Hello to all you amazing Mighty People:
This month I was fortunate to have the pleasure to speak with Mike Prescott for this episode of the Meeting Mighty People Podcast. Mike has 2 Post Doctoral 1 in geomatics and the other is a PHD in Rehabilitation Sciences. Congratulations to Mike Prescott for his success in accomplishing this unplanned but a path that sealed his interest. I will say his career is passionately driven and by maybe some divine timing.
On this fascinating informative and passionate speaking episode of the Meeting Mighty People Podcast we are joined by Mike Prescott to learn about the new Accessibility Legislation that finally received royal accent in June of 2021.
This new BC accessibility legislation consists of three different pieces/
- A accessibility committee
- A accessibility feedback tool
- Organizations must have an Accessibility Plan in Place.
- https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/governments/about-the-bc-government/accessibility/legislation/faq
- https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/governments/about-the-bc-government/accessibility/committees/provincial-accessibility-committee
For me being a person with Cerebral Palsy I enjoyed hearing that BC is now mandating public sectors and organizations in BC are mandated to have a accessibility plan started by September 1st 2023. Eventually with a long term goal of making Canada fully accessible to everyone regardless of one’s ability or function.
Please view Mike Prescott’s MMP episode transcript Accessibility Hub website Mike Prescott will refer to later on in the podcast
All right. Hello everyone. Today we are honored to be joined by Mike Prescott, who works for , the British Columbia Disability Alliance. As an accessibility consultant, he is here today to share his story, passion, and explain the new B.C Accessibility Act, which is set out to become effective.
If I write September 1st of. 2023. He also has a PHD degree in rehabilitation sciences, which is amazing and I’m excited to hear more about, tell us a little bit about yourself, Mike, and welcome to the show. Well, thank you very much for having me. So my name’s Mike Prescott. I’m originally from Quebec, but I’ve lived in, I think I’m in my 29th home right now.
So that includes Ontario, Quebec bc, Alberta, Illinois. New York. And I’ve I, I was fortunate at, well after my disability cause I had a cancer in, in my spinal column that paralyzed me at six. But I did have a lot of recovery afterwards and was able to walk functionally for about 25 years.
But that overuse of, or on my knees. Sort of required going back to using a manual wheelchair again. But I was fortunate after my cancer to be able to go to the University of Illinois where it’s basically where accessible or wheelchair sports originated. And so I got to play wheelchair basketball and well I was in a track chair.
I won’t say I was a track athlete. So I got to be really embedded into a culture of disability. That was very interesting. And I got to travel a lot because of that and, and meet lots of people with disabilities around the world including my partner who was a five time Paralympian herself.
So it really exposed me to things that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. I certainly wouldn’t have been an athlete at that level. And and if I had been paralyzed earlier in my life, I probably wouldn’t have had the great experience of being a high school athlete, which I, you know, I loved.
But so I, after that, I went and did my master’s in my MBA at Simon Fraser University, and then worked for about 15 years in a variety of positions at HR and knowledge management consulting. And then went on very much into the accessibility field. And then I decided, okay, well then I was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor.
And I decided, okay, well I wanna do a PhD, but I was, it was too late in the application cycle. So I decided I’d do a master’s in urban planning, which I had always wanted to do. And then finished that and said, oh, well, I might as well keep going and do my PHD in rehabilitation sciences. And then just because of.Odd situation. I ended up doing two post doctorates, one in geomatics, which I had to actually look up what that meant before I started it. And, and then and then did another postdoctoral fellowship at U B C in rehabilitation sciences. And so I have since then moved to Kelowna BC where I’m the project manager for the Accessible Organization’s Project.
Awesome. That’s a great story. What’s your second degree all about? Not the rehabilitation science one, but the other, the geomatics, PHD, the geomatics. Well, it’s basically just about mapping. Like I, I love, I always as a kid, in fact, my, of all the we have a room that has all the fancy papers and stuff with it.
