American Association of People with Disabilities

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American Association of People with Disabilities

Disability Mentoring Day Coordinator Call 2017

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

12:00 p.m. – 12:40 p.m.

Remote CART Captioning

Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) captioning is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

This transcript is being provided in rough-draft format.

> Zach Baldwin:Hello, everyone. This is Zach Baldwin with the American Association of People with Disabilities. I want to thank you all for joining today's call. We are right at 12:00p.m. Eastern time so I'm going to give it another minute or two to allow some of our additional participants to dial in. We'll get started in just a couple of minutes.

[CART/Captions Standing By]

> Zach Baldwin:Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining today's call. I'm going to give it one more minute for folks to dial in and then we'll go ahead and get started.

[CART/Captions Standing By]

Conference recording started.

> Zach Baldwin:Hello, everyone. This is Zach Baldwin with the American Association of People with Disabilities. I want to thank you all for joining today's Disability Mentoring Day Coordinating Call for 2017. We're going to go ahead and get things started.

Before we jump into things, a few call logistics. Today we'll be reviewing Disability Mentoring Day and discussing ways that coordinators can get involved and organize successful events to support job seekers with disabilities, specifically high school students or college students with disabilities who are getting ready to graduate so we can support them in getting connected to employment opportunities in their local communities.I'll share a little bit about some of the work that AAPD is doing around Disability Mentoring Day.

Then we'll hear from a few of our guest speakers. We have folks from Maine, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania who have all successfully organized Disability Mentoring Day events in the past. They will share some of their experiences and what they've been able to do to help give you an idea of how you can organize this year.

And at the end of the call we'll have time for an open question and answer period if you have any questions you would like to ask. So if questions come up as the speakers are presenting, please hold those, write them down or make a note, and we'll be sure to get to them at the end.

We do have remote CART available for this call. The link was sent out in the email when you registered, as well as my email this morning. If you are participating via CART and have a question, I'm logged into the chat box there; so you can go ahead and chat your question and I will read it aloud when we get to that.

So Disability Mentoring Day, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is actually an initiative that was started at the White House with the Clinton Administration back in 1999 and was since transferred over to AAPD to serve as the national coordinator. As I mentioned before, it's a largescale national effort to connect job seekers with disabilities to mentoring and job shadowing opportunities in their community.

The goal of Disability Mentoring Day is twofold. First, by connecting students and job seekers with disabilities to lead to opportunities for helping those folks explore potential career opportunities or employment opportunities for themselves, to learn a little bit more about businesses in their community, meet some business owners or employees, to start to develop a mentoring relationship that will help them achieve more successful employment outcomes.

The second goal of Disability Mentoring Day is on the benefits that come to the participating employers. Just being able to have some direct interaction with people with disabilities, potential employees with disabilities, helps to counteract some of those unconscious biases or stereotype that some folks hold about people with disabilities and what they can do in the workplace. So we try to benefit both the students and the employers that we work with through Disability Mentoring Day.

Before I turn it over to our first speaker, Darcy Brockman, from Maine, I want to give an example of how AAPD has engaged in Disability Mentoring Day with one of our corporate partners, ColgatePalmolive. I'll give an example of how we worked with them last year in 2016.

We partnered with ColgatePalmolive. They initially reached out to us wanting to get involved in Disability Mentoring Day as part of their efforts to focus more on disability inclusion in the workplace. They had just restarted their Employee Resource Group for Employees with Disabilities and were looking to do more in that realm. So we helped them organize a oneday Disability Mentoring Day event in October of last year, at their headquarters in New York City. We identified a handful of students with disabilities, recruited them, and brought them in to the ColgatePalmolive headquarters in New York.

We kicked off the day with just an opening kind of welcome reception and breakfast as a way for folks to arrive, start to network a little bit with some of the ColgatePalmolive employees. That first meeting was open for anyone in the company who wanted to come by and say hello, meet the students. We had the leaders from Colgate's Employee Research Group say a few words to kick offer the day.And then we had each student matched with a mentor which was an employee from a different division at ColgatePalmolive. And each student went with a different mentor for about 90 minutes to do a job shadow with that mentor and meet the other employees that the mentor worked with, sit in on some conference calls or meetings, and just get a bit of a firsthand experience to learn more about a certain division or department at ColgatePalmolive and what they were doing.

After that first experience we broke for lunch, again had an open kind of networking opportunity so the students were able to chat with their mentors or other employees who came by to meet the students.And then after lunch we did a second round of job shadowing and each student was matched with a different mentor from the company and then again went through that same job shadowing experience, got to meet other employees, sit in on meetings or conference calls, learn a little bit more about what that division of ColgatePalmolive does.

And throughout all of that, too, there were discussions around the students and their mentors about what it's like being either a person or an employee with a disability and how to navigate that specifically at ColgatePalmolive.

After that second job shadow experience we brought all of the students together with their mentors and had a companywide event towards the end of the day at ColgatePalmolive. Everyone who was at the company was invited to attend. We had a speaker from AAPD talk about disability inclusion in the workplace. We also had some executive leadership from ColgatePalmolive, Diversity and Inclusion Office, say a few words and share Colgate's commitment to hiring and supporting employees with disabilities. And then we had a panel of the participating students and some of their mentors share their experiences during the day and their thoughts on disability inclusion.

So it was a great entry point for ColgatePalmolive to really focus more on disability inclusion in their company, a great experience for the participating students who learned more about what Colgate does and some of the different business functions in that office. They were all currently students at the time, so thinking ahead to potential employment opportunities. And it was a great experience for the participating mentors to work more closely with students with a disability and really just helped ColgatePalmolive's leadership and employees realize how they can be more inclusive of people with disabilities.

So, I'm going to pause there. I'd like to turn it over to Darcy Brockman, who is the Business Account Manager and Youth Employment Consultant with the Maine Department of Labor, Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.

Darcy, if you're on, if you could maybe just introduce yourself briefly and say a little bit about what you do with the Vocational Rehabilitation and then go ahead and share how you participated in Disability Mentoring Day last year.

> Darcy Brockman:Great. Thanks, Zach. I appreciate you having me today.

I am the Business Account Manager for the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services for the State of Maine. I work with area schools, promoting services that we do and also offering either group tours or some individualized services as well.

A recap of what we did last year. We had two days of events. We serviced about 41 students during those two days. We also reached out to the Maine Business Leadership Network and were able to contact some businesses that were very welcoming to host an event there.For example, one of the events that we did was with a local hotel in the area where we brought students to that hotel where they were able to tour the facility. Then we brought them back to our career center and taught them about the career center and the resources that they have available to them.

I also brought in TD Bank. And they were able to do some mock interviews with the students as well. We also reached out to a local college, very welcoming. They did an allday event with the student where the students were given tours of the facility, management, security, and dining service, as well as the director of human resources also spoke to the students about the hiring process and interviewing skills.We also invited the Maine Chamber of Commerce to join us for these events.

Another example of a tour we did was at TD Bank where the students attended another allday event at their TD Bank operations center here in Maine. They were given a tour of the facility. They were able to talk to several of the employees. And they were given a complimentary lunch.

Another example of what we did, we also reached out to several employers in the area, some manufacturing facilities that are part of the Business Leadership Network were gracious enough to give the students a tour of the whole facility. It really gave the students an opportunity to learn about manufacturing as a whole and those kind of thought skills that students and potential employees need in the workplace.So a total of about 41 students. We did activities for about two days, which was a great opportunity, again, for students to be exposed to different work sites and different areas of work and also get that reallife picture of what work is.

> Zach Baldwin:Great. Thank you so much, Darcy. I appreciate you sharing how you all organized last year and definitely appreciate you engaging in Disability Mentoring Day.

Do you have any plans for Disability Mentoring Day this year?

> Darcy Brockman:Yes. Again we're working with Bates College and TD Bank. We will probably have a meeting at the end of August to get those events going. TD Bank in Lewiston, Maine, is part of a business complex, so we're going to try to work with those other employers in that area so students can maybe see some food service as well as TD Bank operations. Again, several businesses around that area. And we're just really going to work with more schools this year and reach out to even more employers to make this an even more successful event than we had last year.

> Zach Baldwin:Excellent. Thank you so much, Darcy.

If folks have any questions about what Darcy had organized in the past or is planning for this year, again, we'll have some time for question and answer at the end, after we go through two more of our speakers. So please hold on to those.

Next I'd like to open up the call to Grant Heffelfinger and Kristin Stern with Independence First, which is one of the Centers for Independent Living in Wisconsin.

Grant and Kristin, if you're on the line, if you could introduce yourselves briefly and then go ahead and share how you've been engaging in Disability Mentoring Day.

> Kristin Stern:Hi. This is Kristin from Independence First. I'm a Youth Leadership Coordinator. That's my title.

> Grant Heffelfinger:I'm Grant, also a Youth Coordinator here at Independence First.

> Kristin Stern:What we've been doing for a number of years now is we really kind of try to tailor it to the individual student that we're working with. So we do a lot of outreach in the fall, right when school starts. We do a lot of outreach to the schools and the teachers that we work with and encourage them to send us an application for Disability Mentoring Day and kind of spell out what they're interested in. We give them some choices, sort of a number of different career skills that they can choose from. We also give them time to write in what else they are interested in if they don't see their interest on the list.Then we kind of just go through our list and try to work with employer that we worked with in the past or try to recruit new employers to take on a student for a job shadow experience.

What we tried new last year that I thought was pretty successful is normally we do Disability Mentoring Day on one specific day but last year we expanded it to a whole week. So we tried to open it up for the employers to give them a little bit more flexibility. So we kind of said, hey, here's the week we're looking at; are there any days and times that would work the best for you? Just to give it, like I said, a little bit more flexibility.

This past year we made 60 matches. So we were pretty proud of that. We partnered with a lot of local businesses. We had a couple of banks that we worked with, a radio station, a couple of technical colleges, a salon. We worked with healthcare agencies, hotels, a mechanic, a bakery, gosh, the police department, the YMCA. So just lots of really varied kind of things.

We found that the day -- of what the employers really liked as well was -- Grant and I went and did a lot of site visits. So we would go and take pictures and kind of touch base with the employers and the students and see how everything was going. And then afterward, you know, send the employers the pictures so they have copies of that, too, so they can be proud of that as well.

Let's see. What else?

I also think you know, Disability Mentoring Day yeah, it's in the fall, but you can always be recruiting for that. Just recently we have been in touch with a couple of businesses that kind of reached out to us and said, hey, when is Disability Mentoring Day, we want to participate again. So even though it's June and Disability Mentoring Day is not until the fall, it's always good to have that until the back of your mind and always be sort of seeing what businesses you can connect with and recruit.

Do you have anything to add, Grant?

Grant Heffelfinger: Yeah. Well, that's pretty much the idea behind what we go with. It's just the two of us. So between the two of us, it's a lot of work in the fall. So I definitely if you're going to commit to the event, just know that it's going to take some time to organize things.

We usually create two separate flyers that we can share with businesses and folks who might be a good match for being a mentor. Then we also have a flyer that we share with students and youth to kind of get them excited about the event. I think it's important to have the two separate ones because there's two separate goals there.

The other thing is taking making sure we have photo release forms so we can get pictures. We have a P.R. center but we have do a lot of the picture taking in past years just because it's getting to the different sites. We all chip in and we can get to more sites throughout the week.

Another big thing that's been helpful for us I've been doing this since 2015 so this will be my third year doing it this fall. The big thing that's helped for us is if we are looking for a mentor for a certain youth and it's a job career, field, we haven't dealt with in the past, going to the national sponsors. So AAPD's website, how they have the national sponsors listed, that's a that's been a great place for us to gather new mentors. Because usually they have a location somewhere in Milwaukee, the surrounding area.

> Zach Baldwin:Great. Thank you so much, Grant and Kristin. I appreciate you sharing all of that.

Yeah, to follow up on a couple of things that you mentioned. Regarding the timing, it's called Disability Mentoring Day so historically we've tried to organize all of our events on the third Wednesday of October. And certainly we still have some folks doing that. But we've since gotten more flexible with the program, understanding that the timing be challenging for folks in different areas with conflicting schedules. So we're flexible in terms of when you can implement Disability Mentoring Day. We have some partners in Massachusetts who hold their Disability Mentoring Day in April for the past couple of years. But we do, as much as we possibly can, try to encourage folks to hold Disability Mentoring Day at some point during the move October so that it coincides with National Disability Employment Awareness Month, just as a way to try to connect with some of that to garner additional media attention and get some attention from the schools or potential employers.