Here at Compass, trainees living with a disability regularly explore a world of creative arts and endeavours. That exploration and deliberate fostering of skills has helped launch so many amazing artists and craftspeople – truly talented humans who happen to have an intellectual impairment and/or autism.

Amongst the various arts produced are a range of beautiful and unique handcrafted cards created for a variety of occasions across the year. 

A little while back I was spending time at one of the Compass campuses and found myself watching the artists on staff supporting and encouraging that outpouring of creativity. One of the trainees, Luke, was putting the final touches to an extraordinary card he had made. On the front was a vibrant drawing of a phoenix… and inside the card was just a wonderland of colour, along with a variety of shapes that protruded from the card like the wings of the phoenix. Stunning!

Seeing my interest, one of the staff overseeing the work said to me “Don’t worry… we’ll trim off the pieces that protrude outside the envelope so it will still fit.”

My response was immediate… “No, please don’t do that. Let’s make a bigger envelope.”

When the session had finished, that staff member came to see me in tears. She told me that my throw away comment had landed like a bomb for her. “In that moment I understood what Compass was truly about. I just had such a shift in grasping the heart of my work.”

It’s the secret to a rich and inclusive world isn’t it? 

So often we find ourselves being ‘trimmed’ to fit in don’t we? Or trimming others for the same reason. But perhaps in that process we’re sacrificing many of the pieces that make us wonderfully human and unique. 

What might happen instead if we dedicated ourselves to ‘making a bigger envelope?’ It seems to me that this is one of the many gifts the people I work alongside… people with an intellectual impairment or autism… bring to this world. Hold out your hands, smile… and they’ll give you that gift.

Written by David Dangerfield, Compass CEO

See the article in My Weekly Preview on page 21