Matthew’s One-Year Work Anniversary
Celebrate Your Achievements
Just over a year ago, Matthew Anderson decided he wanted more than washing dishes - he also wanted skilled work that mattered to him. He approached MaxEmployment for help, and they put him in touch with The Easy Read Toolbox at a time when our founder, Karen Headley, was developing the ELSEY project.
ELSEY stands for Easy Life Skills for Every Youth. The Easy Read Toolbox has been a first employment opportunity for many young people with disability, and they were unanimous in saying they weren’t getting the information they needed about life and employment in a way and style that was right for them. So, we’re looking to help fill that gap, but with easy-to-understand resources created by young people with disability under the mentorship of adults with lived experience.
As a self-published children’s author and cartoonist, Matthew was a natural fit for creating some ELSEY comic strips to illustrate simple life tips for youth, from choosing the right suit for an interview to dealing with task overwhelm at Christmas. To date, he has published over 40 strips for the Toolbox, and as his confidence grew, so did his ability to identify useful tips for other young people and portray them with humour and understanding.
But the skills development has been so much more than cartoons. He’s learnt “how to have meetings with my employers using the Teams app”, and when and how to ask for feedback and input in an asynchronous environment, that is an environment where people are not always working at the same time. He has also learned to use Canva and has recently expanded his drawing skills to include diverse cartoon images of people. All of these skills were part of his personal development journey as an artist, but also an employee in a remote, flexible working environment. He now creates Easy Read images on demand for clients and is proud to be part of the team.
“I am most proud to be working for the Easy Read Toolbox, mainly because they hired me thanks to my passion of cartoon drawing, a job that was suitable for me because of my drawing skills.”
See Matthew’s comics at the bottom of our ELSEY Project Page.
