pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf, 6
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CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2017-04-12 | 6 | ITEM 2-B COMMISSION ON DISABILITY ISSUES MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, April 12, 2017 6:30 p.m. people with disability lacked ambition. And it was not because they. It was because just they had just been beaten down by this conversation at Social Security was their future, and nobody offering them a counter-argument, and nobody showing them examples of like, me, who's travelled all over the world. I have a wife with no disability, I have a very good education, and I've made a lot of money. They needed to start seeing those things. That's sort of the root of what we do now. Stuart James: As soon as I get enough money, and we're very close to having enough money, we're about to do another really cool thing. We are about to partner with the Audi Racing School in Sonoma, and take people with disabilities race car driving. If they have mobility issues, they are actually going to get in the car and drive. Audi has agreed to put hand controls on all the cars. For those who are vision impaired we're going to have a dual-seater where they can actually drive along with someone helping them drive, so they can get the experience. Part of that idea maybe specific to Michaela is, "Look, even if you are blind or vision impaired and can't see, it's a really good skill to know how to turn the car off and on, or how to put it in gear or out of gear, or where the brake might be in case you're in an emergency and you need to deal with it.' So we want to teach you those skills. Stuart James: Okay. We've taken people out kayaking. This is part of our travel training program. When we teach people about how to use public transportation, we usually create these expeditions, and this happened to be one where we took them over to Sausalito. Everything's paid for, it's completely free. We take them to lunch and we took them out kayaking. And a lot of these kids were also from Alameda High School transition. Same group, but we also do it for older folks. Stuart James: This young man There's a group pictured here, Michaela, of three folks, and they're on a travel training mission, an expedition, and there's a young Hispanic man in the middle of the picture in a wheelchair. This young man is kind of the premise of a program I'm trying to start, but it's been a bit of a challenge but I'm not giving up on it. He was shot in Oakland. He was a victim of gang violence. He wasn't in a gang. He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also happens to be an illegal immigrant, so he's got a lot of other problems. And we found that this is a substantial problem in Oakland. About 100 kids involved in shootings every year. That number's going up, and 30% of those kids are ending up with physical disabilities. All of the socioeconomic challenges they had before they got shot haven't gone away. But now they have a disability and they don't really have a support system. So one of the things I'm trying to do with these folks is partner them up with the vets, and let the vets do a mentoring program with them. The vets have been really, really wanting to do it. Our challenge has been HIPAA rules and trying to find the kids. But it's a work in progress. Stuart James: Employment is probably my number one goal. I think employment is a big problem. I was really surprised to find that some of the problems and the substantial problems were again, self- imposed. There was a federal study that just completed last year and showed that only 28% of kids with disabilities who actually graduate college, including Cal, are actually looking for a job when they graduate. The others just don't think anyone's going to hire them. They never went to college thinking they were going to get a job at the end. We had Kaiser Permanente last summer, offered us 32 paid internships specifically for kids with disabilities at Cal. Cal, which by the way, has 2000 kids who identify as being disabled. We couldn't fill the intern positions. We couldn't get anybody to take them. We ended up having to give gift cards to Starbucks to get someone to take this paid internship at Kaiser. And they were good internships. They were serious, not low level. They were in accounting, 05/24/17 Page 6 of 29 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf |