AAPD-2018 Disability Mentoring Day Coordinators CallWednesday, June 13, 20183:00 p.m. – 4:02 p.m.Remote CART Captioning

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>> ZACH BALDWIN: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining today's 2018 Disability Mentoring Day Coordinators Call. This is Zach Baldwin speaking, Director of Outreach for the American Association of People With Disabilities. During today's call, we're going to talk about our Disability Mentoring Day Program, give you some history of that program and how it works. We'll share some of the resources that AAPD has available to support you in organizing and participating in your own Disability Mentoring Day event. And then we will hear from a handful of Disability Mentoring Day Coordinators that have done this work in the past, and they'll talk about events that they organized, some of the best practices that they've learned, challenges that they've encountered and how they overcame those. And then we'll have some time for question and answer towards the end of the call.

Right now all participants are in a listen-only mode, just to keep the call line clear. For any of our guest speakers who will be joining later, please be sure -- make sure you have joined the call through the specific instructions that I sent over so that your line will be unmuted when it comes to your time to speak. And I will review the instructions on how to -- how participants can ask questions when we get to that point later in the call.

So Disability Mentoring Day is a large-scale national initiative coordinated by the American Association of People With Disabilities. It was initially started as a program during the Clinton Administration where they brought a handful of students with disabilities to the White House for a day of mentoring and job shadowing. And then we have since moved the program over to AAPD and have expanded it to a year-long initiative.

The whole goal of the program is twofold. First, to connect students and job seekers with disabilities to a mentoring or job shadow experience that helps connect them to businesses in their local community and also connect them -- help them start thinking about what employment opportunities may be out there for them as they get ready to transition out of school and enter the workforce.

The second part of the goal is in the interactions with host employers by helping them connect more with their local disability community, have interactions with people or students with disabilities that can counteract some of those unconscious biases that people may hold about what people with disabilities can or cannot do in the workplace.

Disability Mentoring Day events take many different shapes and forms,

depending on who's involved. I say students and job seekers with disabilities, other participants, those can be students who are in high school, getting ready to transition out of school and enter the workforce, as well as students who are in college, getting ready to graduate and transition out to enter the workforce there, or even folks who have recently graduated from either and are just job seekers looking to make some connections.

Events themselves take many different shapes and forms, which we'll hear more about when some of our guest speakers come on. But as a whole, it could be a half day or a full day of bringing students in to a business, introducing them to what the business does, connecting them with some job shadow experiences so that they can learn hands on from an employee that's in that business, be able to ask questions, sit in on some meetings or see what that employee does as part of their day-to-day tasks. It can also be broader to include more general professional development activities such as resume review workshops or mock interviews or just having conversations with human resources or recruiting team so that the participants understand what the process looks like to start applying for a job at the particular business.

One of the resources that we have available every year for our Disability Mentoring Day Coordinators is our Disability Mentoring Day toolkit. It's something that we update every year. It provides an overview of the program, a little bit of the history, some ideas on what different types of events can look like, as well as guidance on how to identify and connect with partners within your local community, and these partners can be different disability organizations, reaching out to schools, colleges and universities, business associations, or other business groups in your community.

The toolkit also includes some sample forms or letters inviting people to come on and serve as a mentor as part of the program or to recruit students, to have an application form for students to complete as well as an evaluation form. All of this is readily available and open to our coordinators to take and edit or modify some of the forms as they see fit. All of that -- that toolkit can be found at www.aapd.com/dmd. And if you haven't already, I would encourage you to download the toolkit and access those resources.

Before I turn it over to our first guest speaker, I do want to just highlight our desire to connect with our volunteer coordinators. We keep a running list of disability mentoring day events each year that we publish on the AAPD website. This is both so we can keep a tally of what's happening around the country and measure the holistic impact of the program, but also so that we can help advertise events that are volunteer coordinators are organizing so that if students or mentors or employers come to AAPD to learn more about disability mentoring day, they can find an event or activity that's in their state or in their community and then get connected directly to you, the organizers.

So please keep us updated on any events or activities that you have planned as well as what happens after the event, how many students participated, how many mentors participated. And, of course, if you have any questions along the way or would like some additional technical assistance or brainstorming help as you're planning your events, we are more than happy to do that.