My favorite you know, piece of paper is this one from grade six, I think it says, where Mike’s mapping skills are outstanding. And so I’ve always loved mapping things. And so now I, it’s incorporated in what I do because I think it helps tell stories visually. And I’m a very visual person, so being able to see.
Things like, because my research was very much into the mobility of people with disabilities. And so being able to see what that looks like on a map and having to be able to use that to, to start a conversation with somebody because it contextualizes their day-to-day life. It, you know you know, in physical space.
So it, it, they can really. Work with that a lot better when it’s very concrete like that. So I, you know, we’ll look at maps and they’ll say, okay, what’s it like to get from your house to school? And then they can show me on, you know, it could be a street view or it could be on a map. And you can put those stories on a map and collect them from many, many people.
And you have these story maps that really tell us they get into that accessibility, inclusion that. Surveys and, and even individual interviews. Can’t do. So it’s, for me, one cool way of being able to understand accessibility and inclusion. Awesome. Me, I love looking at maps and I’m a visual person.
I actually, I, I actually say to people that I create a map of where I want to go and then, cuz every day we’re planning is people with disabilities. Every day, no matter what ahead of time we always have to play. Where’s the most accessible road? Yeah. And it’s not only that too, right? You get, you go down the road, and I’ve always said one of the, the biggest barriers in accessibility is actually related to temporal barriers.
So time, it could be the time of the day, the season. Just some weird things. So you’ll be going down the street and there’s construction that blocks the sidewalk. So, It’s kind of like the GPS devices where you, you know, you’re like, okay, I have to reroute myself. And it’s not just as simple right as, oh, okay, I can just go up one street and down another.
It’s okay, well if I go up one street that’s up a 10% grade, I don’t want to do that. But you know, like construction on sidewalks is often the sign that you get right where the construction is, so you end up having to double back and it increases your time that you have to travel and stuff like that and makes, you know, it, it’s inefficient.
It’s not fun to have to do. It can be dangerous for some people and stuff like that. So yeah. Yeah. And I understand that there’s a new accessible Canada Act coming out. Can you tell us a little bit about the rules over that act? Okay, so there’s multiple legislation. So there’s the Accessible Canada Act, which has been in place for a couple years from now, and that’s a federal A federal legislation that covers federal entities.
So banks, for instance, that get regulated by at, at a federal level. Deal with that. And, and I’m not involved with that at all. But then there’s province, some of the provinces have started to put together their own accessibility legislation, so accessible. Ontario Act. The A O D A is one that was sort of the first of the provincial ones, and then there’s Nova Scotia, there’s one in Manitoba, I believe.
They’re developing one in in Newfoundland. I think Quebec has something similar. So the provinces have started to do that. And then BC had Royal sent on the accessible BC Act in 2020. One September or April, I can’t remember exactly, but so what that did was what one of the things it did is part three of the, the accessible BC Act requires all provincially regulated organizations.
So it could be. Public schools, it could be local governments, municipal police post-secondary, et cetera. So those organizations, all by September 1st, 2023, had to have three things. They had to establish an accessibility committee. They had to develop an accessibility plan, and they had to create a public feedback mechanism for that plan.
And so my role is to support those organizations in being able to do that. And how do you support those organizations and. So that’s been the big thing. When I started in June of last year, it was very much a blank slate. So it was coming up with a strategy for how to do this because that group is 780 organizations and we were, there’s no way of doing one-on-one with 780 organizations over a short period of time.
So what we did, At the beginning was try to get a group of people with disabilities and those organizations in a room together to create a a toolkit for developing your plan and creating your committee. So it’s a very generic Toolkit that they could at least get started on things. And so we had that.
We have a website, the BC accessibility hub website, which includes all of this information. So if, if those people listening want to find out more, that’s definitely the place to go. And then we’re sort of moving on now to more. Customize workshops for each of the sectors because that generic toolkit worked to a certain degree.
But if, if a school district wants to do something more, we’re helping them customize that for that and, and several other activities like. Even, even that, the mapping that I was talking to you about, I, I’m hoping that that may be something that we could support on an online so that all British Colombians could add to that map and say, here’s what my accessibility experiences are like.
