To mark this year's DUOday, TU Hamburg invited people with disabilities to a tour of the university campus for the second time. Held annually, this day of action has, since 2017, given people with disabilities the chance to gain insight into a wide range of professions for a day. At the same time, it offers institutions and companies the opportunity to discover the skills and potential of people with disabilities. To this end, they form a duo and spend a working day together.
Inclusion Officer Mareike Theeß and TU Chancellor Arne Burda welcomed the participants. They gave a brief introduction to TU Hamburg, where around 100 of its 1,700 employees have a severe disability or are treated as equivalent. The duos then got to know each other better over Franzbrötchen, coffee and tea, before heading off to the various work areas. In total, seven duos from seven areas came together – including the Legal Office, the WorkingLab, the Career Center, the Institute of Production Management and Technology, the Finance Department, the Company Integration Management (BEM) Officer, and the Inclusion Officer.
Mareike Theeß, who organised the day together with Bärbel Urbanek-Urbach and in cooperation with Hamburger Arbeitsassistenz GmbH and the Elbe-Werkstätten, gave an insight into part of her work. Together with political scientist Daniel Fassian, who uses a wheelchair, and his assistant Hanna Braun, they inspected the campus for accessibility. Are the entrances easy to reach and clearly signposted? Are the toilets fully usable, with an easily accessible sink and lighting? Do automatic door openers work reliably, and how long do the doors stay open? What for many people remain unnoticed footnotes of everyday life are, for people with physical disabilities, crucial structural details that determine how freely they can move around their environment.
Daniel Fassian therefore hopes that the perspectives of people with disabilities will be taken into account as early as the planning stage of a construction project, so that accessibility does not have to be added as an afterthought. „If Article 1 of the Basic Law, ‚Human dignity shall be inviolable', is to be brought to life, accessibility must not be a privilege," said Fassian. „Rather, it must become a matter of course in society. The university, as a reflection of social diversity, should embrace this principle just as much as society as a whole."
A working group to make the campus more inclusive
Mareike Theeß found the change of perspective made possible by DUOday especially valuable: „The day showed me how much organisation, attention and energy people in wheelchairs have to muster in everyday life. And I was impressed by how much openness, intelligence and ambition Daniel brought to these challenges." Theeß was also surprised by the many details that she had not noticed at all when walking around the campus without Daniel Fassian: „Despite being personally sensitised, I realised how easily obstacles are overlooked if you do not experience them yourself." Even though a great deal has already been done for accessibility on campus, there are, according to Theeß, still things that can be improved. „In the buildings we visited there were ramps, automatic door openers or appropriate access points and accessible toilets. Unfortunately, these were not always in working order – which, in my opinion, shows that these obstacles need to become even more present in people's minds."
Since the beginning of the year, TU Hamburg has therefore had a working group called „Barrier-free Campus", which includes, among others, the Representative Body for Severely Disabled Employees, the Press Office, the Inclusion Officer, the Occupational Safety Department and the Officers for Students with Disabilities. The working group's tasks include taking stock of the buildings with regard to their accessibility. In order to make information on the accessibility of the TUHH buildings as easy to access as possible, this data is then to be recorded and published in the „Wheelmap" app developed by Raul Krauthausen, an activist for inclusion and accessibility.
Hamburg's DUOday is organised by alsterarbeit gGmH, ARCHE NOVA gGmbH, ARINET GmbH, Impuls Reha & Arbeit gGmbH, Das Rauhe Haus, Die Fähre gGmbH, Elbe-Werkstätten GmbH, Hamburger Arbeitsassistenz GmbH and Leben mit Behinderung Hamburg.
