[Nebraska-students] Action Plan, Part 2

[Joe Orozco]

Dear all:

In a landscape of grim statistics and dismal editorials regarding the bad
economy, the hope of the unemployment rate among the blind appears equally
worrisome.  While NABS should not make job readiness the centerpiece of its
operations, it should provide its membership one more added incentive for
sticking around.  To that end it is my opinion that NABS should consider
hosting a job fair at Washington Seminar.

In general, planning for Washington Seminar should begin in July, relatively
soon after the new board has been elected.  There is the obvious point that
the longer you have to plan, the less likely you are to stress out the
board, but for strategic purposes, the earlier the agenda is finalized, the
sooner you can begin selling the event to prospective funders.  Enter the
Strategic Initiatives team.

The team needs as much time as possible, at least four solid months, to
create the type of noise befitting the country's leading blindness student
organization.  Actually, there is no such thing as "too soon," but four
months will give this team the opportunity to shine at what they know how to
do best.  The team needs to be able to draft excellent marketing materials
to lure the students that are not yet planning to join the division at its
winter seminar, and in the case of my proposal, they need to be able to
recruit the participation of organizations and companies in the fields where
the membership is interested in becoming employed.  There are always job
fairs going on in the nation's capital, and there is no reason why an
organization like NABS could not partner up with the Independent Living
centers, Light House, the city's Department for Disabilities, local-area
universities  and the DC NFB affiliate to put together a well-organized job
fair.  With sufficient time, I do not see why the Washington Post could not
be enticed into scheduling its routine job fairs to meet that of the
Washington Seminar.  If it does not, the paper could still be used to
advertise the event on behalf of the division.

The Benefits:

1. Hands-on practice will always be preferable to living vicariously.  There
is great benefit to listening to three people in a row talk about how cool
their jobs are, but there is a greater impact to be enjoyed from having
those people tell you how to draft your cover letter, your resume and how to
polish your interview skills.  Besides, I've sat next to people who wind up
not listening to these speakers because they're perceived as stuck-up and
full of themselves.  I think they would shake off that perception if the
speakers gave concrete advice on how they did things to be successful.  Over
time I've become a fan of breakout sessions over general group speeches.
There is simply more room for personal dialogue.

2. Summer internships are not far around the corner from Washington Seminar.
DC is attractive to many college students.  Why not make a concerted effort
to ensure that our students get a unique opportunity to compete for those
positions.

3. Job prospects.  Students are not students forever.  Everyone is looking
for a permanent job.  On the surface the job fair would expose students to
potential employers and give them a very real means of practicing their
personal selling skills.  It makes NABS look proactive in helping its
members secure future employment.  On a subtle level things like job
readiness sets the stage for a NABS alumni network.  Many students graduate,
leave the division and do nothing more with the NFB because they never
participated in chapter meetings.  Integrating students into the larger
movement is an ongoing process, but what better way to keep people around
than to place these graduates in a position to help up and coming students?
The thing is, there is no grounds for an alumni network if the graduates
themselves were never given anything tangible in the first place.

4. Membership incentives.  As I've previously mentioned, people want a
reason to belong to your organization.  In this case we are looking for
reasons for people to want to come to Washington Seminar.  You bring them in
for a general session of well-chosen speakers.  You showcase our esteemed
NFB president.  You break out to smaller groups to talk job readiness, and
then you turn the crowd loose on your collection of potential employers.
The crowd moves out dressed to impressed, because one of the breakout
sessions will have talked about social skills and swagger.  True, some of
the locals may only come out to be a part of the job fair, but with
carefully planted board members about the room you ensure that every new
person is approached and given the pitch on why they should join the
greatness that is NABS.  Dedicate four or five hours to the event.
Coordinate it with the National Office to ensure it can be carried out in a
way that the maximum number of people can participate.  Besides, you should
be coordinating the event with Baltimore anyway to ensure that the success
to NABS translates to success for the organization at large.

Even though the meeting space is graciously provided by the NFB, there is no
reason why the student division should not begin learning how to carry its
own weight to help offset expenses.  It would take a few years to get to a
point of self-sufficiency, but things like the student annual banquet are
things that could be potentially picked up by a finely cultivated sponsor.
When you throw a job fair into the program, you're providing sponsors one
more layer of credibility, because you show them how you've been able to
partner up with a number of businesses to come out and be a part of your
activities.

So, from the top, the online registration process is modified to include a
question about future job aspirations.  The NABS board compiles the data,
and with the Strategic Initiatives team working at the helm, a database is
created of businesses and organizations in the fields identified by the
registered membership.  The task may seem daunting, but not when you have
other members in the organization in various occupations.  And, contacting
businesses out of the blue is not altogether a bad leadership building
exercise anyway.  Specific offices should be targeted in the Washington DC
metropolitan area with a well-written letter that is accompanied by a small
but compelling packet of what NABS is and what it does.  With the right
amount of sponsorship, the board may very well be able to afford to feature
these employers at the job fair with little or no cost to the businesses.
In truth, NABS could charge a very nominal fee for businesses to participate
even if sponsorship is available, money that could be used to create or
revise job readiness materials for the future.  I'm all for volunteer
service, but I am sure that carefully budgeted stipends to the board would
not raise too many complaints from the board members who are doing the hard
work.