Cause it’s, I think it’s it again, it’s interesting to be able to see that. But I also think for myself, I might use information like that. To be able to make decisions about where I live or if, if I had children. It’s like where, you know, what schools are good for if I have a child who has a disability. So I, I think it actually has value beyond just, you know, a public good kind of thing.
So that’s, that’s our plan going forward. But we, we really, it’s about working with all of these organizations and asking them what is it that they need. Like we wanna really build the capacity of those committees because a committee has to be made up of. 50% of people with disabilities or organizations that represent people with disabilities and a person of indigenous background.
So we where people might be on committees where maybe they don’t have the expertise at this point. To fully support the organizations that they’re yes, voting to be committees on. We can help to build that capacity and, you know, maybe provide training for those because I don’t know about you, but I’ve been on a lot of committees where I thought, you know, it, it’s one thing to say we’ve got lived experience.
But if we, if we’re not properly informing that committee or if we’re over overselling what it is that we can provide, that just ends up having negative long-term consequences. Like I’ve been on a committee where they were. Doing accessibility audits, but they didn’t really have accessibility expertise.
They didn’t really know what to do with it. And so you end up giving the, the organization that you’re consulting to you know, subpar information and they’re not gonna want to necessarily work with you in the future. Yes. Really wanna keep that really high quality participation yeah.
Participation. And part of the issue is that, you know, people with disabilities have, you know, obviously very low employment rates and all that, so they haven’t had the opportunity to be exposed to that. And so that’s, that’s where we need to build the capacity where, where we can, yes, I agree. And. What, what are, what is your job and how do you prepare as a consultant, how do you provide those resources to the businesses or local communities to work with?
Like if you were to write off a piece of paper and say, okay, here’s what I found today. How would you do that? Oh, you mean like a report to an organization? Yes. If I was a consultant. So I mean, it, it, I mean, it, it can vary greatly. So I’ve done that for parks and recreation. And so they asked me to look at their, their parks and recreation facilities.
And so I would do an audit Using, using gis, using other tools. Like you can use cad, computer-aided design. But I would. So review all of their, their assets in the, so it could, like with Burnaby was like the Swan Guard stadium and all the pools and, and the little parks and stuff like that.
And provide them where they had gaps in their accessibility, but they’d also be able to see how things were connected. So I look at not just like, there’s lots of Tools for assessing buildings and that’s, that’s great. I’m more interested in how buildings are connected. So if you can’t get to a building, it doesn’t matter how accessible it is.
Right. So really understanding the con connectivity as it relates to, to accessibility, cuz it you, for us, for those with in particular mobility impairments, but for others as well with disabilities, obviously. It has to be a seamless environment. So it, any one, like if you. Again, if you’re in a power wheelchair and there’s no curb ramp it doesn’t matter if 99 out of a hundred crosswalks have a curb ramp, if one of them doesn’t, that can, you know, that can be the end of the trip.
So it’s, it, it, it’s very much, I do what’s called network analysis on these things, so it’s not just counting things. That’s, I think, a really bad way of, of looking at accessibility inclusion. Like you could say, oh, well, we’ve got 52% of our public washrooms are accessible. It could mean that none of them are actually accessible, cuz there’s no accessible path to any of them That, so I, I have that high level strategic and I also look at policies and practices around human resources and you know, do you have policies around service animals and things like that.
So that’s all incorporated in a final report that an organization might get. Thanks for that. Yeah, it’s definitely been an interesting adventure. I was recommended by the MLA to be on the accessibility committee for the Town of Creston. And wondering, do you have any visions of what you want that to look like?
In terms of the committees or, yeah. If that’s a tough one. It’s, it’s very, it’s kind of a mix of. You know, we want, ultimately we want to be able to sort of harmonize the accessible experience across the province, which means we want some, you know a lot of. We would like to see a lot of similarities between committees, but we understand that Creston has a lot different challenges than Vancouver or Victoria or Zeballos of, you know, a town of 120.
