My first work experience was at the Memo library in Modena with a large literature dedicated to the disabled.
I attended 9 hours a week. First of all, I was in charge of marking the accesses to the library then after a period of time they gave me many more tasks such as user records or research on rare diseases.
This was a way to get out of the house, to have social relationships and to help the family, that being when I went to work, they could go out.
After this project had concluded I started working for the Modena volunteer centre where I wrote articles on disability and more. We did some interviews with various people who are presidents of associations and other disabled people as well. The Modena Gazette has published several of my articles.
Then my work experience at the centre ended so off I went to the Italian sports centre where I continued to write articles on sport for a year.
At the time, I attended the parish and met with the parish priest to chat from time to time. Once we ended up talking about the subject of work, since the parish has a kindergarten and also a retirement home they needed a person to take care of the bureaucratic matters, to which I offered myself and I was entrusted with the task.
First of all I dealt with the applications for enrolment at the school, then I dealt with payments and attendance.
At that point I had only 9 hours of escort per week which was not enough for me to fulfil my needs over the course of the week. I contacted a friend of mine who worked for the gazette of Modena and we wrote an article asking for two things, a job and an increase in the hours of chaperone from 9 to 20. I succeeded and subsequently both requests were fulfilled.
Officially there are public bodies dedicated to placing disabled children in the world of work. Indeed, by law, every company is obliged to have a disabled person for every 15 employees. The problem is that if they are not hired, the state makes them pay a fine without forcing them to hire. Now disabled people that could be hired are not differentiated by their percentage of disability so all companies take on mild disabilities to get around the law. For me it should be mandatory to have disabled people with different disability rates.
Today the average disabled person cannot exceed a salary quota otherwise their pension is revoked which is potentially meaningless. The pension is used to pay for the various needs that a disabled person has to support more than a non-disabled person.
The municipality should guarantee a compulsory job shadowing for the disabled. Because It can become expensive and time-consuming for a company to train and help a disabled young adult at work, the municipality should help in this.
Once the disabled person has a grasp of the responsibility afforded to them, the educator is no longer necessary. I think that the blame for the lack of integration of disabled young adults into the world of work is not to be attributed only to the employers but the whole system should favour and indeed embrace integration.