http://www.t-tap.org/training/livewebcast/0310VCU.doc Hi, welcome to the RRTC webcast. I'm Teri Blankenship. Thank you for joining us today. Before we get started, there are a couple items I wanted to go over with you. First of all, the webcast will be archived for you and we will e-mail you the user name and password tomorrow. The program is open captioned, so if you need the speeches, click on the list off the webcast page. We will have an online chat room after the webcast today. It's my pleasure to introduce Suzanne Hutcheson. She is the president and CEO of the TriCounty TEC. She successfully led her organization from a sheltered workshop to a community-based organization. She also serves as a member on the national executive board, workforce development board, the United Way volunteer and community resource board of directors. So, let's get started, and I would now like to turn the program over to Suzanne. >> SUZANNE HUTCHESON: Thanks and thank you all for watching today. I'm going to talk about dispelling the myths of conversion, and that is that you can have a successful organization that goes through a conversion effort. TEC. It stands for training, education and community. We are located in Stewart, Florida. Feel free to visit after you hear everything that we have to say and you want to come and see us. But just to give you a historical perspective to let you know where we came from, in 1964 the organization was founded by a number of -- by a group of parents. The parents felt that their sons and daughters needed more than sitting home and watching TV and doing nothing else. So the organization started as a plan for an occupational center for the handicapped. In '74 when money was available for vocational training and other programs, we changed our name to the TriCounty Center Incorporated and began efforts towards work services. We served about 79 consumers with staff. In '84 we ran a successful sheltered workshop until about 1984. We had 175 consumers who came to our organization on a daily basis and did workshop things, taking things apart, putting them together, mailing kinds of things, et cetera. In 1984, we began to hear about supported employment. And we became very excited about it and looked at what it meant to our organization. We heard from people like Paul Wehman and Karen Flippo and David Mank and the things that you are hearing about today, and we began to look at what it meant to our organization. What I'll do today is to, as we get into this, is to give you a logical kind of way to look at conversion and some of the things that we did that seemed to work well. So I won't go into a lot of it now. But in 1984, we began our first supported employment efforts. We looked at competitive employment as an option and we looked at work crew service as an option. One of the early stories, we looked at work crews. We did janitorial work. And transportation became a major problem. We determined that limo service was the only way to help get our consumers to and from the banks they were working at. So the first job started with people making real wages for real job, but also riding in limos to the job. The first message is almost any problem can be overcome if you have a staff that is creative enough. As we got into supported employment and our staff continued to identify folks who we felt should be working in the community, it became clear to us quickly that the conversion to us meant a total change in our organizational structure. In 1990, we realized we could no longer both afford to support a 19,000 square foot building and move people into the community. So the board took a brave step and we sold our building and took away what most people considered to be our major safety net. But that was one of the best things we did. And today, in 2003, our organization is totally community-based. Our first plan was a 3 year plan. I still like to tell people, we are in the 18th year of a three year conversion plan. Just to give you examples quickly of some of the jobs that we have helped people become really, really good at, just very quickly, Ruth is the head microfilm person for a local law firm. Ruth was raised in an institution. Came to our sheltered workshop, was there for about 15 years and then decided she wanted a real job. She has been in her job now for 12 years. Is making about $10 an hour, which in our area is a good wage, has bought her own home and is really kind of living the American dream. Leann had significant, significant mobility issues as well as significant mental retardation. One thing we could find out from her, because her verbal ability wasn't really great, was that she really, really liked animals. She worked for a vet now for at least ten years, is making a really good salary there, and went from cleaning cages to now being the person who greets visitor, and helps bring the animals in. Glen is a major force at the Martin Memorial Medical Center. He delivers things all over the four stories of the building and really is a well-known fixture there. Glen again has mental retardation and has been working there for a number of years, has been their employee for the month throughout the hospital at least four times since he has been there. A historical perspective on the organization, how it changed since 1984 and '85. In '85 we had one location, today we have seven. In 1985 we were serving two counties, today we serve eight. We served 175 to 2500 consumers totaling all the programs. We have 515 people that we place a year and 250 people move into follow along every year. In 1985, we had no employment, today we have 31. And in 1985, we were serving individuals with developmental disabilities only. Today we serve individuals with all kinds of challenges to work and also welfare to work recipients. In 1985, we had five different program types; and today, in 2003, we have 17 different program types. Our organizational budget in 1985 was 650,000. Today it's a little over $4 million. In 1985, we had 34 staff members. Today we have 130. We credit all of that to the fact that we took a very, very strong approach to converting our organization, because we believed that all people should have a place in their community. As we start into this, what I want to talk to you a bit about is what is conversion? And I was talking to Grant Revel with VCU earlier and he reminded me that just as all politics are local, all conversion is local. Conversion to TriCounty TEC meant that we converted the organization. We felt everyone that we work with should have an opportunity to work. Conversion to work in your area might be different. It might have to be incremental. It might be focused on specific areas of your organization. Maybe it's a new startup business. Maybe you believe so strongly in supported employment that you want to start a business that is only supported employment focused. And we think that's a great idea. You have to consider, no matter what approach you take to conversion, what are the politics of your area, the funding within your area, and also other influences on your organization, such as how many niche contracts you have? What