Director
Lic. Marta L. Mendía

The program was born in 1993, the objectives being:

• To insert young people with disabilities in the work world.
• To support the development of their disabilities.
• To make society conscious that people with disabilities can be inserted in the work field, developing some tasks with efficiency and a good performance.

At the First Congress on Down Syndrome organized by ASDRA in Buenos Aires, we were called to present the little experience we had at that moment on the program that today we called Employment with Support for people with Mental Disability.

I remembered our emotion and pride when we shared the Stand with T.O. Christopher Stefen Lynch from Ireland, who is doubtless one of the most important people on the subject of Employment with Support all over the world, who when finishing the projection of the Fundacion Discar Program, declared:
“What you have just seen was the exact thing that an ECA Program can do to people with the Down Syndrome”. The example is perfect but not typical. In general, these people do not live these situations, they make works that they do not like, that are not well paid, or they are not in protected places. This is the situation where we presently are.
“ECA is where we want to arrive, is a new focus, and is a new philosophy”. This is the view. Between the situation and the view, the tension is located. This tension involves professionals, organizations, teachers, families and employers”.
“For this matter, the best thing is to stop looking in the special ambit and to watch what is happening in the work world in general. We have to stop thinking on the training in special spaces. The employers know which the abilities that their employees have to have are. We only have to work to help them”.

When finishing his speech, he asked us the following:
How many people with disabilities have a job and a good salary? When are we going to wake up? As seen in the video they need us to be alert. There is a great potentiality waiting and this does not mean charity, it has to do with a matter of rights”. ECA comes to change this, to give them the place that belongs to them. The work integration has arrived to stay.
We were convinced that it was true. And that is why we have been working all these years. Trying to form and train ourselves, because an ECA program must be professionally made.

We defined the integration program as “Employment with Support”, and its features are:

1. Integrated work in standardized companies similar to other partners without disabilities that have the same type of work.
2. Training inside the work position, so first the person is located in a position and just there the necessary training is provided.
3. Payment from the first day as any other employee.
4. Support during all the work life of the person to allow the maintenance of the position and the required performance.

This model of work integration is based in the whole integration, with salaries and benefits from the first day, a flexible support during the work life and the possibility of election of each person.

The concept “Balancing of opportunities” talks about the process through which the general system of society, as the physical and cultural surrounding is, housing, transportation, education and work opportunities, the cultural and social life is made accessible to everybody. In these years of the development of the “Program of Work Integration” we can say that the integration situation generates an opening and falling of ideological barriers.

When people with disabilities enter a company a new order of roles is produced: the personnel must be flexibilized and some members of the staff must be trained to capacitate and guide this person. This will allow forming a generation of company leaders with a stronger consciousness of their possibilities.

Presently we know that people with disabilities have the necessary potential to be incorporated to the work force and that they want to do it.
Some managers have begun to discover this potential. Anyway a lot of people with disabilities that want and can work are unemployed. This is due to the fact that people with disabilities did not have any access to education and the professional formation. Frequently the helping services they need are not available, the legislation and the public policies do not facilitate their incorporation to works and the buildings and public services are not accessible for them.

The lack of information and the ignorance on the disability theme has as a consequence that the employees consider that people with disabilities are not prepared to work and because of that they do not give them opportunities to show the contrary.

In a meeting of experts that took place in Finland on May 1990 the following outlining was adopted:
“The aim of all the Nations is to established a society for everybody in 2000, where people with disabilities form a natural and whole part of society. In order to obtain that we have to recognize that the obstacles for an independent life and the complete equality do not settle in the functional differences of an individual, but in the existence of an environment that have not been made to satisfy the needs of all the citizens…”

The program tries to answer to this exposition, that is to say it favors that the company can become a surrounding, in a space that can receive and satisfy what a person with a disability needs.

A program of Employment with Support has three moments: the evaluation, the entrance and the following and it is worked over three axes in each one of these moments. The integrated young person, his/her family and the company.