Editor’s note: A previous version of this article mentioned that the David C. Onley Initiative received a $500 million investment from Ontario’s Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities. That investment is actually $5 million. The Charlatan regrets the error.
Carleton is leading the David C. Onley Initiative for Employment and Enterprise Development, a project which will examine low employment rates for students and graduates with disabilities. The project also aims to increase these employment rates.
The Paul Menton Centre for Students with Disabilities (PMC), and the Research, Education, Accessibility, and Design Initiative (READ) are behind the project, which has been in the works for two years.
Research for the project officially began after Carleton received a $5 million investment from Ontario’s Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities.
The project will run for two years, in partnership with the University of Ottawa, Algonquin College, and La Cité collégiale. It will integrate 10 research and development officers across the four institutions to conduct research and program development within the schools’ services, Boris Vukovic, the director of READ, said.
The officers will increase student services, and the ability employers have to hire and support students and graduates with disabilities, as well as raise awareness about people with disabilities. Additionally, officers will promote the employability of students and graduates with disabilities to employers, agencies, and the government in Ottawa, Vukovic said.
“We have to change the attitudes of employers. We have to make our students more competitive,” Larry McCloskey, the director of the PMC, said.
Carleton students with disabilities currently have a seven-year graduation rate on par with the general population, McCloskey said. Yet they’re twice as likely to be unemployed post-graduation, according to him.
“We’re doing a good job in the education sector, and then employment (is) where things fall apart,” McCloskey said
According to McCloskey, there is a myth that people with disabilities make worse employees.
“The reality is, they make better (employees), based on traditional measures of sick days, and changing jobs and all that,” he said.
McCloskey added that one of the main challenges for getting jobs post-graduation is that graduates with disabilities often lack work experience from their time as students.
The $5 million investment in the David C. Onley Initiative follows an $800,000 investment from the province’s Career Ready Fund into the Carleton University Accessible Experiential Learning project, which pairs students with disabilities with opportunities for work and entrepreneurial experience before graduation.
According to McCloskey, the David C. Onley Initiative is intended as a demonstrational project, which would be replicated across the province.
“(The project) becomes scaleable and transferrable to other regions once we prove the model works here,” he said.