So it, it’s gonna be very specific to each in this case, each local government and some of these, part of the, the, the legislation allows you to partner so some Some local governments, like in Strathcona regional district, are coming together. So taas and zba, and I think it’s Port Alice, are joining with the regional district to create a single committee because they just don’t have the capacity to go alone necessarily.
Or it could be that the number of people with disabilities that could volunteer to be on the committee is limited. And so that, yeah, so there’s, it’s very flexible in that way. So, How, what the committee looks like and the plans that they do is going to definitely change. But for me there’s two, I think two important things.
It’s not about the output, it’s about the process. So meaningful engagement with people with disabilities from the beginning, not just a, oh here’s the plan. What do you think of it? At the very end, I. And my brain is a little on the fritz here. So there, there’s that, and I’ll get back to it in a second.
Well, that, that, I mean, that’s at the, the, the, the core of it is that there’s that meaningful engagement and that from that, everything else will, will, will come out of that. And, and that’s my, you know, one of my fears is that for some places it might end up being a checkbox activity. So it’s really, you know, getting people to be, to be able to be like that and, and working as partners.
So the disability community also has to understand that like local governments and all organizations have limited limitations based on their, their, their resources as well. And trying to find that pri Oh, the, the other thing was about prioritizing. So really being strategic in how you prioritize.
So, so again, Committee I was on where they listed like 40 things that they would like to do, and they were all number one priority. Well, you can’t do it that way. So you have to be able to prioritize based on, you know, what’s important to the disability population in that organization and what’s feasible from an operational side of things and finding the ones that are easy to implement and are of high importance and focusing on that.
So that’s what I would like to see committees really do. Try to, to move forward on those two elements. Oh, meaningful engagement and prior a proper prioritization process. And then from that, you’ll start to get results. But if you don’t do it that way at the beginning, then you do these one-off kinds of things.
Like, oh, let’s put a crosswalk here, you know, accessible crosswalk here, well, it didn’t connect much or it wasn’t that, that important. So you sort of, those limited funds that I talked about, then they’re not being used to do as much as they could possibly do. So that’s why you have to really understand the full picture of what the requirements are, and what’s important.
Yes. That was really interesting considering that I’m supposed to be one of the members recommended by MLA Brittany Anderson, and I had no clue what I was doing. So that’s interesting to hear that that’s what you would like to see. Yeah. And, and that’s in like, again, this kind of information is in our toolkit to take people through that process so that they can, because I know a lot of organizations are like, oh, we don’t even know where to start.
And, and others are much further along. So you take the resort municipality of Whistler and they’ve been doing this for f. 10, 15 years. They’ve got very deep research because it’s, they, they’ve understood the economic value of being accessible and inclusive and they want to be world leaders and they are.
So, you know, they’ve put a lot of, and time and effort and, and resources into that. Whereas you just said, you know, small towns just don’t have the capacity to do that. So they have to really understand. What, what it is they wanna do within the context of what resources they have and, and being it’s not that they can’t reach for the sky, but maybe starting off simple and, and evolving towards that is the, the process they might need to do.
Yeah. Sort of start off with one step and then take 10 steps. Yeah. And then, yeah. Don’t have a list of 40 things that you want to do in the year one cuz then nothing gets done. Yes. Then they just shut down. Yep. Where, pick one of the things that are most important to write in your letters for accessibility.
Pick one of the things that you need right now. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s definitely interesting working with the provincial government and the municipal government. And sometimes those, there’s conflicting challenges there. So I did work in North Vancouver where one of the issues was along Lonsdale, well, you cross over the federally regulated highway.
And it, you know, there’s a turnoff off of the highway to go south on Lonsdale. Extremely dangerous term because it’s somewhat blind blinded by trees. It’s up a 10% slope. So, and it, and it services a high population of seniors because there’s a lot of ac assisted living units north of the highway.
And so, For them to go south of that is, is it’s basically a barrier even though technically they could potentially get up and down the road. But at what cost, what, you know, what risk, level of risk are you willing to take? It’s just not right. Yes, I learned to just take the rest once and then if you can’t, if you have trouble doing it, then.
