Marginalised people have the right to work

Jeanne McDonagh is CEO of the Open Doors Initiative, which offers marginalised people a pathway to work. She lives in Dublin with her Sicilian husband, Saro, and their cat

The Open Doors Initiative started out as a programme in Diageo called ‘Learning for Life’. I was working as Head of Society and Engagement in Diageo at the time, and they had done programmes before with youth from disadvantaged backgounds, but in 2018 it expanded out.

That first course gave training

in hospitality skills to people in direct provision in Mosney. It came after a High Court decision that people in direct provision could work in limited circumstances, and the course allowed them to train up and work. The graduation was in June of that year, and David Stanton, who was then minister of state for equality, immigration and integration, gave the parchments. He was really engaged by the work and gave the impetus to scale it up and get other companies engaged.

Three months later, in the September, the Open Doors Initiative launched with David Stanton and the then taoiseach, Leo Varadkar. For a while, it remained incubated by Diageo, while we built up.

We went standalone on

March 12, 2020, the day the country shut down. It was an epic start-up. I spent an hour with my head in my hands and then decided I just had to get on with it.

I’ve had an eclectic working

life. I was with Our Lady’s Hospice as their comms manager, and was Stephen Donnelly’s campaign manager in 2016. My longest job was with the Bar Council as their head of PR, before leaving that to work on the Marriage Equality referendum. So I suppose I’ve always worked around people’s rights and causes.

With the original 2018 course, the participants didn’t necessarily go on to work in hospitality, but they got the skillset and training to engage in society and see the possibilities.

The Open Doors Initiative goes beyond working with people in direct provision and also works with youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and people with disability. Over 70pc of people with disability are unemployed.

We offer marginalised people a pathway to employment.

We work with a group of NGO partners who connect us with participants, and a whole range of multinationals, semi-state organisations and SMEs, offering different training programmes and ways of upskilling people into employment. We also offer paid employment or long-term internships. It’s not tokenism. Everyone who comes to us is on their own merit or skills.

Open Doors started slowly last

year, as everyone adjusted to Covid and people were in crisis mode. However, we helped 2,300 people in various pathways and that was with only 33 companies. We’re bigger now, with 80 companies working with us in a host of areas.

We’ve started a mentoring programme, where 80 employees from various companies started mentoring 80 participants, working on everything from gaining employment, training, and getting apprenticeships. We take our lead from our participants and what they hope to attain. This is more than aspiring to entry-level jobs. They can aspire to run the company if they want.

Our aim is to make companies

aware of people from different backgrounds and to make them more disability-confident. We work to show them how that can benefit their company, and their existing employees, as well as the person they employ through Open Doors.

It’s human nature to choose people who resemble and mirror yourself, but if you want success, you need to expand that and this makes a company more resilient and able to weather change.

What we need to embed in company culture is that hiring difference isn’t just something nice, or something for the good times. It’s something that really works to improve everything and everyone. l