Last week’s Mayor’s Lunch for Celebrating Inclusive Employment was the coming-out party for the city’s employment legacy for people with disabilities announced earlier this year.
About 100 people attended the lunch at the St. Albert Inn, celebrating those local businesses that employ individuals with special needs and encouraging other St. Albert businesses to follow suit.
“The businesses that were there, it’s giving them an acknowledgement and also planting the seeds of how we can grow the program because what we’ve done is create a legacy of job creation,” said Mayor Nolan Crouse. “We have to give it some legs of some sort. This was our idea of coming out of the closet with it in a bold way.”
The city announced four legacies after St. Albert hosted the Special Olympic Canada Winter Games in February — two pieces of public art, a sports legacy to build local Special Olympics programs, and the employment legacy.
According to Ron Hodgson, who spoke at the luncheon, there are approximately 200 people with special needs living in 60 homes in St. Albert, of whom only 25 per cent have jobs.
“The door is wide open for us to help these people,” the owner of Ron Hodgson Chevrolet Buick GMC told the room. “It’s up to us as individuals. Somebody knows somebody else and I think this community does a great job of helping people.”
The businesses at the lunch received a window decal that indicates they employ a person with a disability. Cindy de Bruijn of the Gateway Association said those decals could become extremely valuable as Alberta heads into another labour shortage.
“Now is the time for a new way of looking for how people with intellectual disabilities can contribute to the labour force,” de Bruijn said. “We can turn this potential labour crisis into an opportunity for employers and people with intellectual disabilities. When people with intellectual disabilities are employed, the workplace benefits and the job gets done.”
Chris Perry, acting general manager of St. Albert’s Best Western, said the hotel employs an individual with an intellectual disability and while doing so can require some patience and tweaking to the workplace, everyone benefits.
“If you’re willing to tweak whatever it is you are doing, the benefits are of a quantity that are of an untraceable value.”