Make changes with it. That’s how either you go through it, once you have trouble doing it, you make changes with it. Yeah. I mean it’s us. That has to be the, the voice of the community. That’s where I think, again, that’s kind of like where story maps are really interesting cuz you could have the ability to say, pin on a map saying this, this.
Intersection in particular is problematic. And, and again, if you understand how things are connected, if that. If that crosswalk is critical to connecting to a lot of other things, that’s where your focus needs to be. And that’s where it is using a more scientific approach like network analysis allows you to identifying those.
It’s like a pinch point. It’s a, if it’s, it’s something that if it is no longer available to people, you basically have created an absolute barrier that can wall off an entire area of opportunities. I’m, yeah, I’m just laughing
at your points right now cause I can relate. So that’s the challenge we have to go through to get where we wanna get to. So, It takes energy and I don’t think people get that. It takes us 75% more energy than a regular human being. Yeah. And in fact, like one of my PhD experiments showed that someone in a manual chair ended up traveling 50% further than the shortest possible route than they need to go.
So you’ve added 50% to your trip before leaving the door out, you know, going out the door. And as you say, you know, the, the. Energy levels and all that. So because I did my, from an urban planning perspective, I think this is where it’s really important that, you know, Cities are designed properly the first time, so they don’t have to be retrofitted.
And that’s a very common thing, right? But they also use this, they use this quarter, what they call the quarter mile circle or the 400 meter circle for, to determine how far people are gonna, are willing to walk, basically to get places. But our world doesn’t look nice even you know, I can’t go in any direction from 400 meters away.
And, and not. Combat you know, barriers or even like there’s barriers and and there’s burden. So there’s things that you can overcome, but they take more and more out of you. So, for instance, you could go along a hundred meters stretch of sidewalk that’s flat. So that’s one thing. But that same a hundred meters up, a 10% slope increases.
You know, the amount of effort potentially that you have to use to get that. So it’s not, the a hundred meters isn’t a hundred meters, whereas for an able-bodied person, it, it tends to be it doesn’t really make that much of a difference if you’re talking only 400, 800 meters kind of thing. And so that really changes a lot in your life.
You, if you can. Walk or wheel to most of the things that you want to do on a day-to-day basis, that’s awesome cuz you do not have to get into a car or public transit, which both of them have huge limitations. If you’re blind, you’re not probably driving a car. A transit or paratransit is.
I, I, I won’t get into, onto a bus myself. I just can’t stand being situated backwards on a bus as it holds back and forth and stuff. Like, I don’t have breaks on my my, my manual wheelchair. Not that they would help that much. It’s not enjoyable. Experience. Now I’m fortunate I can afford to have the, have the choice, which again, People with disabilities ha have higher poverty levels lower employ employment levels and stuff like that.
So, that luxury isn’t universal. Luxury isn’t universal. I. Vancouver Youth Leadership Weekend with Blind Beginnings and hast learned how to use friends and going backwards and dress. It was not fun. No, and, and it’s, I, I, it’s not any like, there’s the physical element of it, but I’m sitting there staring at people who are like, there you have no choice of where you’re looking, kind of thing.
Like I, I like the sky train, that’s great to a certain degree, except for when it’s super busy. But yeah, public transit and I. I’ve never had to use paratransit, but the idea of having to plan your life couple days ahead to, you know, schedule things like that and who knows when you’re gonna get them.
That I, I really feel for people that have to, to rely on those things. And then, I don’t know, you know, can you people afford Uber and Lift and taxis? As ways around it. You know, I know there’s taxi savers and stuff like that, so transportation to me, just my background in that is such a key element to accessibility inclusion as well.
So yeah, it’s a very complex problem. It’s not something that, you know, There’s things like universal design, which I’m not a fan of because I, it has very little it’s difficult to put into action. People can say, oh yeah, this was developed using universal design. We’ll prove it.
How do you measure that? It, it’s, to me it’s a quite a meaningless con concept. Because people have just co-opted it to, it’s kind of like green tourism that used to be ecotourism. Anybody could say they were an ecotourist attraction or something like that. And it’s kind of the same way with universal design.
