 Abledon On Air is sponsored in part by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering neighbors with disabilities to be at home in the community. Additional support for Abledon On Air is sponsored in part by Washington County Mental Health Services, where hope and support come together. Welcome to this edition of Abledon On Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns and achievements of the definitely able. I've been your host, Lauren Seiler. On this edition, we will focus on Champlain Community Services to discuss the world of employment and other community services they provide with us to discuss this important topic is your name is Bella, please. I'm Elizabeth Seiler. Okay. And... And you're the... You're an employment counselor. Yeah, so I'm the director of the way to work program, which we also have the school to work program and the bridge program under that umbrella. Okay. Explain the missions and goals of Champlain Community Services. So Champlain Community Services, our mission statement, we provide essential supports to people with intellectual disabilities and autism, helping to create a place where everybody participates and everybody belongs. That's the mission statement, but really what we're doing is trying to build a broader community of support for people with intellectual disabilities and autism. And one of the most important ways that we do that is through our employment program. Explain the process of people and employment within your program, like, do they fill out an intake, how does that work, what kind of job do they want? Yeah, it's a pretty broad question. Yeah. So the way to work program, school to work and bridging, as I said, that's all under an umbrella of our employment programs. So way to work is our adult program. So that's for individuals that are seeking to either change jobs, get a new job, be promoted in a job, learn new skills. But our programs are very much individualized. So the process for each individual is different. A person may come in with a resume already built and we go on to talking about references and industry of choices and where their skills and their talents lie. Or a person may come in knowing what Vermont has to offer with an employment opportunity. So it's very much individualized. Under the adult program, we have school to work, which is the same concept as supporting folks with different abilities to be able to go out and seek employment and understand what Vermont has to offer, what skills are needed in order to get into the competitive business community. And we're working directly with the school systems within that. So we work with case managers and whatnot within schools on trying to identify what students are ready to be able to go into that phase of their life. Bridge program is one step underneath that. And that is a pre-vocational program helping students really to become more well-rounded. And their lives, you know, the simple things of independent living, understanding what nutrition looks like and how to pack for lunch for work. How to dress for a job. How to dress for success, exactly. You know, and all those things that we need for our bodies to be very healthy to be able to go out there and really be our best selves when we're looking for employment. That also has a huge piece of the career exploration. Really, you know, kids coming out of school or students coming out of schools are doing the, you know, working at Hanna-Fords and that type of stuff. This opens up a student's mind to the other opportunities that are out there. You know, larger and more career-driven activities where a student can really learn the steps of employment and how to go about that. Okay, now, historically, there has been discrimination and people with special needs being discriminated against in the workplace. I know we have the ADA in place, but in your opinion, and in terms of your opinion, there's a two-part question, in your opinion on discrimination in the workplace, and how does your program combat discrimination within the workplace? I think discrimination and also inclusion is an attitude, not necessarily a problem, and we as an agency really promote dignity of all and treating people with respect and seeing that everybody has something to offer. I'm sorry, can I just interrupt? I think it's also, I agree with you, that people more and more in Vermont are being able to experience working with people with different abilities, and there certainly still is discrimination. We still find that, but I like the approaches that the more opportunities employers have to work with people with different needs. Example. Exactly. Can you give an example? Well, I mean, many of our employers have never had somebody who has intellectual disability or experiences autism working with them, so it might be their first time, they might have a preconceived idea of what it's like, they might be afraid, they might be intimidated, and just getting to know somebody. I'm sure you've heard the saying, knowing one person with autism is simply knowing one person with autism. Everybody is extremely different. And autism is one of those things, I don't like saying things, but one of those situations where it's unexplained sometimes. Yeah. Like, okay. And people make assumptions. Mm-hmm. Now, here's another thing. According to the ADA, like, for example, if you place someone on a job or in a job experience, do you make sure that that person or that group of people is taken care of? What I mean by this is that it's an accessible place to work. Do you, like, go out to the job site and see to make sure that things are working properly for that person? Yeah. Yeah. So our supports are, we not only support the individual, but we also support the business community. So helping them to find qualified, eager individuals that want to work and do a good job. So with that, we're always building the partnership between the