Nadia van den Heuvel (41) has spastic tetraplegia. With her company Ictoria.nl, she prepares people distanced from the labour market for work, including in IT.
“I can still see him before me, the recruiter whose mouth once fell open in amazement when I rolled into his room. The first thing he said: ‘But your CV was so good!’ ‘That may be true,’ I replied, ‘because I didn’t have to type that with my legs.’ I don’t mince my words and have no problem showing others what being disabled is really like. I may be disabled, but there is nothing wrong with my brain. Because the muscle pressure in my body is too high, I sometimes move uncontrollably. This can be painful, making it difficult for me to walk. For longer stretches, I use a wheelchair.”
“I come from a multicultural family and the fact that my father had a girl was, according to him, a punishment from Allah. That I turned out to be disabled, he saw as a double punishment. We had little money and when I went to school in the 1980s, facilities were different from today. I was sent to a mytyl school, especially for children with disabilities. There, I did not get the idea that they believed in me and my future. There, you are more or less groomed to spend the rest of your life in the care system, or if you are lucky, packing things on the assembly line somewhere. It was painful. Whereas with every other child the focus is on what they would enjoy doing later, for me it really felt like ‘where can we dump Nadia as soon as possible’. I wanted a full-time job no matter what. Via-via, I ended up at the court as a telephone operator and that went really well. I had always known I could do it, but now others saw it too.
We really need to look at labour participation differently. It is a shame that we write people like me off so quickly, not being open to what they can do, sometimes with some adjustments. After court, I ended up at the Public Prosecutor’s Office as a business management consultant. There, I coordinated multi-million dollar projects. I earned a more than average income, even though I was in a wheelchair. I wanted to do the same for fellow sufferers. It started itching to do something with that.”
At one point, I met an IT professional who had only 40% vision and saw every application fall short of that, even though he was in a field for which there are many vacancies. In no time I got him a job. That was the final push, this is what I wanted to do with my life. It is now three and a half years since I started Ictoria.nl. My business card says talent pioneer instead of director. We help people enter the job market, for example by teaching them certain skills, and deliver them to a company where they are a good fit. It is great to see how an initially sceptical employer nevertheless becomes convinced of someone’s added value. I have bumped up against quite a few walls, but keep pushing forward because I am convinced of the importance. My biggest dream is that in about five years’ time, my company will no longer be needed because, as disabled people, we are considered full. I work eighty hours a week, quite awkwardly with my disability. But doing this mission half-heartedly, I can’t. And then when I get a message from someone who is totally happy in a new job, that can make me SO happy.”
Tekst: Sara Madou
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