Workforce Wednesday

Celebrating the 5 and 18

Happy Anniversaries to me! On 1/2 I celebrated 18 years supporting the disability community on a full-time basis and today, on 1/6, I celebrated 5 years at JVS Boston. If I had ever pursued formal education in my field - which I have not[1] – I would have long since secured my Ph. D and hopefully earned tenure by now.

As it is, I am still a proud godforsaken generalist, a practitioner who has often worked my way into positions of leadership within the organizations that I serve. As I told the attendees in the introduction to our MA-APSE Employment Matters Conference last October, I do not consider myself an expert. To claim the title of expert, I think that I would need to have an expansive vision of how the immense and profoundly diverse capacities of the disability community intersect with the needs of a service oriented, global, highly digital, and rapidly automating economy that elevates the interests of capital above the flourishing of humanity. Alas, while typing the latter sentence I was overwhelmed by the enormous gaps in my knowledge of fields as diverse as disability studies and computer science.

So, not an expert. But I am a learner with a prodigious work ethic who is fiercely committed to the disability community. Thus, I want to take a few moments to explore a few of the lessons I have learned in my 18 and 5 in the disability focused workforce development field.

First, five lessons that I have learned at JVS:

1. Effective workforce development requires considerable scale. While our disability team has 19 people, we are a part of a larger organization that has over 230 full-time professionals working with multiple populations in numerous sectors to meet employer needs and create an inclusive workforce. That significant scale provides opportunities for career seekers to pursue employment in their particular field of interest. I am proud to be 1 of the 230 at JVS who partners with career seekers and employers to create a diverse workforce.

2. Connecting transition age young adults with disabilities to paid employment and career pathways before they leave high school - usually at age 22 - is the most important work we do. During my first month or two at JVS, our beloved former CEO Jerry Rubin asked, “if connecting young people with disabilities to employment is our most important contribution, why don’t we invest all of our resources in that work?” There are answers to this, such as the vital role the leading workforce development organization in New England has in providing opportunities for adult career seekers with disabilities to advance their careers, but Jerry’s question has definitely provoked our effort to help young adults with disabilities access employment and connect to a career track before their 22^nd birthday.[2]

3. There is power in being a practitioner. Throughout my time at JVS - unlike much of my time as a leader at Triangle - I have maintained a caseload that includes at least one career seeker from each of our diverse programs. Besides grounding the work that I do on a daily basis, this work helps me understand at least a little of the pressure our career coaches face. There are pitfalls to this approach for sure - at times it can be tempting to focus on the needs of my caseload instead of my bigger picture responsibilities - but I figure that if heads of surgery are still expected to operate and most senior law partners still serve as counsel, then disability-focused workforce development leaders can continue to coach.

4. I still believe in sharing every resource that I have - except for my talented colleagues - with other colleagues and organizations that are on mission. The career readiness resources that we develop for transition age youth, a friendly connection to a funder for invaluable support resource, and employment opportunities that our clients cannot fill should be shared with open hands. I believe in collaboration because everything we do builds on the brilliance of workforce professionals and disability advocates who came before us. If I am desperately holding onto a training resource or an employer relationship my hands are not free to reach out for the next opportunity or put my hands to creative work.

5. I still require significant executive functioning support. I often have a pretty clear vision of where we should go and I have become overwhelmingly average at developing systems and implementation plans. But I still need a supervisor and colleagues to establish themes like “The Year of No!” that will keep my aspirations reasonable. Moreover, I need talented implementers beside me on a daily basis to turn dreams into reality and reinforce questions, concerns, and critiques that can take a long time to penetrate my thick head. Micah and Joanna as well as Rosa and Taciana[3] before you, I could not and would not want to do the work without you.

And 13 additional lessons I have learned over 18 years:

6. Segregation is our greatest enemy. Youth with disabilities are still often served in separate education settings that are poorly designed and segregated from their non-disabled peers for questionable reasons. Thanks to new proposed regulations from President Biden’s Department of Labor, we have a chance to finally put an end to the practice of paying workers with disabilities sub-minimum wages.[4] However, even if sub-minimum wages are eliminated,[5] segregated sheltered workshops and day programs – many of which offer scant access to the competitive employment, regular gym visits, and occasional bar hops that make so many of our lives worth living – will remain. Moreover, America continues to imprison more of its citizens than any western nation and the federal government estimates[6] that 38% incarcerated Americans live with at least one disability. The Disability Rights movement, which is directly inspired by the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, is morally opposed to segregation and committed to working relentlessly for meaningful integration. The work most definitely continues.