But, it is important to plan and solidify the agenda early on to accommodate
this venture.  The agenda should be included in the pitch to businesses so
that they see how they will fit into the larger scheme of the winter
seminar.  It tells businesses you are prepared, organized and ready to be
taken seriously.  Businesses do not have to send representatives to your job
fair.  Make them feel ignorant for not participating.  By businesses I mean
nonprofits, government agencies and corporations.  Ideally they will have a
national scope so that the student from Ohio and Oregon are just as likely
to find an opportunity back home to take advantage of.

Now, the database of businesses and organizations would serve two purposes.
First, it would provide a springboard for the job fair idea, but second, it
would set the stage for a mentoring program.

I am thinking of a mentoring program where our students are mentored by
current professionals in their field of interest.  If the professionals
happen to be blind, excellent, but my recommendation would be that the
program not be tailored that way.  Students need to understand they're going
to be competing in a sighted world.  I would encourage sighted mentors to be
recruited to take on outstanding blind mentees.  First, it helps create an
avenue for education for the mentor.  He or she will be teaching the mentee
about a career while at the same time learning about blindness and what a
blind person really is capable of doing in the workplace.  The exceptions
are, of course, in situations where the student wants to go into the
blindness field, in which case it only makes sense that they speak to
someone in that chosen profession.  Second, the arrangement for the
mentoring program sets up networking opportunities.  In some cases the
mentor may even be able to offer the mentee's name for vacancies in their
office when the mentee has graduated.  We want people employed.  The
mentoring program could be one more vehicle to move people further in that
direction.

Perhaps this mentoring idea could be integrated into the existing NFB Link
program.  At the very least NABS should inquire into whether or not the
modules could be borrowed to create a mentoring program specifically for
students.  The initial work can be gleaned from the current registration
process, but thinking long-term, NABS should make the investment in a
web-based system that can match, track and promote both mentors and mentees.
There are free CRM systems out there to accomplish this, but the right
people need to be recruited by the Director of Online Strategies to help him
or her shape the project in a way that works smoothly and simultaneously
promotes NABS and the NFB.

This is an initiative I believe the Department of Labor would find worth
making a time or financial investment in.  Here again the Strategic
Initiatives team would need to spend time developing a case for why Labor or
some other national entity would find it beneficial to contribute services
or finances.  Talk to the American Foundation for the Blind about how their
system might be integrated into this proposal.  They're going to be just as
interested in a good case for why it is necessary as anyone else.  Do not
assume that just because an organization does work for the blind that they
have to do anything with or for you.

Like most everything else I've written about up to this point, these are
ideas that could be integrated at the state level.  Substitute the
Washington Seminar with your affiliate's state convention.  A convention
will draw the right volume of people and lend itself to a good public
relations campaign that should attract the right level of interest from
businesses.  If nothing else, the mentoring program could work better at the
state level because creating a curriculum for the program that involves
face-to-face meetings between the mentors could be more feasible, though
national planning should not overlook the means to bring mentors to the
National Convention to get the full depth of what the NFB stands for.

In summary, the problem of unemployment among the blind needs to be
addressed.  No doubt the argument will be made for how such an initiative is
beyond the scope of the student division.  I think the argument is without
foundation.  There are scores of blind people who leave the division to take
on a myriad of careers.  The problem is that the number is not high enough.
We need more students out there with a good job that is not always related
to the blindness field.  NABS can and should teach students how to be
productive students, but college is nothing more than an academic  training
ground for future success in a student's chosen profession.  We often tell
students that there is not going to be a DSS office in their future place of
employment and that they should begin to learn how to be independent.  True,
but there is always going to be an NFB, and if we can begin to cultivate a
sense of loyalty to the NFB by way of a proactive student division that
plays a major role in job readiness and job exposure, graduates will be able
to thank the NFB for the success they achieve and be more likely to stick
around and help younger students coming up behind them.  I am of course
willing to entertain arguments to the contrary.

The job fair can be a part of Washington Seminar 2010.  Use the success of
that event to build the resources necessary to build a mentoring program
that could be fully operational by 2011, and in the meantime, start putting
people to work in their chosen field.  Education students can work with the
Director of Education to write curriculum enhancers for teachers of blind
students.  Business administration and marketing students can be put to work
writing grant proposals, business plans and strategic plans that analyze
current strategies and make projections for future improvement.  Math
students could be enhancing a wiki project to show teachers and students
alike how it might be possible for a blind student to excel in required and
specialized math and engineering courses.  Journalism students ought to be
heavily involved in the production and marketing of the Student Slate.
Science students ought to be playing a bigger role in the planning and
execution of youth Slam.  Computer science and information technology
students should be working with the Director of Online Strategies to push
the web site forward to reach larger audiences.  David Dunfy, for all his
posts about the DJ Invasion, could be persuaded to host a NABS podcast?  The
point is, people are more likely to help you if you give them the capacity
to do something they would have been doing anyway.  If you can build NABS so
that students use the organization to complete classroom projects, there is
a win/win situation for both the student's grade and the improvement of the
organization.

Ambitious?  Of course it's ambitious.  Ambitious organizations create
legacies.  Mediocre organizations may as well stay home and play tiddlywinks
for all the impact they will accomplish.  The greater the goal, the longer
the list of objectives required to achieve the goal, and the more objectives
necessary to accomplish the goals, the more likely it is to learn how to use
all those objectives for the benefit of other goals in the future.  People
should not think of how difficult it would be to put on a job fair and
mentoring program.  People should be thinking about how the steps involved
in preparing for the job fair and mentoring program can help with the
preparation of student seminars, fundraising campaigns and general
membership recruitment, all of which will be addressed in future
installments.

To be continued...

Joe Orozco

"A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the
crowd."--Max Lucado
 

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