pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf, 7
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CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2017-04-12 | 7 | ITEM 2-B COMMISSION ON DISABILITY ISSUES MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, April 12, 2017 6:30 p.m. in billing, these were good things. Couldn't get them. Stuart James: I'll tell you a story of another one. I had a young man come to me in May. He just graduated from Cal with a degree in History. He had spina bifida, so he's in a wheelchair. He came to me with absolutely the most eloquent speech you have ever heard about why he can't get a job because of his disability. It was incredible. Obama would have been impressed. I said, "What did you study?" He said, "I studied History." I said, "I've got great news for you. I got a job." He said, "What's the job?" I said, "San Francisco Unified just called me. They're 17 teachers short for next year. They want to hire people with disabilities. You don't need to be credentialed, they'll pay to get your credentialed. They'll hire you tomorrow. I can get you an interview right now." He said, "I don't want to be a teacher." I said, "You studied History, what did you think you were going to do?" He said, "I want to work in technology." I said, "You studied the wrong thing. You're not getting a job because you have a disability, you're not getting a job because you're stupid." In a nice sort of way. Stuart James: But this is the conversation: these kids are not having the right conversation early on. We want to start to get people, and this is sort of an ingrained problem with the disability community, and the problem that I had before I got involved. The people who I find really succeed, who have disabilities and have succeeded in life, do not come back and help the community. They're so busy putting their disability on another side of the wall like I was, that they don't want to cross the wall and touch it. It's a thing we got to change. So I'm trying to get people with disabilities who are very successful to come back and help set the path. Stuart James: We are hopefully, but it's not set in stone yet, we're having a conversation, a very preliminary thing, with one of the tech companies, and for some reason it just completely left my head. But they have a goal to hire 1,000 kids with autism in the next year or two. They tried this already, and they didn't do so well with it because they were very good at teaching the coding computer part. They were not so good at teaching some of the soft skills that those folks needed to survive in the office space. But they're very passionate about doing it because the CEO has a son with autism, and he's on the Asperger's spectrum, goes to Cal. The Worldwide CEO also has a kid with autism. So they're very interested, and we're about to start working with them. Stuart James: What I've done at CIL is, I started to create an employment program for people with disabilities that's very specific. There's actually going to be two of them. We've just started with the first one. We had one that was funded by DOR, and it was basically. DOR sent these people who needed a job and we spent a week helping them write a resume, and learn how to job interview, and nobody ever got a job. So I got rid of it. And I told you all we weren't going to do that anymore because half the people coming through, the disability wasn't the problem they weren't getting the job. They had some other issues. They hadn't been to work for 20 years. They weren't educated. They couldn't read. They couldn't write. They were actually the reasons they weren't getting a job, nothing to do with the disability. Stuart James: There's lots of places you can go learn to write a resume. You don't need to come to us for that. What we did is we said, "Where can we really make a difference?" So we've started with these kids from college and we said, "We've got to change the way they think about this." We started to teach them what I call the back door approach to employment. I think the problem for people with disabilities, visual disabilities particularly, is HR. It's an HR person's job to qualify candidates before 05/24/17 Page 7 of 29 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf |