pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf, 15
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CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2017-04-12 | 15 | ITEM 2-B COMMISSION ON DISABILITY ISSUES MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, April 12, 2017 6:30 p.m. Stuart James: I need to probably cover my bases. We've got a very good relationship with Berkley, and with community members in Berkley. So we are working with Freight and Salvage hopefully to maybe do an event there. We are working with the UC Theater. The UC Theater is a non-profit theater much like the Freight and Salvage but bigger. And they have a theater education program which is teaching low-income people the business of theater. So about engineering, lighting, accounting, booking arts, promotion, marketing. We have been working with them to incorporate people with disabilities. And we are looking to do one single event that will be our folks who they are training will produce the event. And with some help from me. So that's something. One of the things we have been really focused on and this might be something that commissioners should think about. I'm again an integrationists. So one of the things you'll see in the disability community particularly in Berkley, is them creating programs for people with disabilities. So they created a program called CTP which is a great program. It's Computer Training for People with disabilities. Stuart James: My thinking though is that there is a lot of those programs, one of the best ones is actually here in Alameda called NPower and it's over at the college Alameda. It's free to anybody wants to, if they're qualified, you have to be low-income I believe. And you're pretty much guaranteed a job at the end. So for me I think, why should we have a separate program for people with disabilities, why don't we just go to NPower and make sure they're accessible, and that they are accommodating. And they've been very happy to work with us to make that happen. That's our approach. I would rather not reinvent the wheel. I would rather go to some of these companies that have a really good track record of success and say, "How can we help you get people with disabilities involved?" I do want to point this out because there's something. I don't want to take up all your time. But, and I'm happy to go public with this. Stuart James: I was very upset recently, I had a conversation with a new Disabled Student Services Director at the Cal University. And we have very different thinking about what needs to happen. And one of her big ideas, they've cut a substantial portion of their programing for disabilities. They've cut workability. They've just removed 20,000 plus pieces of video that were for education purposes because they weren't all captioned. So people with hearing problems couldn't watch them. Instead of fixing them, they took them all down. So there was no longer anything. Cal's got lots of problems. But she had come to me with this new big idea. And her big idea was that she wanted to hire a person who was a disability specialists in the career counseling office. And I said, "Interesting." What do you anticipate that person to do? Stuart James: And her thinking was that anybody who had a disability or identified as disabled at Cal, when they're ready to go get a job would go see that person. And I said, "That is the worst idea I ever heard of." I don't need help with my disability. I'm an expert at my disability. I don't need anybody help me with that. If I'm an architect major, I need someone who knows all the people in architecture to help me get a job. I don't need to go to the disability person. And if you want to have a disability expert, it shouldn't be for the student, it should be for the other counselors, so that they can figure out what accommodations a person might need in the workplace. That's the kind of thinking we're trying to change. We're trying to say, "Look let's not reinvent the wheel, I don't believe in segregation. Segregation's not equal.' Stuart James: We just had the exact same experience at Cal State, East Bay. We're hiring at the moment and I sent my HR person to Cal State, East Bay for recruiting. So she went to the career 05/24/17 Page 15 of 29 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf |