Here is one of a series of blog posts we have from our Micro-Interns. These are students from Oxford University who took part in a 5-day internship with Avalis to find out more about disability employment, research issues and possible solutions and then produce things that we can take into our work to help create positive change.
This post is from Anlin who was focused on Business Operations, we hope you enjoy this and if you'd like to read more of these please click on the tag "micro-interns":
I must say, I never thought one could learn so much, skill-wise and awareness-wise, in 5 days, but it did happen in this Micro-Internship with Avalis. Before describing what I have learnt about disability employment, I would like to first summarise this very productive week working as a business operations intern.
I think my productivity largely owed itself to the well-organised nature of this internship. We were provided with some voluntary preliminary readings before the internship to familiarise ourselves with issues surrounding disability employment. Then, the week began with an opening meeting where Dave showed us the online Miro board where we will be working and set us some videos and readings to look at regarding Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas. After another meeting where we met Becky and Amber, we dived right in to educate ourselves on the topic and start thinking about what Avalis could do to address systemic barriers limiting disabled people’s employment. From there, we studied more and more about how to systematically develop business ideas into feasible products, including matching our services exactly with customer needs, pinpointing every assumption behind the proposed services, and designing feasible experiments to test those assumptions. Our findings culminated in a short yet professional report completed on the last day of the programme, where we outlined the general business situation and recommended some business experiments with detailed designs.
Throughout the internship, the Avalis team had been entirely supportive and responsive. Dave checked up on our work every few hours, met with us for at least one hour over Zoom every day, and we could ask as many questions as needed and could drag those meetings much longer if we ever liked. From naively believing that innovation is all about brainstorming on a big whiteboard, I’ve grown to know that it requires, in fact, dozens of big whiteboards, and brainstorming by itself is never rigorous enough for developing an idea you care about. Indeed, Avalis cares about disability employment, and about its employees, interns and partners. It is probably for this reason that they took the time to prepare such a rich set of resources and a well-thought-out schedule to enable us to learn the theories, apply them to make an impact, and gain knowledge and skills along the way while contributing to a greatly valuable cause. I can confidently say that this week was well spent, especially when my newly acquired knowledge of business tests has allowed me to finally understand why Tesco sends me so many Christmas promotion emails.
Now to the real thing though, it’s all about disability employment. I have to admit that I was not very aware of all the physical, legal, societal, and psychological barriers surrounding it until I did the preliminary readings Avalis provided. I was very moved and said to myself, “Oh I never thought of this, and I can’t believe that I didn’t”. I think this speaks to the heart of the issue – lack of awareness and understanding. We are so used to thinking about our conditions whenever we organise anything: we need a venue and we need people to come. But we rarely consider that the venue has to be accessible and comfortable for some people to come and that the format of the event must not be alienating or condescending. We have to remember that disabled people are not “some others”, but rather “some of us”. Simply because we don’t encounter them often in everyday life, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist or they don’t want to attend our events. Rather, they have largely remained outside our circles precisely because we do not design events and facilities for them. It is incredible how many new things you could see once you start considering disabled persons’ perspectives. I would even look at my own bathroom now and think about the door being too narrow, shower set too small, and the window too high for some wheelchair users. All these can help us to realise the sheer extent of the problems that they face in our society.
Avalis is doing a lot to seek to address these issues, and so are many other organisations dedicated to this area. However, many issues remain, largely because people that are not dedicated to it, for example, me, are uninformed. I do not know what can be done to immediately change this, but at least we can start by keeping a note at the back of our head to always remember considering disabled person’s needs as we go through life. For employers, this is especially important, because you can provide the gate for many disabled people to independently support themselves through work and access the resources needed to become more integrated into our community. Making adjustments is possible, and, vital. Disabled people have already faced many more obstacles than non-disabled people, and it is unfair to not do our parts to make their lives easier, especially now that we’ve realised their needs.
There is much to do in this area, like many other social issues. I’m grateful that I have taken the first step in raising my awareness and contributing towards solving it by participating in this internship. If anyone else is considering partnering with or joining Avalis, I would recommend it. They really do care about their cause and their people. A final note to everyone that has reached this part of the blog, congratulations, and I would like to ask you do just one more thing with me: put another thing on our checklist whenever we organise or design anything, you guessed it, disabled persons’ perspectives.
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