pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf, 8
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CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2017-04-12 | 8 | ITEM 2-B COMMISSION ON DISABILITY ISSUES MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, April 12, 2017 6:30 p.m. they put them through to whomever they're going to work for. There's no incentive for HR people to take chances. My joke is that my wife was an HR executive. She married me, but she would never hire me. [chuckle] Because there's no upside for her. Stuart James: If it's a good experience, that's her job. If it's a bad experience, people are going to say, "Why did you put that person through?" I have never not had a job. In my entire life I've never not had a job and I've never had to write a resume because one job always led to my next job. Now I have a very extensive network. If I quit this job I could be working tomorrow. So we teach kids to start building their network, to start meeting the people that can hire them and start to build relationships, so they don't need to worry about going through HR. We start to teach them how to market themself, how to present themselves in a way that they're comfortable and to build an identity, and how to have a conversation; how to use LinkedIn. Then, we've partnered with Facebook, Google, Lyft, Pandora, and we take the kids in there. What I tell those tech companies is, "I have no expectation for you to hire anybody I bring in. I don't want that to be the premise of this." That's why they allow us to come in. I tell the kids, "You're not going there to get a job. You're going there to build your network. So I need you to start meeting the people you're going to meet, getting their information, following up with them, telling them and reminding them that you're looking for a job, and start to build your network." Stuart James: We've had a 75% success rate at getting people jobs that way. Not just any job. One of them is producing weather for CBS TV, hadn't had a job in three years. One of them is actually working for Google as an accountant. Another one is working for Accenture on the Google account. One of them is the editor of a paper. They're all doing really great things. Once we got them to start to think about themselves in a different way; like if you graduated from Cal, or even Cal State, East Bay, you shouldn't be thinking about working at Walmart. You should've been going there thinking about what you want to do in a big way. If you're going to fail at getting a job you might as well fail spectacularly. Don't fail at the little things. Stuart James: I'm hoping the next step of this is to apply this same premise to kids with cognitive disabilities. It's to start doing community improvement projects with the Chambers of Commerce with the kids from the transition programs so that they can get to know each other. They can get to see those kids in an environment where they're capable. Where they are having a positive impact on the space. That's my next step. The same sort of backdoor approach of getting those kids to meet business people that will hire them directly, and stop worrying about the cold call. But that's a work in progress. Even in Alameda unfortunately, we've had union problems. The unions won't let us do the community service projects, so there's some challenges. But we're working on it. I never give up, so I'll find a way. That's the employment issue. Stuart James: This is my staff. That's my assistant. [chuckle] Independent living skills. We used to do this one on one. We used to teach people whatever they want to do, how to manage your money, how to cook an egg, how to do things like this. It was boring and we didn't have a very big.. We didn't have a lot of consumers. We were losing money hand over fist doing it that way. So I decided we were going to do it a different way, and we were going to do it in a way that really attracted the community as a whole. Stuart James: So if you don't know who that is that's Cal Peternell and he's the head chef at Chez 05/24/17 Page 8 of 29 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf |