
- Problem Solving: Nothing will stymie people like a sudden change in plans. We focus on teaching our students to learn by doing, and failing at something is an important part of the process. Success comes from knowing how to climb out of challenges. For example, a student receives a PDF by email from a colleague. They open it only to discover that the PDF is not readable. What to do? Our students learn many options to solve this issue such as using a screen reader to convert the file to Word.
- Strategic Thinking: At our training center, our students are given the chance to take on many leadership roles. They plan, organize, prepare, and execute many large projects such as feeding forty people from scratch on a tight budget.
- Effective Communication: Blind people, like everyone else, need information. Often information in the community is in the form of visual signs. Our students learn how to frame questions to receive the information that they need to successfully reach a goal. For example, asking for directions, our students know that people are often confused by the question “what road is this?” Often the answer depends on which way the person answering is facing. Students learn quickly to adapt to a person’s communication style to get the correct information.
- Resilience: Although this is last on my top five list, it is not the least important. I have the privilege of watching a new person arrive at our training center and go from feeling like the life they once had before losing vision is over, change completely to a person of incredible confidence by their graduation day. Their resilience gets them through the tough times in their journey to independence. Learning how to process information in a new way, read Braille, and do all the other skills needed to live a life of freedom can be mentally grueling. Despite this, they return day after day until they reach their goals. Our students do not want to take a back seat to life- they want to climb mountains, raise children, graduate law school, work construction, and so much more.
What do you think? Let us partner to ensure reliable, problem solving, strategic thinking, effective communicators, and resilient blind people leave our center with an offer letter in hand.
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