Talent Has No Boundaries: Workforce Diversity Includes People with Disabilities

by Andrés T. Tapia —

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM) – a month-long event that takes aim at the barriers to employment that workers with disabilities still face and the workplace discrimination that continues to exist. Each year, NDEAM develops a theme and a poster that promotes awareness of the topic and emphasizes the many talents, skills, and viewpoints that employees with disabilities bring to work.

This year’s theme, Talent has no boundaries: Workforce diversity includes people with disabilities, and poster highlight the work of the well-respected artist, writer, and activist Laura Hershey. In addition to writing, performing, and creating imaginative computer generated compositions, Ms. Hershey has spinal muscular atrophy. As a registered artist with the VSA – The International Organization on Arts and Disability, her work is available to a broad audience. For the 2010 NDEAM poster, the VSA website explains that Ms. Hershey “addresses themes of disability and discrimination; illness, health, and healing; love and intimacy; the life of the body; personal power; and mythology,” and often incorporates poetry in her art pieces.

In her poem, Ms. Hershey asks, basically, what people see when meeting her for the first time, and what fear do they “unlearn” by getting to know her. The Inclusion Paradox’s chapter, Disability: The Diversity Issue We Fear the Most, suggests that what we really see is our own vulnerability.

Her words bring me to the central question at the heart of her poem, “What do we see when we look at each other?”  We seldom “see” or “think” of artist, performer, or writer when meeting someone with a disability. In her vocational choice, Ms. Hershey defies that misguided conventional wisdom.

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