One thing that I neglected to mention at the beginning of the call, which I probably should have done, Disability Mentoring Day occurs every year during the month of October to coincide with National Disability Employment Awareness Month. It

was historically held on the third Wednesday of each month, hence Disability Mentoring Day, but we since expanded that to allow our partners more flexibility to have events that work with the schedules of participating students and participating employers. We do still encourage folks to hold the event during October because of the association awareness month. But that's not a hard and fast rule if you need to look at some other dates later in the fall or at another point during the year.

So with that, I want to get to the heart of today's call and our guest speakers who are here to tell you more about the events that they have organized. Our first speaker that we have lined up is Cathy Cowin, who is Transition Specialist at the Christina School District in Delaware. Cathy, I don't believe you are signed on as a speaker yet.

>> Can you hear me? >> ZACH BALDWIN: If you are on the line, though, please let me know. >> CATHY COWIN: I am on the line. Can you hear me? >> ZACH BALDWIN: Yes, we can hear you. Go ahead. >> CATHY COWIN: Good. I had a little challenge there getting in. Yes, so I'll start

off by saying about four or five years ago, I was invited to join a group that the Cabinet Secretary of the department Of Health and Social Services pulled together. And her goal was to spread Disability Mentoring Day throughout the state of Delaware. It had been celebrated only at the University of Delaware with students who were enrolled in the career and life skills certificate program, which is a two-year program for individuals with developmental disabilities. And so I partnered with the Department of Health and Social Services which included the Division of Developmental Disabilities Services, the division -- or the visually impaired as well as Vocational Rehabilitation. And so I began by pulling some students from a couple of the high schools to participate in the event that the University of Delaware was holding on the Disability Mentoring Day in October.

And this event included a breakfast with speakers as well as a couple of hours of job shadowing at different jobsites and then a luncheon. And this is great for me because I just needed to provide students. But then after several years, the university didn't have the resources to help find the jobsite. And because we want this to go through all three counties of Delaware and to have students in the high schools participate, I began working with the five other school districts in New Castle County last year. And so what we did was pull together a different kind of celebration of this day. And by utilizing actually the toolkit, we came to realize that maybe -- that maybe what we could do was to have more like a career development day. And this year we are in the process of preparing for October 17th.

So what we did last year -- and by the way, let me step back a second and say that in the other two counties, there were also school districts doing various types of activities. But last year what we did was we -- we had zero dollars in our budget. And it truly became a community event. We reached out to the Jewish Community Center which offered for free their facility. And we asked speakers to come in. We had someone to talk about ADA and self-advocacy and when to disclose having a disability. We also had Junior Achievement talk about work readiness and how to dress for success, and they partnered with a church that had been collecting clothing that they gave to students. And we also had one of our community adult providers talking about employability skills. We also had a panel with five members of different backgrounds and businesses. We had about -- well, we had 56 students who came from four

different school districts. Two of the districts were unable to have students. And the students went through those, each of those workshops, and then went to lunch. And during the lunchtime heard from the members of the panel.

Lunch was also donated by Olive Garden. The only cost that my district had was for transportation to get the students there. I found students from one of the high schools. So what really worked -- what we heard from the students was that they really, really enjoyed having, like, small group sessions learning about the topics that they were participating in. But some of the challenges we faced, for one thing, the panel really was not successful. The kids, by the time they had these five people talking at them, they had already been through three workshops. They were hungry. They really just wanted to eat. So we're going to modify that this year.

What we're thinking about doing this year is that we are inviting businesspeople to come and sit at the table, like tables that have about eight students, and to be part of the conversation as the students are having lunch. So that it's a more informal approach to talking about careers, for instance, what it's like to be an electrician, what kind of training, you know, other jobs that could be involved and any question the students have. The challenges is that, again, we have limited resources. So for us to try and develop this, we really -- it's challenging to fit it all in in the day with time limitations that we have. It's also difficult for schools because it is in October, and we really kind of want to celebrate on that day, that it is just such a hard time a year for us.

And the other challenge that we have is the stigma of disability. And sometimes our students aren't interested in participating because they hear disability mentoring day. So we sort of worded it more like this is a development career day for you to participate in. So I don't know if there's anything else you'd like me to talk about?

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Great. Thank you, Cathy. That's a good overview to start. And if you don't mind hanging on the line for the rest of the call when we get to the question and answer period at the end, we can see if other participants have any questions.

>> CATHY COWIN: Okay. >> ZACH BALDWIN: Great. Thank you. So next I'd like to introduce David

D'Arcangelo, the Director of the Massachusetts Office on Disability. David, please go ahead.

