Why a Hanoi Café Copied a Bangkok Inclusion Program

In a fifth-grade homeroom at the International Community School of Bangkok, and behind a coffee counter nearly 1,000 kilometers away in Hanoi, two programs are testing the same premise: people with intellectual and developmental disabilities do better when treated as contributors, not as recipients of charity. One is a school inclusion program. The other is a vocational training center built because a Bangkok social enterprise proved the model could work.

The connection isn't incidental. Mike Beard, who co-founded the Hanoi program with his wife, Michelle Beard, is the Students Incorporated host's longtime friend and business partner, and the program he built borrowed its playbook directly from a Bangkok nonprofit. What links a life skills classroom to a coffee shop in Vietnam is a bet that inclusion, done right, isn't a favor. It's a job.

From the Self-Contained Room to the Homeroom

At ICS, Mary Kate teaches elementary life skills to students in kindergarten through fifth grade. In part one of the episode, she described a shift in how the school handles inclusion: rather than keeping students with disabilities in a self-contained classroom all day, ICS now places them in general education homerooms for as much of the day as possible, joining peers for reading, science, social studies, and chapel, and going to specials like art and music alongside their grade-level classmates.

That approach lines up with published research on inclusive education. A study by Indiana University's Center on Education and Lifelong Learning, which tracked a cohort of Indiana students with disabilities from third through eighth grade, found that students placed in general education classrooms for 80 percent or more of the school day scored significantly higher on state assessments than peers in more segregated placements, a gap the researchers said could be attributed to the classroom setting itself, not just underlying differences between students. "This is one of the first studies to find such conclusive evidence in favor of inclusion," the study's co-author, Sandi Cole, said at the time.

Mary Kate's account matched that pattern in a more personal register. She described a student who, after watching a classmate with a disability solve a math problem, asked why that student wasn't in a more advanced class, a small moment she said reflected exactly the kind of assumption-testing inclusion is supposed to produce. Her advice for judging any interaction with a student in the life skills program: presume competence first.

The idea of presuming intelligence, not looking at individuals with disabilities and assuming that they're not able or not capable, that's oftentimes when we're proved wrong the most.

ICS has also built a formal peer pipeline called Links, where high schoolers serve as teaching assistants in life skills classes. Mary Kate said the first cohort of three Links called the block a highlight of their day, not an obligation but a friendship they hadn't expected.

A Blueprint Borrowed From Bangkok

Part two of the episode shifts continents. Mike and Michelle Beard run Imago Work, a vocational training program in Hanoi for young adults 16 and older with cognitive disabilities. The name comes from imago Dei, Latin for "image of God," the idea, rooted in the Beards' own faith, that everyone is created with gifts meant to be used, not simply accommodated.

The program's origin is personal. The Beards' son, Evan, now 26, has Down syndrome. When the Beards and their business partner opened Simple Coffee in Hanoi, they brought Evan on to work in the shop and watched what a job did for him that special education alone hadn't: a sense of purpose and dignity. They decided to build something for other families facing the same gap.

They didn't invent the model from scratch. Imago Work's approach, a one-to-two-year vocational training center that places graduates directly with partner businesses, was copied from Steps with Theera, a Bangkok organization founded in 2016 by inclusion specialist Max Simpson and pastry chef Uang Hokrakitya. Steps with Theera has become proof the model works: according to the organization, it grew from four trainees to 30 within three years, and 100 percent of graduates have gone on to paid employment, a record that has drawn interest from schools and businesses across the region, including a virtual internship partnership with a Bangkok international school.

Now in its third year, Imago Work has built five partner businesses in Hanoi, including the InterContinental Hotel, Simple Coffee, and Joma Bakery, and is beginning a new partnership with the United Nations International School. Training runs along three tracks: basic life skills, social and communication skills, and job-specific vocational skills, which the Beards break down into granular steps, such as how to pull an espresso shot, froth milk, clean a window, or serve a customer.

The Barrier Isn't Skill. It's Framing

Ask the Beards the hardest part of the work, and the answer isn't training difficulty. It's how businesses first approach the idea. "When we're approaching people about this, they tend to think of it first in terms of charity," Mike Beard said in the episode, "how can we help people with these cognitive differences," rather than seeing what those employees bring to a business that's short-staffed and looking for reliable workers.

The data backs up how steep that framing problem is. An August 2024 International Labour Organization working paper estimated that roughly 1.3 billion people, nearly one in six people on Earth, live with a significant disability, yet only about three in ten are active in the labor market globally. Those who do work face what the ILO calls a "disability wage gap": on average, workers with disabilities earn 12 percent less per hour than other employees, a gap that widens to 26 percent in low- and lower-middle-income countries, according to the same report. Roughly three-quarters of that global gap can't be explained by differences in education, age, or job type, meaning it isn't a skills problem so much as a hiring one.

That's the gap the Beards say they're trying to close one business at a time, and they're not alone in the region. A Hong Kong café founded in 2011 by a mother whose daughter is autistic has employed people with a range of disabilities ever since, according to the South China Morning Post, part of a broader pattern of Asian social enterprises treating hospitality work, coffee, baking, hotel service, as an accessible entry point into competitive employment rather than routing people with disabilities into sheltered workshops separate from the regular labor market.

What a Year at the InterContinental Looks Like

The clearest evidence the Beards offered wasn't a statistic. It was a name. Zwi, one of Imago Work's first trainees, has Down syndrome, like the Beards' son. Michelle Beard recalled him arriving at the program "not knowing a single thing about how to pull a shot or how to froth milk." Over the course of his training, he learned to make the full menu of coffee-shop drinks. He's now more than a year into an internship at the InterContinental Hotel, working in the bakery on cake and pastry packaging, no longer a trainee the staff had to be introduced to carefully but, as Michelle Beard put it, part of the team.

That shift, from a hire the staff felt uncertain about to a colleague they've come to rely on, is the outcome both programs are chasing, whether the setting is a Bangkok homeroom or a Hanoi hotel kitchen. Proximity changes assumptions faster than awareness campaigns do. A classmate who solves a math problem, a barista who nails a drink order, a colleague who's been on the team for a year: each is a small, specific correction to the presumption that disability and capability don't overlap. Multiplied across a homeroom, a coffee shop, and eventually a labor market, that correction is the whole strategy.

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