Позитивные изменения. Том 2, №4 (2022). Positive changes. Volume 2, Issue 4 (2022)

In this column, we will share inspiring stories of the people who managed to achieve substantial changes in their communities, regions, and even countries. The first guest of the new column is Roman Aranin, CEO of Observer, a company producing and repairing rehabilitation equipment for the disabled. We talk to him about ways to create a social model of understanding disability, why an entrepreneur needs positive thinking, and how to do things in Russia that have never happened.

Roman Aranin

Yulia Vyatkina

Editor, Positive Changes Journal

How would you define the impact of your company, the Observer?

We have created a new social model, where people with disabilities themselves determine what they need and what it should look like.

For the region in general, this turned out a very beautiful project. An enterprise appears that is run by a wheelchair user, and where 25 % of the employees are wheelchair users, and what they do is not bending staples all day long, but operate assembly lines, welding robots, or milling machines.

That is, we show that with a properly adapted environment, a person with disability can do absolutely the same work as a person without a disability.

Our social model is about giving people a job, rehabilitation, assisted living. We create all this ourselves, and the state receives service in its purest form. Roughly speaking, if the government built the same thing, it would probably take five years and cost 150–200 million rubles.

Meanwhile, we did it all with our own money. Ten assisted living cottages cost about 35 million rubles, the rehabilitation center another 50 million. That is, we did it in a year and a little less than 100 million.

How did you get to all these results?

What periods can be distinguished in your company's development?

The road was long enough. We started making wheelchairs in 2009. Four years later, we set up a public organization called the Ark, and we started employing people with disabilities – two or three people at a time.

First to the wheelchair repair shops, then to the resource center that worked on creating an accessible environment, then to the beaches, etc.

Eventually we felt the need to do something more serious, because someone's wives, someone's mothers kept coming to us, asking for help: "Hire, hire him” and we just didn't have any place left to hire people. And then we made up our mind to build a factory.