[Ohio-talk] FW: The 70 Percent Solution

[J.W. Smith]

Dr. J. Webster Smith

President, National Federation of the Blind of Ohio

PO Box 458 Athens, OH 45701

740-592-6326

 

"Changing what it means to be blind"

For more information go to nfbohio.org

 

From: Suzanne Turner [mailto:sturner at ClevelandSightCenter.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 12:29 PM
To: JWSmithNFB at frontier.com
Subject: FW: The 70 Percent Solution

 

Dick Davis emailed me great information.  I thought I would share it.

 

Suzanne Turner, BSW, MPA
Employment Coordinator and Benefit Specialist

Cleveland Sight Center

216-791-8118 (main)
216-658-7350 (direct)
216-791-1101 (fax)
 <mailto:sturner at ClevelandSightCenter.org> sturner at ClevelandSightCenter.org

Visit our NEW website at  <http://www.ClevelandSightCenter.org>
www.ClevelandSightCenter.org

We have moved to our temporary address below while our building is being
renovated (use this address for visits & deliveries):
2490 Lee Boulevard, Suite 202
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118

Please continue to send mail to our permanent location address below:
1909 East 101st Street
P.O. Box 1988
Cleveland, Ohio  44106-0188

Our Mission: To empower people with vision loss to realize their full
potential, and to shape the community's vision of that potential.

*******************************************CONFIDENTIALITY
NOTICE*******************************************
This email including any attachments, is private and is for the sole use of
the intended recipient(s) and may contain copyrighted, confidential,
protected healthcare information and or privileged information otherwise
protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that any
unauthorized use, disclosure, copying, distribution, or the taking of any
action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please immediately
notify the sender via telephone or return mail and destroy all copies of the
original message. 

From: Suzanne Turner 
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 12:13 PM
To: Joel Zureick; Alexis Vinick; Sterling Garrett; Steven Woodard; Suzanne
Turner; Janice Hannah-Hardy; Jim Hlavaty; Nicole Kahn; Patricia M. Buckhold,
RN, BSN; Jassen Tawil; Tabatha Whiteman; Brooke Dowdy
Cc: Steven Friedman
Subject: The 70 Percent Solution

 

 

 

Braille Monitor

Vol. 51, No. 2                                                      February
2008

 

The 70 Percent Solution

Employment Preparation in a Center Environment

 

by Dick Davis

 

            From Dan Frye: Dick Davis, assistant director of BLIND,
Incorporated, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, delivered a reflective yet
practical presentation on the topic of preparing students in a center-based
environment for work during the Employment breakout session held on
Wednesday afternoon, December 5, 2007. He previously administered the
Minnesota rehabilitation unit serving blind people and worked as a manager
at the New Mexico Commission for the Blind. Over the course of his varied
career, Dick has generated and cultivated a variety of innovative solutions
to address the challenge of the unemployment and underemployment of blind
people. The text of his address follows:

 

What makes a prevocational training center for the blind different from an
independent living one? It's not the skills taught--most centers teach
Braille, cane travel (O&M), computers, home and personal management, and
some form of industrial or manual arts. It has little to do with the
qualifications of a center's staff, its building design, or the fact that it
may be part of a vocational rehabilitation agency.

 

The main difference is its focus. A prevocational training center is focused
on employment, on getting its graduates good jobs. That's the case whether
they go directly into employment after graduation or go on into mainstream
higher education or job training and from there into employment. The problem
is that most training centers don't know how to be prevocational centers,
and because of that fact their students fail to get jobs.    

 

A recent survey of graduates of the three training centers in our state
produced some interesting results. Initially the response rate of BLIND,
Inc.'s, graduates was very low in comparison to that of the other two
centers. However, when the survey team started calling our graduates in the
evening, their response rate shot up dramatically, meeting or exceeding the
others'. Our graduates were working, looking for work, or going to college
or technical school, not sitting at home.

 

Here are some ideas to consider and actions you can take if you want to make
your program a prevocational center. The list is intended to give you the
broad framework you need to start down that path. I know that the
suggestions work because I used them myself to transform the New Mexico
Orientation Center into a prevocational center, and we use them at BLIND,
Inc., our NFB training center in Minneapolis.

 

Think jobs, and think of center training as a job. Everything we do at
BLIND, Inc., has a career focus. Our curricula are designed to provide our
students with the skills and self-confidence they need to compete with their
sighted peers in today's labor market, and our instructors emphasize careers
in everything they teach. We set consistently high expectations for our
students' performance. Since we try to run our center the same way employers
run their places of employment, we expect our students to be in class and on
time. If they aren't, we dock their monthly maintenance payments for
tardiness or absenteeism. Is that cruel? Not really--in the real world
they'd lose their jobs instead.

 

Proposed action: Consider the ways in which you can develop a career focus
in all of your classes, and find ways to run your center like a place of
employment. Have consistently high expectations, and make sure students
experience the real-world consequences of their positive or negative
behavior.

 

Don't protect students: it weakens them and makes them more likely to fail.
A major problem in many training programs for the blind is that their staff
members reinforce the stereotype that students are fragile and need
protection from real life. That might be expected, given the number of
nurturing people in work with the blind; but, well intentioned or not, such
protective behavior turns out to be a curse. A protected person becomes
fragile, and a fragile person is poorly prepared for a competitive work
environment. As a result, such a person is far more likely to fail. Instead
of protecting our students, we use the structured discovery learning method
to help them take on greater and greater challenges. They start out doing
simple things with lots of instructor supervision and gradually increase
their skills and self-confidence until they are doing complex things with no
need for instructor supervision. In our classes, recreational activities,
and everything we say and do, we communicate our belief in our students'
ability to meet the challenges and rewards that lie ahead of them.

 

Proposed action: Work to eliminate the subtle ways your center may be
protecting students, and find ways to challenge them instead.

 

Don't teach your students that the world owes them a living-it doesn't.
Another major blindness stereotype, and a curse for many centers, is the
belief that it is the role of sighted people to take care of the blind. That
may work for SSI and other entitlement programs, but it has no place in the
world of work. Employers don't want to know what they can do for a blind job
applicant; they want to know what the applicant can do for them. They can't
afford someone who takes up the time of other workers. Anyone who wants to
get or keep a job must learn to put the employer's needs first. At our
center we spend a great deal of time working to eliminate dependency in our
students and replace it with more positive, employer-focused behavior. 

 

Proposed action: Since many blind people have been conditioned to receive
rather than give, you will have to spend a lot of time reversing the effects
of this conditioning. Address this issue head on in discussion seminars, and
find ways for your students to give back to the community through public
service projects or other kinds of volunteerism.

 

Think of your center as a manufacturing plant and your students as its
products. One chapter in the book Don't Send a Resume and Other Contrarian
Rules to Help Land a Great Job by Jeffrey J. Fox is entitled "You Are a Box
of Cereal." It's the truth-prospective employees are a product, and
employers really are shopping for the best they can get. In our center we do
everything we can to produce quality products that employers will want to
buy. That includes teaching our students the best alternative techniques,
building their self-confidence and self-esteem to new highs, and teaching
them the most effective strategies to sell themselves to employers. Since we
help our students get jobs and follow up afterward, we learn how well our
products are performing. The information we gain helps us continually
improve to meet students' and employers' needs.

 

Do your graduates have competitive job skills and a high level of confidence
in their own abilities? If not, you need to make them that way. To produce a
consistently good product, you need a curriculum designed to give your
students competitive skills and attitudes. A cafeteria approach, in which
they choose what they want to learn, won't do it. Would you buy a product
with missing parts? Employers won't.

 

Proposed action: Take a hard look at your graduates. Do they consistently
have competitive skills and attitudes? Do they get good jobs? If not, you
need to change your training curriculum to achieve that result. If you
currently use a cafeteria approach, consider replacing it with something
that produces more consistent outcomes.

 

Encourage your students to choose careers based on what they really want to
do, not on what they think a blind person can do. Our students usually
reconsider their career choices after they've been through about three
months of center training. The reason? Increased expectations and
self-confidence. It's the best time for them to do some serious career
planning. Many programs try to steer blind people into stereotypical
so-called blind occupations (the present one is customer service). However,
there is a direct correlation between what a person loves to do and his or
her likelihood of success. In our center we encourage all of our students to
choose their ideal occupation, and after that we help them figure out how to
do it as a blind person. We teach our students that a job's responsibilities
and the way it is done will vary from employer to employer and job to job.
We know from networking in the NFB that the job in question is probably
already being done by a blind person. Since our students learn to think
creatively and believe in themselves, they are likely to be successful in
whatever career they pursue.

 

Proposed action: Encourage your students to reconsider their current career
goals. Are their goals based on what they really want to do or on what they
think blind people can do? If it's the latter, help them explore the kinds
of careers they'd really like to do. NFB Link, the NFB Jobs listserv, state
and private career planning systems, and other resources can help with this
process. 

 

Teach your students modern job search methods, and show them how to deal
with blindness in the application and interview process. A wealth of
information is available about modern job search methods on the Internet, in
bookstores, and through state and private employment service offices. State
employment agencies often teach creative job search classes using manuals
available in Braille, tape, and other accessible formats. It's impossible in
this short presentation to go into any detail on how to handle blindness in
the application and interview process, but I can offer you the short
version. Mentioning blindness in a resume or cover letter can result in an
applicant's being screened out. If disclosing it won't definitely help, it's
best not to do so. However, it is essential that a blind applicant discuss
blindness early in the job interview to put the employer at ease and
encourage questions about alternative techniques and reasonable
accommodations.

 

Proposed action: Explore the many resources for job seekers on the Web and
in bookstores. Attend a creative job search class and use some of their
ideas with students. Read the Jeffrey Fox book mentioned earlier; it's
available in electronic form on <www.amazon.com>. Check Richard Bolles'
Website, <http://www.jobhuntersbible.com>, and read his book, What Color Is
Your Parachute?, which contains a section on job seekers with disabilities.
With your students listen to the teleconference Bolles did with Chuck Young,
president of Hadley School for the Blind. (Go to
<http://www.hadley.edu/2_f_past_seminar_hadley.asp>, and scroll down to What
Color Is Your Parachute? Recording.) Attend NFB conventions and seminars to
meet employed blind people, explore the resources on NFB.org, join the NFB
Jobs listserv, and network with people like us who have helped blind people
find jobs. 

 

I hope this brief presentation has given you some ideas you'd like to try in
your own center. Keep in mind that the most fundamental changes you can make
will be in your concepts and attitudes about blindness and in the subtle
messages about it that you send to your students. If you make those changes,
more will follow, and you will be doing your part to make the 70 percent
blind unemployment rate a thing of the past.

 

 

Suzanne Turner, BSW, MPA
Employment Coordinator and Benefit Specialist

Cleveland Sight Center

216-791-8118 (main)
216-658-7350 (direct)
216-791-1101 (fax)
 <mailto:sturner at ClevelandSightCenter.org> sturner at ClevelandSightCenter.org

Visit our NEW website at  <http://www.ClevelandSightCenter.org>
www.ClevelandSightCenter.org

We have moved to our temporary address below while our building is being
renovated (use this address for visits & deliveries):
2490 Lee Boulevard, Suite 202
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118

Please continue to send mail to our permanent location address below:
1909 East 101st Street
P.O. Box 1988
Cleveland, Ohio  44106-0188

Our Mission: To empower people with vision loss to realize their full
potential, and to shape the community's vision of that potential.

*******************************************CONFIDENTIALITY
NOTICE*******************************************
This email including any attachments, is private and is for the sole use of
the intended recipient(s) and may contain copyrighted, confidential,
protected healthcare information and or privileged information otherwise
protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that any
unauthorized use, disclosure, copying, distribution, or the taking of any
action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please immediately
notify the sender via telephone or return mail and destroy all copies of the
original message. 

Suzanne Turner, BSW, MPA
Employment Coordinator and Benefit Specialist

Cleveland Sight Center 
216-791-8118 (main) 
216-658-7350 (direct) 
216-791-1101 (fax) 
sturner at ClevelandSightCenter.org  <mailto:sturner at ClevelandSightCenter.org> 

Visit our website at www.ClevelandSightCenter.org
<http://www.ClevelandSightCenter.org> 

Our transformation thorugh renovation is nearing completion!  We are pleased
to announce effective Tuesday, May 29th we will be back at our permanent
location: 

1909 East 101st Street
P.O. Box 1988
Cleveland, Ohio  44106-0188 

Prior to May 25th, please continue to use our temporary address for visits
and deliveries (for U.S. Mail, please use our P.O. Box above): 

2490 Lee Boulevard, Suite 202
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118 

Our Mission: To empower people with vision loss to realize their full
potential, and to shape the community's vision of that potential. 

************************************** CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE
**************************************
This email including any attachments, is private and is for the sole use of
the intended recipient(s) and may contain copyrighted, confidential,
protected healthcare information and or privileged information otherwise
protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that any
unauthorized use, disclosure, copying, distribution, or the taking of any
action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please immediately
notify the sender via telephone or return mail and destroy all copies of the
original message.