Enough jobs to go around

There are 1,330,000 disabled people of working age in Ukraine. One of their greatest needs is to be useful to society and as independent as possible. None of them wants to be a burden on the nation or their family. But to achieve this kind of independence people with special needs have to get jobs. Experts who are familiar with the lifestyle of the disabled claim that handicapped people are ready to work at any job, but the main thing is to get one. Unfortunately, only 25 per cent of all handicapped are employed. To help promote employment among disabled people, benefactors in Kyiv recently launched Social Aid, a new national charitable organization.

“The standards of living and labor among the handicapped remain low, although there have been substantial changes in the last decade,” said Petro Talanchuk, the head of the supervisory council of Social Aid and president of the Ukraina Open International Human Development University. “However, our society has a low awareness of these problems. There is a lack of sympathy for disabled people. The legislation we have is not bad, but it is not always implemented. And the handicapped are glad to do any job. We would like to break the vicious circle of indifference and give people with special needs the jobs they want.”

In the next seven years Social Aid plans to help find employment for over a million handicapped people. In order to do this the charity plans to find sponsors and create a few companies designed to employ people with special needs. No details of the project have been revealed yet, but on July 25 the charity is launching a campaign to raise funds. Borys Lytvak, director of the No. 2 Olympic Reserve Sports School for children and teens in Odesa, who is also one of the heads of Social Aid, hopes that sponsors support their initiative and deposit funds to the charity’s bank account. “Supporting talented handicapped children is also one of our priorities,” Lytvak emphasized. “We are planning to organize special contests to assist the comprehensive development of their personalities. We will also do our best to ensure fair employment for them when they come of age.”

The government of Austria has signaled its readiness to support Social Aid. The Austrian authorities are ready to share their technologies for building special enterprises and methods for providing employment to the handicapped, an obligatory government program in many EU countries. There are approximately seven million disabled people in Great Britain today, and more than 50 per cent of them are employed.