>> DAVID D'ARCANGELO: Zach, thanks so much. Thanks for your leadership and for AAPD for making this a priority. And thanks to everybody on the call for making this a priority. Really, we've got to encounter, there's nearly two-thirds of all working-age people with disabilities are not employed. So we've really -- this is an important program to try to address that situation. So thanks again for the opportunity.

So here in Massachusetts, we first did Disability Mentoring Day back in 2016 through one of our organizations that approached us. And we took part as a participant. We did seven mentor/mentee matches during that. And we said hey, we had such a great experience doing that, we decided to do our own and internalize it. So now state government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, my office, Mass Office on Disability combined with our Human Resources division partnered together and last year we did our first Disability Mentoring Week. So we make a whole week out of it where the first -- on the Monday, we are talking about it at our organization level. Tuesday, we bring the mentors in for a luncheon and overview and orientation. And then the following two

days they're at their state agencies, really doing the nitty gritty types of shadowing and understanding what it's like to work in those agencies and understanding what the essential duties of the job are and really all of the stuff that disability mentoring week does such a good job at bringing out and really building those relationships that are going to help people with disabilities understand what it's like to be able to be in our particular workforce.

We had great feedback from our mentees and mentors about the relationships. We've really made it a focus this year to focus on those relationships and really try to turn those into conversions. Last year we had 28 mentor/mentee matches across 21 different agencies, and we actually got a hire out of it, and some of the other people ended up interning and others who ended up getting jobs when we followed up with them, they indicated that their experience through Disability Mentoring Week certainly built value for them in finding their job that they ended up in. So we're very pleased with that. We're hoping to build on it.

So year one, we learned a lot. And really fortunately nothing major went wrong. We had some good planning. But we did have some drop-off. Originally we had 42 applicants, and then a few of them got back to us that they weren't able to attend because they got a job or something else had happened. There was a sickness. A couple of things like that. So, you know, it did kind of whittle down a bit from our initial -- when we put it out there throughout the summer, we ended up having it in October. So much like Zach had indicated, part of Disability Employment Awareness Month.

So we started with a larger pool, ended up with a little bit of a smaller pool. So maybe as you're planning and anticipating, try to take some of that into account, that there may be a little drop-off or attrition throughout the process for various reasons. So recommendations that I would give new DMD coordinators would be things like organize. Build a team, assign duties, put a project plan in place. Scheduling is key. Start early. We're working on ours, which is going to be happening the third week of October, which by the way, if anybody would like to go and see our stuff, please look at it. It's www.mass.gov/mod/dmw18. I'll read it again. Www.mass.gov/mod/dmw18. And when you go to the website, you realize that we have all of the applications up for the mentors and the mentees, all of the criteria. And then at the bottom, we have the additional resources.

We found that from year one to two, putting the job category descriptions was very helpful. Having a general flier that can socialize with both your mentees and mentors to give them an understanding. And then really having clear criteria, making sure that things like if you are going to use a web page, that it's accessible. Whatever documents you're going to put on there are accessible. We want to make sure we're accommodating people with disabilities. And then certainly any reasonable accommodation requests that they're going to have through their experience, we want to make sure to make that message loud and clear that we're here to do that. But we need to know about it ahead of time. So engaging in that dialogue with the potential applicants I think is key, too.

To me it's organize, start early, get a good team, and really just focus on the relationships. I think that's -- those are my takeaways here. Please learn from us. If we can be a resource, contact me directly, either through the website or you can find us online at Massachusetts Office on Disability. Once again, I want to thank Zach and

AAPD and all of you for the great work you're doing. Let us know how we can build value. It was very rewarding for us here in Massachusetts. And we hope it's rewarding for you and ultimately people with disabilities across the country.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Thanks so much, David. You appreciate you joining today's call and sharing your knowledge and experience with all of us. And especially the website that you all put together with the applications and other resources. I think that will be helpful for folks to take a look at as they're planning their own event.

>> DAVID D'ARCANGELO: Sure. Just to jump back in quickly, we really modeled off of the good work that AAPD had done, so we really didn't want to purposely reinvent the wheel. There was a lot of good stuff out there. We tried to emulate it. And certainly we tweaked it for our business process, you know, and how it fits our particular enterprise here. But -- and I would encourage everybody to do the same, and please use that if it can be a resource to you. So thanks again.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Great. Thank you, David. Next I would like to introduce Shaun Collins, who is the Senior Human Resources Business Partner at Anthem, Inc. Shaun, please go ahead. Shaun, are you on the line? All right. Shaun, if you are on the line, we can't hear you. Please go and make sure you enter the speaker code so that you can unmute yourself. While we are waiting for that, we'll move on to our next guest speaker, Grant Heffelfinger and Kristin Stern with IndependenceFirst. Please go ahead.

