Whitney Harris Seeking opportunity for workers who are ‘a different flavor of normal’ WINTER 2016 INFLUENCE | 115 Whitney Harris always thought she’d be helping people, but this isn’t the path she started out on. The eighth-generation Floridian went to St. Petersburg College, earning her degree in orthotics and prosthetics. She completed a residency in Colorado, and became a certified prosthetist. But Harris said she quickly realized it wasn’t for her. “I didn’t like Colorado, and I didn’t like working in the prosthetic industry,” she said. “I didn’t like the way people without arms and legs were being treated. It started weighing on me.” So in 2014, she took the first opportunity she could find in Florida with a nonprofit that worked with and advocated for individuals with disabilities and their families. She landed at The Family Café in Tallahassee, and changed the course of her life along the way. “A lot of the people you identify as rising stars, there’s no limit. What the big advantage with Whitney is, whether she wants it or not, she is a role model,” said Tony Carvajal, the executive vice president of the Florida Chamber Foundation. “She’s just not making a big deal about it. She just does.” The 26-year-old joined the Florida Chamber Foundation in January as its special projects coordinator and assistant to the executive vice president. While it might not be a sexy title, Harris has been tasked with developing and leading a newly created internship program for people with disabilities. When she’s not doing that, she’s coordinating the Florida 2030 Town Hall Meetings, a key part of a major Chamber Foundation initiative. And she is also a person born with a disability, a fact she doesn’t let get in the way of her life. Born without a fully developed right arm and right leg, she climbed trees with her siblings. She sews and she knits; last year everyone on her Christmas list got homemade hats. While many people might consider her an inspiration, including Carvajal, her boss, Harris tries to to shrug off the idea. “It upsets me to no end that people seem to equate me living a normal life ‘despite’ a disability as an automatic inspiration,” she said during a speech at the 2016 Future of Florida Forum. “Let’s pretend for a moment … that everyone in the world was the exact same. We all have one arm, one leg, and one thumb. We get up, put on our legs, drive to work and provide for our families. Going to work wouldn’t be a point of inspiration, it would be a point of our everyday life. It would be normal.” At the Chamber Foundation, she’s helping to create an environment where a person with disabilities can get a job and thrive in the Sunshine State. She’s already proven herself in a short amount of time, and said Carvajal sees her staying in the policy world “managing more and more programs, hopefully with us. “She has a good head on her shoulders, she has vision, she can see what the future of Florida looks like,” he said. “She’s clearly someone we’ve passed the torch to, inside or outside of the organization.” There are an estimated 700,000 people in Florida with disabilities who are capable and interested in working, but can’t find jobs. Launched earlier this year, the internship program works with chambers of commerce across the state to identify local businesses that could potentially hire people with disabilities as interns. “There’s still a large number of people with and without disabilities that don’t understand that having a disability isn’t weird or strange, it’s just a different flavor of normal,” she said. “We want to earn a living, provide for our families and help develop the economy.” R I S I N G STARS
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