7. Parental expectations - and, by extension, the expectations of employment established by employment professionals - are the deepest, darkest magic we have. Paul Wehman and team’s analysis[7] of the National Longitudinal Transition Survey demonstrated the power of parental expectations when it reported that students with disabilities five years out from high school graduation were 21% more likely to be employed if their parents expected them to work. Our clients should harbor no doubt that we expect them to enter the workforce and succeed.

8. People with disabilities have incredible capacities for establishing successful careers and living fulfilling lives of their own choosing. The nonprofits that accept local, state, federal, and philanthropic resources to assist the disability community should constantly be looking for opportunities to improve their current services and develop innovative solutions to the very real barriers that people with disabilities confront. In this work you are either growing or dying. It takes constant effort to stay on the high side.

9. Employers are usually not the problem. If career seekers with disabilities want to pursue employment at an existing company or business, they are likely to find employers who have a personal connection to disability - whether it is their own, their child’s, a neighbor’s, or a niece’s - and would love to see an employee with a disability succeed. It is the responsibility of the career seeker and their support team to identify how the career seeker’s strengths and skills can support the businesses’ objective. The primary barriers to employment for disabled career seekers in my experience are a lack of early exposure to work and targeted training that helps career seekers develop the skills that employers need.

10. Working as a grocery bagger is not the problem. Securing your first job as a grocery bagger at 22, 32, or 42 is the problem. Early work is a key part of every child’s education, whether they have a disability or not. Learning to work in retail, food service, or childcare between the ages of 14 and 22 is even more important for youth with disabilities. Research suggests that the latter youth are 19% more likely to be employed 5 years after high school exit if they had paid work experiences[8] - not internships, volunteering, or provider or school run micro-businesses, though those have their pace - during their high school years.

11. “I’ll get old before I’m good at this. Who’s the President? What year is it?” Hayes Carll is talking songwriting, but the same is true of employment professionals. In all but a very few cases it takes a year to be oriented to the work. To get good and salty at it requires years of training and retraining. The latter cycle is iterative and I am delightfully stuck in it.

12. “Get ready to ask everyone you’ve ever known for a connection or a resource that will help your clients.” That advice was given to me by Sean Greene, who provided invaluable training to me in my earliest days. The people who are at the forefront of this work are often ferocious networkers. The good book wasn’t lying when it said, “you do not have because you do not ask.”

13. As Keith Jones and Taciana Saab have been teaching me for years, we are not here simply to help people get jobs, we are here to help people build careers. Every innovation in the workforce development space - like JVS’s current Work Early, Expect Success initiative that provides industry education, access to early work, and employment focused parent coaching for 14 - 16 year olds and their families - must focus on helping people with disabilities cultivate careers that will support and enhance their “one wild and precious life.” There is no organization in New England that is better resourced or more committed to equipping people with disabilities[9] for career success than JVS Boston. I am working my ass off to be worthy of this opportunity to serve my community beside colleagues that I love.

As I told my invaluable colleague yesterday, I am more than halfway through my career. I am so grateful that I stumbled into this work and received this calling. I realize that I could not do this work without the patient support and executive functioning expertise provided by Kellie. As I’ve said before, nonprofit spouses are the real martyrs to the cause.

I cannot wait to get off this 6:20 am train and get to it.

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[1] In truth, I have never taken one credit bearing academic class focused on disability studies, rehabilitation counseling, or nonprofit management.

[2] When secondary education for the students with the most significant disabilities ends.

[3] While I am focusing on work here, on the home front I appreciate the executive functioning supports that Kellie provides.

[4] Which, as Doug Crandell brilliantly documents, can be as little as Twenty-Two Cents an Hour.

[5] And such elimination is not a foregone conclusion since hundreds of retrograde providers with poor business plans are fighting to maintain sub-minimum wage.

[6] https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/disabilities-reported-prisoners-survey-prison-inmates-2016#:~:text=criminal%20justice%20system.-,This%20brief%20presents%20findings%20based%20on%20data%20collected%20in%20the,U.S.%20general%20population%20(15%25).

[7]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265859594_Predictors_of_Successful_Transition_from_School_to_Employment_for_Youth_with_Disabilities

[8] See Wehman, et. al, above.

[9] Or many other populations that face many other disabling challenges like economic displacement and unemployment.