>> Good afternoon, everybody. This is Kristin. >> GRANT HEFFELFINGER: And this is grant. >> We're from IndependenceFirst in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I guess how we have

sort of structured our program is I know somebody else -- I think we kind of mentioned earlier kind of expanding it from the one Disability Mentoring Day into Disability Mentoring Week. So we've really taken it and expanded it to a week to give more flexibility to the students to participate and to the employers. So we have a better chance of making arrangements for them.

So here at IndependenceFirst, Grant and I both work a lot in the schools. So we have a lot of contact with area high schools. So we usually start early, as someone else mentioned. When the school year starts, we go into the schools and right away we kind of start recruiting students to see who's interested in doing disability mentoring day. And we work pretty closely with special ed teachers and also transition coordinators to help us kind of identify who they feel would be good students to participate in the program. And then we have kind of an application that we have the students fill out where we have them sort of pick out what the career fields are that they're interested in. And we have them pick out -- we have them rank one, two and three, you know, what are your top three career fields that you want to explore. So we collect our application.

And then as far as -- we go out into the community and try to recruit as many employers as we possibly, possibly can to participate and to match students up with. So we do that by just using anybody and everybody in our network, professional and personal. So we try to get a lot of buy-in from the rest of our agency to try to kind of make it an agency project. So we send out tons of e-mails asking our fellow staff to ask their networks to see who might be interested in hosting a student and who might be interested in providing a student with a job shadow. You know, a lot of times we hear employers say, well, my job's pretty boring. I don't know if a kid's going to want to sit and watch me work. It doesn't matter. Anything. We can make it fun. So we just try to

kind of spread the word and just get anybody that's interested and, you know, kind of take it from there. And we have worked with a couple -- a couple businesses that we work with every year and try to convince them to take a group of students sometimes and, you know, sometimes they'll kind of provide a day-long event, give them lunch, give them a tour, that kind of thing. Yeah. I'll let Grant kind of answer the next question.

>> GRANT HEFFELFINGER: Yes. So last year, just to put it in perspective, we were able to match up 93 young folks with mentors in the community in a career choice, like Kristin said, in one of their top three career choices. So what we did to kind of help support them through that and worked really well this past year in 2017 was obviously make sure that it was one of their top three choices that the youth were interested in. But we also tried to reach out to the mentors a little bit more this year to help support them. That was something the year prior to this past Disability Mentoring Week that we felt we could have improved on, and we definitely were focusing on that.

So we utilized -- for big companies who have disability employee resource groups, we definitely took advantage of those to make sure that we could meet with the groups during their meeting time that they usually have or any other events they're doing to try to, like, talk to them and see what kind of information or support they might need. Usually it required helping make phone calls to parents, making sure that if there was any accommodation request, that we got those sent over to the agency or company right away. And, you know, like Kristin also said, even if it was in their agency, we are an independent living center. So that's what we kind of do is accommodations and accessibility, but still I think a lot of folks get nervous when it comes to serving or working with young folks. So we just wanted to make sure they were comfortable as well.

When they did say that their job was boring, we let them know, like, this is something that the youth, you know, marked on an application that they were interested in, so they were ready to endure whatever that person's day-to-day job life was like. We try to make all of our mentors, since they are volunteers, volunteering at least two hours of their work day for one of these young folks that applied. We're making sure that we are accommodating them as well. So it's a lot of work and it's a lot of making sure that just, you know, we're kind of the technical support here. We don't have the means to provide transportation. But we -- like Kristin said, utilize our school staff for that.

A lot of school districts have school vans or transportation services. Or the staff have the ability to transport their students during the school day. So we were able to tap into those resources this past year as well. And Kristin, do you want to talk about some of the challenges?

>> Sure. So I think probably our biggest challenge would be, you know, while most of the students attended their job shadows, we did have quite a few that just didn't show up, which mentors don't really like that. But this past year, we saw less of that because we really tried this past year, we really tried to -- tried to do more with transportation because we found that a lot of the students that were not making their job shadows were doing that because they didn't have transportation. So earlier when I mentioned, you know, having good relationships with the teachers, with special ed teachers and the transition coordinators, getting them involved and, you know, talking with them about how they can coordinate transportation.