individual we're supporting and also the business, and together we're a full team that really supports the person and the combination. Supposedly, if you place somebody, let's say at a place where they have to do, like, forklift and that type of job, inventory and things, and if you see it's too dangerous for them, do you place them somewhere else, or do you find? No, we do a lot of training because it doesn't matter if you have a disability or not a disability. If an area is a dangerous area, it's about training and being aware of what the dangers are and building the knowledge and, you know, regardless of where an individual goes, they're going to encounter things that are unsafe. No, what I mean is, what I mean, okay, in that case, since you said that, like, if a person comes to you and says, okay, for example, if I was part of your program and I say, look, I don't want to work with them anymore, I feel that it's not a good place for me, can you help me find someone else? Sure, they're not happy with where they're working. Exactly. Or if there's problems, or if, how do I deal with a boss that yells and screams a lot? Obviously, if you're going to work with them, I have a coronary experience also. So if you have a chef that yells at you but doesn't mean to yell at you, you know, how do you deal with that? To educate the chef a little bit. Or if they're in a live truck, let's say journalism, and you hear yelling and screaming, it's not necessarily at that person, it's the nature of the job, you know, so how do you deal with those kinds of things? And we try to educate in every possible way we can. And, you know, every moment that we can have the opportunity to educate, we want to educate. But we also want to be respectful of the individual. And we want them to be in an environment where they're always going to find their best self. If that continues to be an issue, we obviously need to move on and find something that matches better. So they can be successful. You know, we all have to be in places that were successful. Okay. Explain job coaching, because I've been a job coach before. I've gone to plenty of work sites, and I've worked with individuals. What exactly, explain where the mentor is, and a job coach, or if they're one and the same, within your agency. Generally a mentor is not paid, right? A job coach is. So a job coach is. I've had paid mentor shifts, but go ahead. So our job coaches are there to support individuals at their job sites, to navigate and to really build on their success, to give them, you know, just an extra opportunity, have a little bit more oversight and training, or maybe to acclimate themselves to the environment, or to build those natural supports and find commonality in our coworkers. The job coach can also provide transportation, and be a mentor, you know, to help model what success is at a job site. And really just to be there to help the individual navigate the employment process. Resumes, extremely important. Do you help with resume workshops? How does that work within your classes, or anything? And I think we have to be very creative when we start thinking about resumes and building different opportunities for people to show their talents and skills in other ways. We're really looking into how we can do video resumes, or audio resumes. Paper resumes. So like a reel, like what we're doing here. You know, paper doesn't always show the best qualities in everybody, so we really want to try to see how we can enhance that and help people to really see the abilities that somebody may have in the qualifications and that they can bring to the organizations. So we do resume building, sometimes it's individualized and sometimes it's in the group. It's really dependent on the needs of the individuals that are seeking positions. Do you guys help with, I don't know if it's a grand funded thing, but okay, let's say if a person wants to look nice for an interview, but cannot afford a suit or tie, do you guys help them with things like that? How does that work within your agency? We have in the past. Absolutely. Yeah. And sometimes we'll use fundraising dollars that we have from the agency. We don't have any specific grant funding for that, but the idea is to help people to get a job. Because I'll give you an example, New York and some of the big cities, like I'm familiar, there's an organization called Dress for Success in New York, and if a person doesn't have a suit and needs one, they either have used clothing or they find a suit for that person. Thankfully, Vermont's a pretty casual place. Yeah. Well, I mean, you never know. Do you have to dress? Do you have to show up for an interview? Dress for success. Exactly. Dress for success. I mean, if you're going to dress in a lifeguard, you don't come in a suit or I don't know. Maybe you don't show up for your lifeguard interview in a bathing suit either. All right, so what are some of the misconceptions around people who especially is when you first meet them? Oh, my goodness. Wow. You know, I think a lot of the times as we see fear, where individuals are unsure how to communicate, or unsure of a... That's a huge one. Yeah. People are afraid of people they don't know, right? And that it's easy. Often we put people in boxes or we think of that sort of us and them thing. So a lot of times people with disabilities are described as dangerous. They automatically think it. Yeah. For example, if you're mentally challenged, they automatically think that... You might be harmful. Harmful. Yeah. That people aren't very smart. You talk about communication that people can't communicate. Not only can they not understand things, but that they also can't express themselves. And they don't often believe that people with disabilities have different ways of communicating, like all of us, using body language, using verbal language, sign language, sometimes facilitated communication. There's so many different