Bridie’s story: Change the Story
Bridie’s story: Change the Story
Bridie’s story is one of how building confidence opens opportunities. Travel into Bridie’s world of heightened senses, where her disability has awakened and enhanced her sense of smell, touch and taste – and what that means for her career. This is a story of someone who hasn’t let her vision impairment stop her.
Video Transcript:
Bridie: I can see shapes, shapes and objects, colors. I actually have to stare at the object to focus on it. My name is Bridie Lee Cole. I’m 46, from Perth. I have 5% vision. I can see to about a meter, and then everything after that is blurry. But I don’t see visual impairment as a disability.
Carol: She’s just somebody just like you and I who just doesn’t see very well. I’m Carol Williams. I’m the Disability Employment Service Program Manager for WA and Tasmania for Visibility, and we’re partnered with Correct. I’ve worked with people with disabilities but never someone with a vision impairment. I seriously sort of looked up and went, ‘blind people’? Can blind people work?. I was so ignorant; I was that person once.
Carol: What we do at Visibility is we work to support vision impaired and blind people. My role is mostly with employment. I first met Bridie when we were running the Beyond to Employment Program. She was so nervous; she actually had a little cry, and we just gave her a big hug. In the course that we did, it was about interview techniques, but also what we were doing is we were showing them how to do it as a blind person.
Bridie: We clicked on the first day. It’s just like you meet someone; it feels like you’ve known them for years.
Carol: Straightaway, I saw something in her. I just believed in her. I knew that she could do this and get through it.
Bridie: Having people like myself in the class was really great. It was just a fantastic relief that, oh, there’s other people here that are in my situation as well that want to go out and look for work.
Carol: Vision-impaired people are statistically fantastic for showing better OH&S. You’ll find that they will take less time off, and I might add, they’re incredibly hard workers. And that’s proven because they’ll do volunteer work, unpaid work, just to get that experience or just to show that they can do what everyone else can do.
Bridie: I had my support worker come and help me do a resume and a cover letter. I rang Community Care Lifespan Center, and I asked, would they be willing to take some volunteer work? And they said yes. If I didn’t do this course, I couldn’t see myself doing the volunteer work or getting a job.
Bridie: Food is an escape. It relaxes me; it’s something that I love to do. This job came up at Niro’s Cafe. I was looking for paid work, and I achieved that.
Niro had a cafe that wants to do platters and food preparation. It was a no-brainer; it was a perfect fit.
Bridie: I’m really looking forward to starting my first day there.
Carol: This is something I love about disability and what I do as well, is that, you know, you can meet someone like Bridie, and when I first met her, she was quiet and introverted and wouldn’t speak. And then you see this person blossom into something amazing. I have full confidence that she’s going to be fine. It was in her to do what she’s doing. She’s an amazing woman; she’s just a great human being.