We had a lot of buy-in from the teachers who said, okay, you know, great. We

have four students from this high school signed up. We're going to have one of our staff people, you know, take a advantage and drive the kids to each of their job shadow sites. So, again, that took a little bit of coordination just trying to make sure that we had -- you know, we had four kids coming from the same school. Maybe they're going to four different places, but trying to arrange them in kind of closer proximity and timewise, similar times so then the teacher's not -- either for the teacher to help transport them. So we found that that was a way that we could kind of overcome that challenge a little bit of transportation.

That said, you're always going to get a couple of kids that, for whatever reason, they're sick that day or maybe there's something at school that they absolutely can't miss or something like that. In those cases we try to just -- if they're not going to come, we try to encourage them to contact the mentoring that they're connected with directly. We always give, you know, we always kind of exchange -- we give the mentor, the students information. We give the student the mentor's information and we let them know if you can't make it that day, call your mentor and reschedule if they can't make it. I think that was helpful dealing with that challenge as well. Go ahead.

>> GRANT HEFFELFINGER: And to piggyback onto that, that also is a strategy we use for a lot of our programming here at IndependenceFirst. As an independent living center, for those of you guys that don't know, we kind of run our programs and services by the independent living philosophy, and that is that the person has control over their independence and the supports they receive. So we're doing a lot to empower our youth who are involved in Disability Mentoring Week to make those phone calls themselves. And if they need help with that, I've been on the phone -- I'm sure Kristin can account for this -- we've been on the phone with young people and coaching them through, you know, this is what you can say. Let's practice it -- practice it on the phone with me like you would with the mentor. And so if they did need to call their mentor to confirm, reschedule or cancel, they did so appropriately and showed, like, that they have those professional skills. To the employer.

When we found out that the youth did call to reschedule or cancel, the mentor who -- this volunteer mentor was more likely able to accommodate that request and reschedule with them. So we did do some relationship building there which was kind of cool this past year. Oh. And then just some recommendations that Kristin, I thought we could give to other folks who are just starting. Focus on partnerships with businesses because, like we said, the reason we're able to accommodate so many job shadow matches is because we partner with companies who have the means and the employers to do so. Bringing big -- bringing big companies like GE Healthcare and Northwestern Mutual who have hubs here in Milwaukee into our event this year was able to really bring our numbers up as far as who we serve. And it makes it easier for carpooling and coordinating transportation when everyone's going to the same building. And then not going to the shame job shadow, but like I said, when you work with bigger companies, there's more jobs in one building because of a company's size, which is kind of cool for us. And then the other thing we wanted to do is encourage folks to, you know, involve the parents, too. Although it is during the work day. We just have some parents that were super into this event and this activity. A lot of -- I've talked to at least two parents last year specifically who thought this was more important than the school day, which I don't want to upset any schoolteachers, but you guys -- both things are

quite important as far as experiences for our youth and our young folks. And then starting earlier, we get rushed -- I know I heard someone else talk

about doing it at the start of the school year as well. I feel it's pretty rushed sometimes. So starting earlier, I know teachers are not usually working before the school year starts, but maybe reaching out to some families. We thought about doing to try to get some involvement started and stirred up before the school year starts.

>> And as far as plans for 2018, I think we're just going to try to do what we've been doing and try to get even more mentors on board. It's always exciting when we can make new connections, meet new mentors and hook a student with a new mentor.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Great. Thank you so much, Kristin and Grant. I really appreciate you joining today and sharing all of your experience from having participated in Disability Mentoring Day for the past few years.

Now I'd like to turn it over to Andric McNeil, Jessica Pooser and Deirdre Cato with the South Carolina Vocational Rehab Department. Please go ahead.

>> Hi, everyone, this is Deirdre Cato. Can you hear me? >> This is Andric McNeil. >> ZACH BALDWIN: Yes, we can hear you. >> ANDRIC McNEIL: Hello? >> ZACH BALDWIN: Hi. We can hear you. Please go ahead. >> ANDRIC McNEIL: If you can hear me, Deirdre, you can start off on the state level

if you want to. >> Okay. I am the transition specialist for South Carolina, and our Disability

Mentoring Day operates through vocational rehabilitation. And what we do is we have about 31 offices in our state. And with South Carolina voc rehab, we do everything in house. So we have transition counselors who are employed with vocational rehabilitation, and they are assigned to each high school around the state. So what we do is from the state level, it's more of a data collection, and we try to help share ideas from around the state. But the actual coordinators are in our local offices. Those are our transition teams. And they plan what they feel is best for their individual students in that area.

