Five years ago, Rhodes University caterers were in a fix. They had a high staff turnover and had difficulty finding the right kinds of people to work in their kitchen. What they needed were people who could follow basic instructions, work well with others and were loyal.
And they found all these qualities in Luthando Ntile and Xoliswa Mbiza – two Kuyasa Special School pupils they hired to work in one of the dining halls.
Five years ago, Rhodes University caterers were in a fix. They had a high staff turnover and had difficulty finding the right kinds of people to work in their kitchen. What they needed were people who could follow basic instructions, work well with others and were loyal.
And they found all these qualities in Luthando Ntile and Xoliswa Mbiza – two Kuyasa Special School pupils they hired to work in one of the dining halls.
Their internship and subsequent employment proved so successful that now the university wants to expand the Kuyasa internship programme.
Rhodes is now set to employ 15 pupils from the school in its housekeeping section, the sewing room, grounds and gardens, engineering division and day care centre.
Riana Henning, from human resources together with Jay Pillay, the head of food services, approached Kuyasa Special School principal, Jill Rothman, five years ago with the idea of employing intellectually impaired individuals.
The programme consists of a one-year internship on a "shadowing" basis, where individuals are assigned junior and senior mentors. It's a system which has helped transform their lives and provide them with permanent employment.
For Ntile and Mbiza, the project’s first interns, it was important that an enabling and nurturing environment be created where they would not be stigmatised. They were assigned to St Mary’s kitchen, a smaller dining hall staffed by more mature men and women, to provide a comfortable working environment.
Pillay Ntile and Mbiza were allocated junior mentors – someone they could partner with to learn the job and acquire skills.
Kuyasa School focuses on domestic, practical and life skills. The Rhodes staff involved with the internship provide further life-skills training, such as budgeting, looking after one's family, relationships and HIV awareness.
Pillay described the progress of another intern in the programme, Lezelle Breedt, of Pretoria. She is currently doing her internship at Kimberly dining hall.
“When she started here she was all nervous and couldn't string together a sentence,” said Pillay.
A few months down the line, Lezelle’s English had improved remarkably and her confidence had grown. Pillay said the programme offered more than just employment, providing the interns with skills that could be put into practice in their everyday lives.
“And that is really how the programme has taken off. We have created employment,” says Pillay explaining how the programme had expanded into the housekeeping section, the sewing room, grounds and gardens, engineering and the Rhodes Day Care Centre.
Intellectually impaired people were stigmatised, Pillay said, and some people believed they were incapable of completing certain tasks. They were often overlooked by businesses and organisations in the broader community.
Pillay’s MA thesis uses this project as a case study and shows how the internship programme can be replicated and used in other businesses and organisations.
She says that more pressure is being placed on companies to report on their corporate social investment and corporate social responsibility, and her research could present opportunities for other companies to incorporate individuals who were intellectually impaired.
She believes that when big organisations consider "equity", their core focus is on issues such as empowering women and on eliminating racial discrimination.
“I feel people with disabilities should actually fall in the same category,” Pillay said.
She said the programme had not begun as a community engagement exercise, however.
“What it started off as was a retention strategy, our looking at retaining people. But what it has done is created an opportunity for community engagement,” Pillay said.