I, I, I cringe when I hear people just putting that in their some strategy or whatever. It’s like, yeah. Show me how that is. And and, and they just get blank looks. Or sometimes if they say a washroom is accessible and you walk in there and it’s not accessible, it’s like, and they say it’s universally designed.
It’s like, prove it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And even just the idea of universality is. I know, somewhat controversial, but that’s a case where I, like, I find this one, the universal design thing is interesting, because the disability population for the most part will jump on board with that. And we haven’t really questioned it.
It’s, it’s just sort of taken for granted as, oh, it’s, it sounds good, right? Who’s gonna disagree with wanting to make everything accessible to everyone? But it, it’s not really, it’s not a strategy, it doesn’t have the ability to be used in a strategic sense. It was designed by it.
It’s just, it’s so many questions that we do have, we don’t, as a community really have a debate about, and that I always worry when I, whether something is just taken for granted like that, I immediately, in my mind is something’s not right here and I want to investigate it. And I found Universal design to be one of those things where I, I, I’ve yet find really strong evidence that it is really valid isn’t the right word, but a valid concept.
Yes. I kind of see where you’re going with that. Cause, how, what’s universally designed for the community might not be inclusively designed for somebody with, say, a paralyzed leg or a broken arm or something. Yeah, and there’s places, right where accessibility for one group is a a barrier or problem like for another group, you know, like the twiz, the for ramps.
The, it’s obviously, it’s more important that someone with a, a visual impairment is stocked from going into the. And into traffic obviously, but it can also create falls for someone in a manual chair in some cases, but so that you can have conflicts like that. And even within accessibility Things like, I was at a, I was in Spain recently, and you know, the washroom is, it’s huge.
It’s got, and it’s got every single accessibility toy in there. You could probably, it was so big in fact that because I don’t use my wheelchair indoors, I found it more difficult to get around because I don’t have access to walls to just to be able to put my hand on so that, you know, and then it had, I’ve never seen this before.
A sink that you can change the height for, which again sounds great because you can get underneath it if you’re in a power chair, a really high power chair, something like that. But I didn’t even know it was. And then I put my hand on and all of a sudden it gots going down and I’m about to you know, do a header right into a, into a sink.
Wouldn’t, wouldn’t impact my looks. But it’s still, it’s not something I wanna have happen. Yes. Universal versus inclusive design. Inclusive design is more inclusive to everyone
as compared to just universal. Yeah, it’s. Yes, I, I’m a scientist. I’m very highly rational. I need empirical evidence. I like numbers. And I’m not, that’s not always the right. So. Requirement and whatnot. But that’s just for me, it’s kind of like I need to see those numbers to, to do it. I know people too, like when I use was the manager for accessible tourism.
People say, oh, you know, just put pictures on your website of, you know, of the room and the bathroom and stuff like that. And, and I, that’s definitely helpful, but you can’t tell from a picture if you know, if a doorway is 810 millimeters, or is it 860 millimeters wide? Because it can just take a couple centimeters to not, you know, not allow for access into that washroom.
So you need a combination of those things to be able to really make a judgment as to whether or not something’s AC accessible for you. And it, again, it’s gonna be different for someone in a manual chair versus someone who has visual impairment and all the, so it’s, it’s very confusing.
Yes. Sorry about that. Yeah, do it is so just so individualized. Some, in some cases, and it, it makes it just a challenge.
I’m curious, when I read your online bio, I seem that you have a PhD in rehabilitation sciences. What made you dream of having that degree? Is there a story behind this? Not really. Pretty much everything I’ve done so far has been I was working at in one group and they said, oh, maybe you wanna look into this.
I, I, my career has not been planned out. Planned out at all. So which I would definitely not suggest others do because it seems be problematic later down on the line. It is kinda like, oh, I’m interested in this. And there just happened to be an opportunity to, to do the PhD at ubc. It happened to be in rehab sciences.