ways that each one of us can communicate. And it's the same with people with disabilities. And I think sometimes there are assumptions about people with disabilities that they don't have the same challenges that we do. Explain what you mean by assumptions. Well, I mean, assumptions like that people with disabilities don't want to have families, that they can't have partners in relationships. I'm married to it. Exactly. Exactly. There are a lot of assumptions that... And there's sort of... Some people think that people with disabilities are childlike. And that's one of the biggest assumptions that happens sometimes we act like children. Well, sometimes I act like a child. We're all adults. And that's one of the biggest things that we try to make sure that employers and the community at large understand that people with disabilities are people like every one of us. They may have challenges. They can have issues with mental illness. They can have issues with substance use disorders, sexuality, all of the challenges that we see in our society today. Racism, sexism all impact people with disabilities. Right? The same as all of us. Where have been some of the placements that you guys have placed people? You don't have to... Oh my goodness. You don't have to say specific people or names. Just like corporations. Oh, yeah. How does the corporations... Yeah, we have pretty much helped support people find jobs in every sector of the business community from manufacturing to computer development organizations. Childcare. Childcare. Hospitals. Hospitals. People are private business owners. Yes, we have entrepreneurs that we've supported to build their small micro-businesses. So, you know, it's wherever the interest is we seek. So, for example, if a person wants to learn obviously that person is not going to work for ABC right off or ABC, but if a person wants to learn or job shadow somewhat in journalism, what would be the first step that that person would have to go through? Yeah, so the first step would be exploring what their community connections are within that field of want or field of desire, right? Yeah. To find out, okay, does my friend have a friend that works at ABC or does my mom work at ABC? Or really to find those networks within our community that can introduce us and get our foot in the door to go talk to people. That's one of the great things about Vermont is it's such a small state that... You're going to work in an affiliate station or you might work. Yeah. We always look at additional potential as well. An individual may be an astronaut. Well, in Vermont, you're probably not going to find a job doing that type of work. Maybe aeronautics. But they're right. So we look at all that additional potential. This is the industry that captures your heart and soul. So where do we go from there? What can we find that will give you that same feeling but in a different location? Okay. What has been your experience in the field of employment before Champlain Community Services? Yeah. So my past adulthood was accounting and human resources. And then I came to Champlain Community Services and things changed quite a bit. What did I do before this? Yes. I worked on wooden boats. I was doing trades work and I was an artist. Interesting. But I've been in the field of disabilities for 25 years now and still do little art, sometimes do little trades. Mostly do this stuff. Now Champlain Community Services, how long has the agency been in Florida? So we just had, it's our 51st year right now. Our 50th anniversary was in 2017. We had celebrations all year long. Who started Champlain Community Services? Families. A group of families came together in 1967 and decided they wanted an alternative to Brandon Training School, where people were going. The years played a little, well here's the thing. In terms of employment, the downside to it, back in the 70s they had something called sheltered workshops. That's how we started. Right. So explaining how, I don't want to call it back to the future but past, present, and future. Explain what a sheltered workshop was and then how you guys really came to be and why. We started as a sheltered workshop. Why did it call it sheltered? What was the reason behind it? The name is what it was. It was a workshop where people were sheltered from the community and they were really confined to that one area. It was a congregate work site, meaning everybody came together in that place and did the work. What type of work would they be doing? piecemeal work, really. You would have manufacturers often come to the organization and say, I need to have these bags put together or I need to have these widgets assembled. Something like Capitol Candy. You put stuff in the candy bag and you ship it off. Sounds just like it. The people who were served or employed by CCS at that time, they would be paid by the piece by how many things they were able to do. You can see that if they didn't have a lot of dexterity and couldn't move very fast, their paycheck wouldn't be very high. In other words, if they could only move slow and put together one product per day, their checks would be six, seven bucks. No, not even that. We have old checks from three or four dollars for a week's work. It's not fair. We've come a long ways from them. The upsides to that were families were new. At that time, all families really cared about was that the people were safe. It wasn't so much about whether or not they cared about community. There was still that idea that the community didn't care about people with disabilities, and so they just really wanted that sheltered. Sheltered was worked two ways. It was sheltered from the community, and the community was also sheltered from the people in there. And I think for a long time, that was what they wanted. So that's basically discrimination. It absolutely was discrimination. But it was the first step toward what we're doing now, because that was