Power to the People with Disability
Jess Colgan loves a saying about people with disability: “If you’ve met one person with disability, you’ve met one person with disability.” Describing herself as a ‘reformed accountant’, Colgan spent several years working as the financial controller of a major catering and events business in Melbourne, and a significant portion of her career in the hospitality sector, before transitioning into the social enterprise space.
In early 2022, Colgan, alongside her brother Brett Duncan, a qualified pastry chef who is profoundly deaf, founded online plant-based patisserie GingerSnap. Later that year, in what Colgan describes as her “personal and professional worlds colliding”, she became the CEO of All Things Equal, a social enterprise cafe in Melbourne staffed by an all-abilities crew. This move, she says, was driven by her desire to see more people with disability not only employed in the hospitality space, but earning award wages and in leadership roles.
From their sunny, yellow-fronted corner spot in Balaclava, a suburb in the city’s inner southeast, All Things Equal serves up tasty vegetarian and pescatarian dishes like smashed avo and shakshuka. But what sets it apart from your regular brunch spot is its core mission: to empower people with disability to find meaningful employment and rewarding hospitality careers and help foster more inclusive hiring practices across the industry.
Transformative training programs
All Things Equal operates an Employment Pathway Program for people living with disability, aged 18 and upwards. Its training program encompasses three key stages: a one-year Pre-Employment Program, where trainees develop their hospitality skills in a professional environment; an Employment Program, where trainees move into award-wage employment; and a Transition to Employment Program, where All Things Equal supports trainees in finding and working in new roles.
“Historically, people with disability have been segregated from the community across education, employment, and housing,” says Colgan. “So, our mission is to bring people with disability into the community – and a cafe is a beautiful way to do that.”
“Breaking down those barriers and ensuring that we have people with disability consistently connected with the community changes perceptions,” Colgan says. “It changes people’s perceptions about what a person can do, what they can achieve, and what their contribution is to our community.”
The social enterprise cafe functions as a learning hub and a professional environment for trainees to develop and enhance their hospitality skills before transitioning into new roles outside the organisation and into the industry.
At the third and final stage of the Employment Pathway Program, All Things Equal works closely with large businesses, such as major hotels and catering companies, to take on and transition new trainees into roles. Each role is specifically tailored to match the business’s needs and the skills and requirements of each trainee.
“We help them [the employer] to craft that role,” says Colgan. “We provide training to their team and to their managers to help them feel supported and confident as employers of people with disability. Then, once we actually place a person into a role within that employer, we partner them with an employment mentor.”
Creative solutions with Square
All Things Equal use Square for Restaurants POS in their cafe, with Square Register for processing payments and Square iPad POS Square Stand for taking orders. The simple functionality of these solutions is a key component of ensuring that all roles – both back- and front-of-house – are inclusive.
“We use iPads for all of our ordering,” says Colgan. “We have all the menu items numbered on the iPad. So, that means for people who can read, it’s fine. For people who can’t, they can base things on the numbers and where they’re placed on the iPad, and we try to use the little icons, where possible. All those things really mean that we can be accessible to anybody who wants to work in front-of-house.”
Bianca Stern, Head of Impact at All Things Equal, agrees, noting that using Square has allowed the team to be very creative in how they provide workplace accommodations in their training.
“I’ve seen, over time, our trainees become a lot more confident using Square because the system is really simple, once you get the hang of it,” Stern says. “Trainees start off not so sure how to use an iPad – they are used to using it for more recreational purposes – and, all of a sudden, they’re using it in a professional way. Over time, I’ve seen how trainees nail the Square system to the point where they can now take orders independently.”
It feels really good working with other people who help me and support me learn hospitality skills. I take orders on the iPad, greet customers when they come in, polish cutlery, make milkshakes and smoothies, deliver food to the customers’ tables and clear their tables when they’re finished.”
Alex Cherny → All Things Equal trainee
Square Analytics also helps provide All Things Equal with invaluable insights into what the cafe’s bestselling products are. According to Stern: “The insights through Square have been really great for us to understand patterns and trends with customers. Things like coffees versus foods, or what the most popular dishes are. It’s been really great as a data source.”
The future of disability employment
In early 2025, All Things Equal released its Equal Opportunity: A Blueprint for Disability Employment in Hospitality report. Based on global research, case studies, and industry insights, the report explores ways to grow the meaningful employment of people with disability in the hospitality sector over the next decade.
The report identified that people with disability are twice as likely to be underemployed as those without disability. While the unemployment rate for people with disability is 7.5%, that jumps to 13.5% for those with severe or profound disability. It’s numbers like these that drove All Things Equal to call on the hospitality industry to create 1,100 award-wage jobs for people with disability by 2035, during which they will aim to train another 4,500 employers in the hospitality sector on inclusive employment practices.
Stern believes inclusive employment can help address the staff shortages currently faced by the hospitality industry. “We complain about the fact that it’s such a transient workforce, and that we never have staff members who actually stay in the role. Yet, we have got 100 people on our waitlist dreaming of their first-ever paid opportunity, who we know actually want careers in this industry. It’s a no-brainer that we need to start doing better by being more inclusive in our employment.”
Meanwhile, Colgan highlights the importance of representation, highlighting the old saying: ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’.
“I believe that it’s really important that we lift people with disability up into leadership roles, into entrepreneurial roles, so that the young people coming through into employment now can see that these big opportunities do exist for them,” she says.
There’s no limit to the opportunities that can exist for a person if we just put the right support in place and always take a strengths-based and empathetic approach to mentoring and supporting them.”
Jess Colgan → CEO