The original plan was to actually do experimental medicine. Don’t ask me what that is. I don’t really know. So it’s, it’s kind of like, cuz I had, my background is so diverse. I can, I’m not a I’m not an expert in anything. But I know a lot of. Things across a lot of areas. So and, and rehab sciences and urban planning actually are two types of degrees that do draw on that in particular occupational therapy, which is kind of the grouping I was in.
But my, my PhD is more, I could have, it could have been in geography just as much as it was in rehab sciences. Cuz the, I wasn’t really doing a traditional. Like an I wasn’t coming in there as an occupational scientist or a, a physiotherapist kind of which a lot of those that go into that are yeah, it was more just, oh, this project was available.
You’d be a good fit for that project. Okay, let’s do PhD at the same time. So it’s not, well, not well planned out, but that’s, that’s good though, because opportunities create themselves and then you can choose your path. Yes. Until they dry up. So, here’s the challenge, right? You have two, you don’t have two choices, but you’ve got at two ends, you’ve got one of being really focused in your career.
So you get the education, you do volunteering, all that kind of stuff because you know exactly, you know, you wanna be a you wanna build bridges, so you gotta get your civil engineering degree. And, and that’s. So it’s great cuz your chances of getting a job are, you know, 99%. The other approach is to be more of a generalist and in economies where in a good economy that’s a great ability to have a wide range of skills because then you can be, you know, used, oh, we could use you here, we could use you there.
But that the world’s not working like that as much anymore. They just wanted to put you into a slot and say, oh, this is what you do. Go. We need that. Great. We can hire you. And I think, like for me I. Human resource departments look at my resume and probably just have a total blank as to what to do with me.
It’s just not, it’s just so non-traditional. It’s that yes, it’s great, I got to do things I like, but it really makes finding work later on in, in life more difficult. And I mean, if you have a mass, you know, passion for something and you’re willing to The sacrifice, the, the fact that you may not find work as fast as you want, or you, you may not find the level of work that you want.
Yeah. Till later on. That’s great. But otherwise you might get frustrated by the fact that people are having a hard time figuring out what they can do with you, even if you’re great. They still like it, I don’t know. I still don’t know how to utilize Yes. How, how it’s, how. What skills do you know and how do you utilize the people that society needs to learn a bit more about how to basically incorporate Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. And, and we live in a world now and it’s getting worse with like artificial intelligence. If if if that’s used to basically figure out who, who gets interviewed for a job, it’s. So artificial intelligence uses data and it trains its algorithm. It, its decision making process is based on that.
And so what it will do for resumes in the future is train its algorithm on. Most likely able-bodied resumes. So anything that might be non-traditional again, would get kicked outta the system. So you know, if say you had a break in your career because you were sick or something like that, It would, you know, it would get a red flag because a human isn’t looking at it, it’s just a, a formula that says, oh, this, this is not, doesn’t fit within our parameters of what we are looking for.
And people with disabilities are gonna be, a lot of them are going to be in that because they’ve had you know, non-traditional careers or non-traditional lives and, and they’re, those businesses are gonna miss out on some amazing talents. Because of that, that’s my fear. I. Exactly. People with disabilities have amazing talents in society.
Doesn’t quite realize that. Yeah, it’s kind of similar, like women not being in the workforce, you know, 18th, 19th century kind of thing. And. You know, you’re missing out on 50% of the amazing workforce there. It’s still, and we’re 22 points, seven in, or 23.7 in percent of the population in British Columbia.
That’s a lot to miss out on. Yeah. Yeah.
That was an interesting conversation piece. I have another question for you. The last question of the day before we end this off. What do you think are the qualities of the Mighty person?
Well, I, I would say someone who is caring, who understands their strengths and weaknesses, who’s always looking to make others Mighty, yes, pro. I think anybody who’s mighty can accomplish anything in the world they want to. So when I saw your bio, I, I immediately thought I needed to have you on my podcast.
Well, thank you for having me. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you today. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have and very much as much knowledge as I have gained.
Thank you.
Meeting Mighty People by Alexis Folk 