Most of the time we center everything around our high school students with occasionally we might put some of our post-secondary or recent graduates might attend our Disability Mentoring Days. We, too, have some offices that also do extended times where we do more than one day. It just depends. It varies from office to office. And since we have workforce innovation and opportunity, all of our counselors are out for preemployment transition services. So Disability Mentoring Day ties in with what they're doing year round, which is, you know, part of that is job exploration counseling as well as work-based learning experiences. A lot of our counselors are doing that year round. So when you leave it up to them to decide what they feel is best. So we have some counselors who decide that they're going to do the individual job shadows and matching the students up with an area of interest. We also have some offices that like to get the students exposed to maybe careers that they haven't thought about. And so the ways that they do that is by looking at their local labor market information to see what are the hot jobs in that area. And a lot of times they might take tours and go to those sites to see, you know, what are those jobs actually like? And sometimes the students might not have even thought about that before. So it gets them exposed to different careers

that maybe they have not been exposed to before. Another thing that we do sometimes are themes like this summer one of the

things that we're using for our summer institutes that we do that could also be adapted to this mentoring day is we're doing a pirate theme. We're using that -- the pirate word to say that preparing individuals with adequate time, effort and supports. So what we did was we went, looked around the whole state for different jobs that are related to some type of pilot or nautical team. And we do have a lot in our coastal areas. We have tours. We have things like putt-putt. We have restaurants. Around the state, we have day cares that might have the word treasure in it. So it just gives us a starting point that we can kind of think of if we wanted to do a theme and to explore some jobs that maybe we haven't thought about before. So that's something, you know, that we do that's kind of fun. And we're doing that during the summertime just to kind of get us thinking about some of those work-based learning experiences that the students could go to do to just gain some soft skills, to learn some job skills out in the community. It might not be what they want to do long term, but it does give them some work experience that they can do while exploring, you know, work skills during the summertime.

So we do that. Another thing that we thought about was maybe possibly our State Fair. We have a really good State Fair each year that has just a huge variety of different types of careers that are available there. We might have military, police, administrative, foodservice, florist, agriculture, you name it. There's just a long list of different types of jobs and doing some type of activity for that. So that, you know, that could be something that could be done with groups to kind of explore and do something fun and exciting at the same time and, you know, build relationships with our community partners. I know one thing that we talked about maybe with some of the problems, with our schools, they usually provide bus transportation, if it's during the school day, and sometimes budgets are tight. And they might not have the funding to pay for that gas, that extra gas to get them to and from some of our offices and to the work site. So VR sometimes helps to pay for the gas transportation if they are providing the buses for us. So we partner closely with our schools for that.

As far as food items and other essentials that we might need, you know, for our event, I know someone already mentioned Olive Garden. They've been a great partner. Walmart has been another good partner for us. Sometimes they might give us a $100 gift card. And that way we can use it however we see fit. We could buy food that's prepared. They have their deli trays that we can purchase. Or we might have some giveaways for door prizes. So, you know, any way that we want to use it. And they've also been a good partner to hire some of our clients, you know, once they have successfully completed the program and they are looking at job placement. They've been great partners for us in that area.

And then also since we're doing all of our work-based learning experiences out in the local communities, sometimes our community members, they will donate food for us like Subway is another one. A lot of our students work there, and we are paying for them to work there to gain some of their, you know, soft skills, to learn some things that they are doing. So, you know, to return that favor to us, we don't require that, but, you know, they like to partner with us because we're helping them as well as they are helping us. So they like to do those things and try to help us. So that might be

something that could help as well. Some of those business partners might be willing to donate, and maybe they might not be on a national list, but it could be just your local mom and pop type of business that they're just grateful for the assistance that they get from voc rehab or whatever entity that's working with them that they might want to, you know, partner with you for that. So I'm going to stop right there and I want Jessica and Andric to kind of go over some of the things that they do and maybe some problems or, you know, any areas or thoughts that they might know that would help because they're the ones who are actually coordinating out in their local office. I'm going to turn it over to them.

>> ANDRIC McNEIL: Okay. This is Andric McNeil and Jessica Pooser. >> JESSICA POOSER: Hello. >> ANDRIC McNEIL: We work out of Richland county in South Carolina. We have

two different school districts. That's our biggest challenge that we work on. I'm going to let Ms. Pooser talk more about that.

>> JESSICA POOSER: Typically with our schools, because we have different districts, the challenges that we have is trying to schedule Disability Day at a different time where both districts can participate. One of our school districts, transportation is a little more of a challenge. So we like to schedule when that school district is out of school. That way we can transport them on our voc rehab vans. And the other school district actually provides transportation for mentoring day. So that's kind of how we circumvent that problem. But we start our planning very early, just like I've heard a lot of you mention. We really start at the beginning of the school year. Sometimes at the end of the summer, actually trying to plan how many sites we're going to try to obtain. We actually do go by the student's interest. So we send out those information packets. As soon as school gets back in, then we kind of have an idea of how many students we're going to be serving.

And a lot of times we do get more students to do the -- [ Lost audio ]A little bit of information about last year. We actually served -- 68 students actually attended in Richland District 1 and 2. We had several -- several sites that we had them go to including insurance companies, the airport, parks & recreation. We had some IT sites, some healthcare sites. We also had some construction as well as information -- as well as information on the higher education department. So we really have a diverse entity when it comes to Disability Mentoring Day. And we give -- like I said, we give the students a time when it comes to turning those packets back in. We do set a deadline. We have so many parts that get into this event together.

One thing that we also do with staff here at voc rehab is we all reach out to various businesses for donations. And not just donations with food, but we also have donations for -- like Deirdre was saying, we have raffle items or door prizes. And this year we had several door prizes that were donated from different entities in Columbia. So we just -- that was a nice perk that we kind of put in this year. And the students really liked it. The teachers liked it because we raffled off the items to those who were helping us with the event who were not voc rehab staff, but the teachers -- the teachers for the school district as well as the students got to participate in the door prizes. And that was really an incentive for them participating. And also Olive Garden catered our luncheon for free as well. And that's it in a nutshell.

>> I don't know if I mentioned this or not, but last year for a number of participants statewide, we had 3,935, and then we had 327 businesses that participated.

>> ANDRIC McNEIL: Wow, that's terrific. >> ZACH BALDWIN: That's really great. Thank you so much, Deirdre, Andric and

Jessica for sharing. Those are amazing numbers coming out of North Carolina. Now we've got a little bit of time left for questions and answers here. If participants do have questions, please press 5 and then star on your phone to enter the queue. And we will unmute your line so you can ask a question. Again, those directions are press 5 and then star on your phone to enter the question queue. And we'll go through and individually unmute some lines.

We have a question from a caller with 727 area code. Please go ahead. You should be unmuted.

>> Hi. This is Patricia Banks in Florida. I would like to -- I'm very interested in your program with South Carolina where you use the pirate theme. That is something we use a lot. But I didn't get all the acronyms down. I would like to -- preparing individuals?

>> It was preparing individuals requires adequate time, effort and supports. >> ZACH BALDWIN: Great. Excellent. I love the pirate theme. That is very

creative. >> We use it a lot here, thank you. >> ZACH BALDWIN: Mm-hmm. Great. All right. Next question we have from a

caller with area code 412. Please go ahead. >> Hey, this is Richard Nancer in Pittsburgh. And my whole staff was involved in

this. We're all very excited. I've been doing this for a number of years and I've got some good ideas. We were wondering if we could get transcripts because some of the speakers we couldn't hear very well. And we're wondering if there will be transcripts available afterwards.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Great. Good question. Yes, we do have CART for this call happening right now. So I'm watching the transcript being typed out as I speak. So we will certainly post this transcript as well as an audio recording of this call once we conclude that. So those will be up on the AAPD website. The best place to find that is aapd.com/dmd.

And we have another question from a caller in 302 area code. You should be unmuted. Please go ahead.

>> Hi. My name is Alyssa Cowin, and I'm the co-chair of the Disability Mentoring Day. And the challenge is people -- transportation. So I work with DHS. That really enters how South Carolina, what you did, seeing, like, pirates, you could do a Disney "Frozen," like Elsa and Anna, kind of like that, I guess.

>> And Cathy, the transition specialist in Christina School District, I would like to, Alyssa does happen to be my daughter.

>> Yes. >> CATHY COWIN: But she is the facilitator of the DMD Day through the department

Of Health and Social Services. She has been helping to bring together periodically so that state agencies are working with us. Again, so I work with a group of transition specialists from all six school districts in our Newcastle County, but we are also helping with the group to facilitate.

>> Yes. >> Hi. >> ZACH BALDWIN: Great. Go ahead. >> Hi. This is Deirdre from South Carolina again. I think I understood about using

the different themes, and yes, you could use whatever you think would work in your area. I know last year, we get our counselors together each summer. And last year we did a luau theme. And we did let us all understand how to get prepared for employment. Just look at your area and see how you might be able to incorporate that with, you know, what you have. You know, there probably are a lot of themes that deal with winter or colder weather. Then, you know, in Florida you might have the tropical areas. You might have fruit farms and things like that, the oranges. So just however you can tie it in with your state.

I was really shocked when I started looking for different pirate themes -- I knew I was going to get a lot on the coast, but when I started going inland and I found all the things that involved treasures, I was really pleasantly surprised that I was able to find all these things around the state that related to pirates.

>> So it's Alyssa. I have another question. Like how you -- what you said about the State Fair and I'm thinking, like, how to do it. And I'm thinking it's hard to get people involved, and I don't know if this makes sense, if you -- let's see. In the past, say, four or five years when I start my -- he asked me and another person to commit on this. And so I would do it, and then that was small dmd. And then we built it and made it bigger. So we might try to do it like a State Fair somewhat. Yeah, so -- yeah.

>> We haven't tried that yet. I just thought that would be a great idea because they have so many different types of careers. So I thought it might be a good possibility for us to do that. Is voc rehab involved in your planning team?

>> No. We have -- huh? >> CATHY COWIN: I'm sorry. >> What, Mom? >> CATHY COWIN: We're a team. >> Yeah, we are a team.

[ Laughter ]

>> CATHY COWIN: They were in the beginning, and then have kind of backed off a little bit. So -- and they were not at the -- well, it depends. In southern Delaware, they were much more involved in heading up jobsites. What we had in northern Delaware was initially through the University of Delaware. And then, again, as I said at the beginning, we began to do it through the schools.

>> With our voc rehab, you know, we do everything in house. But most states contract. So they might not, you know, do things on site. It could be that, you know, I know, for instance, I heard Alaska was on a webinar, and they were talking about how they work with their teachers to provide their pre-employment transition services. So every VR is not set up like South Carolina is. So it would just depend on, you know, state by state kind of how they might be able to be involved and what resources they might have. If there's any way that we can help with anything, you know, and talk with you, you know, I'd be glad to -- we can exchange e-mails, and I'll be glad to help any way that I can for you.

>> Yeah. Sure. >> CATHY COWIN: Yeah. >> Well, I believe -- I think this is -- and correct me, Mom -- but I believe this year is

going to be five or six years we'll be doing this, I believe. I'm not quite sure. >> CATHY COWIN: Yeah. >> And I -- I coordinate meetings, and I set up conference calls and I believe we

have Christina School District, a couple other people involved, and CBI. >> CATHY COWIN: Alyssa, time is almost up, and there may be some other

questions. >> Yeah, yeah, go ahead. That's it. >> CATHY COWIN: Thank you. >> ZACH BALDWIN: Great. Thank you so much, Cathy and Alyssa. >> You're welcome. >> ZACH BALDWIN: We really appreciate you being involved in Disability Mentoring

Day. We are up at the end of the time that we have for our call. I think there may be one or two more questions left. But for those folks or for anyone else who does have a question and is not in the queue, please reach out to me directly, and I can get your question answered or direct you to one of our speakers if your question is relevant to them. The best way to get in contact with me is to e-mail dmd@aapd.com, and I'll make sure to respond to your questions or, again, to connect you to the appropriate speakers. Again, I want to say thank you to everybody for joining today's call. Thank you to all of our speakers for giving your time and sharing your experience about how you organize Disability Mentoring Day. I hope everyone saw that there are a whole wide range of different ways to participate in Disability Mentoring Day and to add different aspects or different types of events that can be most beneficial to participating students and to employers in your community. Again, if you haven't accessed our Disability Mentoring Day toolkit yet, you can do that at AAPD.com/dmd. And on that page, you'll also find instructions to connect with us about sharing information for any plans, Disability Mentoring Day you have or for letting us know how it goes after we get to October. So again, thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. And best of luck with organizing your Disability Mentoring Day events this year. Thank you.

>> Thank you to you. >> Thanks so much. Have a great day, everybody.

(The call ended at 4:02 P.M. ET.)