better than Brandon Training School. What was short answer? What, in the shortest possible way, what was Brandon Training School? So if people don't understand what that was, because I can explain in New York, in New York we had something called Willowbrook State School. Yeah. We are all the Rivera... I remember that, yeah. ...sort disparities. What was Brandon Training School? So it was our statewide institution where people that... Any person that the state didn't feel comfortable being out in the community were sent there. And so that was people with mental health issues, substance use disorders, and disabilities. If you were classified as... I hate saying my word, but mentally retarded. Absolutely. When you weren't, you were sometimes sent somewhere. Yes. People were misdiagnosed a lot of the time. But even the state... Brandon Training School was actually started by young women who were indigent, maybe who had had children, out of wedlock, young. They were put there because the community wasn't comfortable with that. It was really sort of like a place where people who didn't fit in the community somewhere else were sent. And it was a training... Misfits, quote, quote. For sure. And the training part was the idea was that they could learn skills and they could do training. But really what happened is, as they did work, the money came back to the training school. It didn't come to the individuals. So the next step was, you can see it's a progression, going to a sheltered workshop. People were actually getting their own paycheck. It just wasn't really valuable income. Now, etiquette... people with special needs and etiquette on the job. Certain words obviously are not used anymore. The old word. You know, mental retardation is a diagnosis. It's not the person per se. Or retardation. Because if you look up definitions of certain words, they don't mean what they say. You know, it's just a clinical... Now, my question is this. How do you train employers if they don't already know already? Do you guys do sensitivity training within how to treat someone with a disability the right way? How does that work within... That's one of the best questions. Am I asking the wrong question? No, you're asking a good question. I truly believe that employers are just respectful. We do a lot of modeling. We can train our community by how we deal with things ourselves. We're treating an individual with respect and dignity. And as a true person, then everybody tends to just kind of gravitate towards that as well. We don't do sensitivity training at the job sites. We do normal... How do we build commonality? How do we find where everybody is naturally tied together somehow? What is that? What does that look like? Because it's so person-centered. It's person by person. I wouldn't want to go into an employer and say, this is how you work with someone with a disability. Every one of us should have an opportunity to be in a workplace and get to know people as we are, as a person. Nobody went into my place of employment and said, here's how you work with someone like Beth. Right? For me, that's somewhat discriminatory. And I think the idea is that... I'm not asking the wrong question. No, I think it's an excellent question. It's a great question. Because it's an important point to be made that every person is individual. Every person is unique. And every workplace has to kind of get used to the people who work there. And we're all different. And there isn't one way to teach a workplace. This is how you deal with people with disabilities. Because we're also different. By doing those trainings, we're actually showing that this person may be different. And that's not what we're trying to highlight. We're trying to highlight how this person has commonality. When the person goes to the employer and says, look, because I know that on a job interview, you don't have to say you have a challenge. Right? You don't have to. But I tell certain people... I say, look, this is what I'm dealing with. How can you make your... Because I'll give an example. My job deals with computers. I'm dealing with scripting. I'm dealing with things. So to make my job easier, computers now, historically, they've changed. Because you can easily tap your screen and make it larger if you need to see. Or at home, from time to time, I have a home computer also. I use something called ZoomText, which helps my visual impairment. And I can adapt it to me. So to add on to that too, another thing that we do is we do employment profiles. Where the individual then has the control of what they want the employer to know about them. But the employment profile is really designed to say, this is what I need. Sometimes I cannot articulate it, but this is about me. This is how I work. These are my skills. And this is the best way to communicate with me. And those have been very powerful at the job sites. Now, adaptability. Let's say someone that wants a job tells the employer, look, because of my challenge, I can only work 20 hours a week, or 25 hours, whatever that is. I can't work a full 40 hours. How do you work with that? Within your agency. As far as what a person can and cannot do. Because, you know, of certain challenges, how does that work? Everyone of us has parameters around what we can do and what we can't do. Exactly. And we call that a lot of job curving, where we'll talk with the employer and see what their needs are. And then we'll match them to a candidate that best fits those needs. Employers also like to have individuals that are only working 20 hours a week, because that's all the job entails. So it's that building of the relationship with the employer and the individual to find out what the needs are and go from there. Future goals, we have a little time left, but future goals of Champlain Community Services, anything else you want to add? Oh, my gosh, we're a pretty ambitious agency. We always have something on the horizon that we want to do. We've expanded a little bit. We have some new initiatives. We want to work with other agencies around job development, other populations around job development, not just people, people with all different kinds of abilities who might have challenges to workplace employment, like maybe veterans. What are some of the projects that you work in? If you want to say some of that. What are some of the projects that you're working on now that you want us to... Yeah, so recently we started working with people who were visually blind or visually impaired. That was kind of a new area for us to understand complexities and the challenges in that population. We've looked at veterans groups, maybe new Americans or refugees who are coming in, what the... Immigrants, or immigrants, yeah. Who are, you know, what their unique challenges are. We're seeing ourselves more and more as not just a disabilities agency but an organization who supports people getting to work. I mean, I think one of the things we find is important to Vermont, is getting people to work. And one of the most natural ways for our community to come together is through the workplace. We all build natural relationships at work. Now, this is... I don't like putting politics in a mix. But as you know, a lot of things are being cut. You know, services have been cut past and that type of thing. And due to the administration that we're in, if you were to give a message to Washington to say how important employment is for people with special needs and getting out in the workplace, what would you say? One of the beautiful things about the work that we do is that it has such great rewards. I mean, there's good data. There's people going to work not only helps them financially but it also helps to build, you would say, social capital, helps to build relationships, helps for overall health, helps reduce incarceration, helps reduce substance use reliance. What do you mean by incarceration? Going to jail. Helps people. I mean, honestly, if we're engaged in work and doing well in building relationships, people just tend to stay out of trouble a little bit. So there are all these incredibly data-supported benefits of employment. So those kind of things, it gives us an opportunity to really show that. I mean, the political climate is always going to be in flux. There are, you know, constantly, you know, we should, frankly, we use public dollars and we should be scrutinized for the work that we're doing and we feel really good about how we... scrutinize health, sir. ...by looked at. I mean, if we're a Medicaid-funded agency, those are public dollars, and I think it's... I'm not surprised that people have questions about what those dollars are going towards, and we're really proud of how they show up. And frankly, when things are tough politically, they're always tough politically, but when there's extra scrutiny on organizations like us, it just gives us an opportunity to show how good we're doing. Okay. So knowing this, now, are people scared sometimes about hiring people with special needs? Why are we not? Not scared, but worried. Again, it goes back to the fear-based of not understanding the disability or how to communicate and how to work with this person. And also, the fear of accommodations. And that's a total myth, you know. Because accommodations don't really cost money to... No, no, they don't cost much at all. And a lot of times the accommodations aren't related to any financial means. So, you know, it's about the education. It's going out there and educating the value of folks with disability and their ability to do the job. So, again, it all comes back to education and helping people understand that we're all different in our own ways. And it's about getting a job done and having the right support. Anybody can work. And we try not to make people feel bad about their biases to begin with. I mean, the reality is, people haven't had a lot of experience with people with disabilities. And the best way to sort of build that alliance with us is to give them opportunities to meet people and to not shame them for not understanding what they haven't experienced. But to say, listen, understand, maybe you haven't worked with somebody who's been different. That's unfortunate for you because you've missed a great opportunity. And then that usually builds a, you know, sometimes people are surprised or they have, you know, it gives them an opportunity to really look at their biases themselves and work on them. And our support is also there for the employer. You know, we're there for them. If they're unsure on how to communicate or they're unsure of how to deal with a certain issue that comes up, we're partners. We're there to help. We're there to help their whole organization to really build that strong diversity. Yeah. Okay. Well, I would like to thank you for joining me on this edition. Available down there. Thanks for having us. Thank you. It was a pleasure. No problem. For more information on Champlain Community Services, where can they turn? Our website is CCS-VT.org. And if you could just, you can just search Champlain Community Services too. Okay. Is there a phone number that they can reach? 8-0-2-6-5-5-0-5-1-1. Can you repeat it one more time? 8-0-2-6-5-5-0-5-1-1. Okay. Well, that puts an end to this edition of Available Down There. I'm Lauren Seiler. Arlene is off today. But we'll return next week. And we will return with another exciting episode Available Down There. I'm Lauren Seiler. Again, we are sponsored in part by Green Mountain Support Services. Thank you, and see you next time. Available Down There is sponsored in part by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering neighbors with disabilities to be at home in the community. Additional support for Available Down There is sponsored in part by Washington County Mental Health Services, where hope and support come together.