Working with a disability: 'Being cute is fun, until the bill has to be paid' (Trouw)
Trouw – Intelligent, secondary or higher educated, and having a disability. That is a difficult combination in the labor market, Nadia van den Heuvel knows from experience. That’s why she started a design agency with a special mission.
Her first job? That’s where Nadia van den Heuvel from Cuijk did end up in a very special way. “We had a step club with some girls. One of them sat up with an assignment from her boss. She had to mediate someone with a disability to work and asked if she couldn’t help me get a job.”
So Van den Heuvel went to work as a telephone operator in the judiciary. “Before I knew it, I was a team leader. They were very pleased with me: I knew all the numbers by heart pretty quickly, making me the fastest of them all.” That sounds like an excellent lightning start, but there is also a tragic edge to it. Because actually Van den Heuvel worked as a telephone operator far below her level, which is not surprising given her lack of prior education.
'Keep them busy'
Van den Heuvel has, as she puts it, a standing and walking disability. She was in a wheelchair from an early age. And “so” – because that’s how it went in the 1980s – she attended mytylschool. “There I quickly noticed that I was more intelligent than most other kids. It made me take care of others a bit. That’s in my character, after all.” The further education then, the secondary school at Werkenrode? “That had a high love-she-bits content. I mostly learned a lot of Disney movies there from front to back.”
Sixty people to another job
Now, a few years on, Van den Heuvel has her own design agency, Ictoria, in downtown Boxmeer. It employs 21 people. Some in wheelchairs, others with autism, or with a hearing impairment, for example. “It was actually not even my intention to employ people myself,” she reflects. “But many employers find the step big at first anyway.”
And so she now usually hires people herself first, as a stepping stone to the outside world. In three years, she has delivered at least sixty people to the labor market. This almost always goes well, also because she keeps in touch with employer and (former) employee after the transfer.
This is only part of Lukas van der Storm’s article. Read the whole story on the Trouw website.
