Caroline Casey lights a candle

The founder of Amnesty International, Peter Benson coined the phrase

“better light a candle than curse the darkness”

In other words taking even a small insignificant action is better than just complaining.

35 year old Caroline Casey lit a candle 7 years ago. She left her management consultancy job in Accenture to trek across India on an elephant for a 1,000 kilometres to raise awareness of disability issues. She then set up the Aisling Foundation in 2000. Aisling is the Irish word for vision or dream

The Aisling Foundation recognises company excellence in best practise towards people with disabilities. With 100 organisations representing 10% of the company’s population now taking part, the O2 ability awards is now a major event in the business calendar. Last Wednesday, the awards ceremony was held and shown on RTE on Thursday.
There’s growing awareness people with disabilities are not just a problem, but can make a very substantial contribution to a better society.

Caroline has just finished an Ashoka scholarship to support the development of an international franchise for the ability awards. She wrote about it in the Irish Times and you could see the turmoil and frustration of trying to get support for her ideas in a very honest way.

She comments on issues such as spending all our time trying to be the same as every body else, yet the true success stories are people who stick to their own beliefs and stand out from every body else.
She talks about feeling sorry for herself, sleepless nights, about giving up, key people not being willing to even meet with her, shame, avoidance of action and fear of failure. Eventually she decides to try and ignore whether she’s going to fail or succeed, but at least she’s going to make the effort.

We can all learn from Caroline. Fear of failure and being different, stops us from doing so many things that we would love to do. Yet like Caroline, if we accept we’re scared of the next step but try anyhow, our lives could be so much better.

Finally you may not be aware,but Caroline has been visually impaired since birth.

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