kind of dollars are available to be converted? What impact does it have on other kinds of contact work that you have as well as your thrift shop efforts and things along those lines. The reality is a conversion really is something that you look at based on your own organization and how it can change. The guiding principle has to be a belief that all people, in fact, need to be, should be, have the right to be and the responsibility to be a working member of our society. One of our little tag lines at TriCounty TEC is we create taxpayers. As we go into this and we look at it's 2003 and not 1984, we wanted to start out recognizing some of the changes that happened since TriCounty TEC looked at converting. As we go back to the overhead, politics are really one of the major things that changed. In the early 1990s, we were focused on people. We were focused on people going back to work. We were focused on welfare to work, society felt very strongly that people who were on welfare needed to work. It seemed at that time that people with disabilities would surely be next. The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. Our first real, real push and ability to have some civil rights attached to what we do. If you look today, we are more focused on the fiscal arena. We are more focused on in fact how much can you do with this little bit of money? There is little discussion about even individual funding streams or funding pieces. It's more wait a minute, we are not that interested in what you want to do that is new. It's can you continue exactly, exactly as you are? Charles Dickens said it best in that: "It's the best of times and the worst of times." For the last number of years, self-determination has been our mantra. We felt strongly that all people have the right to determine themselves what kind of job they had, where they would go, et cetera. Our Congress and other politics have been very, very strong in looking at that. And some of the efforts to increase funding have been things like the ticket to work, revenue maximization, Medicaid buy-in, all the things that have different meanings in different states. So what we find is some of the new efforts to increase funding put walls between the consumer and provider. In many cases, the provider has in their hands the ability to choose or not to choose to provide these services. So in some cases it made it already harder for the consumers that we serve. There is lots of work left to do, but these are changes in the political arena that really have been interesting. Our funding streams have changed. In 1984, dollars came to us almost on a daily rate kind of thing. We were able to move dollars around and to provide services within an existing funding stream. Now, Medicaid services are categorical, they are very difficult for placement or phase 1 services. In many states they're not -- I'm from Florida. We don't use them hardly at all for phase 1 services. And in many states, not only are they not possible for the phase 1 services, but also for the follow along services. So far we have been lucky in Florida and we can use some dollars for phase 2, but not a lot. Vocational rehabilitation, another major funding source, has changed to hourly or performance based. It's harder for a smaller organization to work through the performance-based benchmarks, but it causes incredible cash flow issues. So funding streams have changed a lot. There has also been a real lack of conversion efforts. I think we all pretty much know that for every one person that goes into supported employment, four go into sheltered workshops. So we have a long road ahead of us to really convince everyone and to convince the providers and the policy makers that really conversion efforts that actually lead to employment and community-based services for people with disabilities, you know, we just have a long way to go for that. The economy, with a war potentially in our future, and the economy being very, very difficult these day, it's really hard for anyone to have a crystal ball to be able to say things are going to get better, things are going to get worse. If we make conversion efforts, you know, how do we know that we can sustain them, et cetera? So the economy really does play a major factor in whether a person, an organization, can convert or not. 9/11 changed our world forever. We all know that. 9/11 probably had the biggest impact of any of our lifetimes at this point. One of the things that I think we need to look at with 9/11 though is it's a real opportunity for us, as America rebuilds and as America looks again at who and what we're going to be in the future, it's a perfect time for those of us who are advocates to really get our message back to the decision makers at all levels, that in fact employment for people with disabilities, community-based opportunities such as being able to live in their home, being able to participate in the community efforts, it's a real opportunity for us to be able to bring that back to the forefront and use it as an opportunity to make our case. Things that stayed the same since 1984. It's that services remain predominantly facility based. Again, while employment is rising, and that's the really, really good news, there are more people going into competitive employment, supported employment or general employment. But the reality is that there are still 4 to 1 moving into sheltered workshops, so we have a ways to go. But there is not a doubt in my mind that we can do it. Policy still does not support supported employment. It more supports congregate types of funding, and it's a real challenge, sometimes, to make sure that we can, in fact, get the funding in place to do conversion or even to move more people into employment. The train and place model doesn't work. We can do training and training and move a person into a real job and they really need the assistance on the job to learn the job. And that's what we still need to be focusing on. The best thing, however, is that consumers still can and want to work in real jobs in the community. So from the standpoint of there's a lot of changes, there's a lot that is the same. But the most exciting part is that the people that we all are in the field to work with all want, in fact, the same thing that we do: To have a life that is meaningful, to work in the community with everyone else, to live and play and be a part of the community. Another bright light are the school systems. School systems in many locations are focusing more and more and more on employment based outcomes for their students. So that when the student actually graduates, they have a job in place. So there are some very positive things in the future. And as long as we can keep the positive focus, I think we can absolutely make anything happen. When our organization looked at conversion, and as we looked at conversion now, there are four factors I think that are necessary for conversion. One is that all conversion has to be mission based. It has to be based on a belief system and a value system that says, again, that everyone who has a disability, or not a disability, everyone has the right, the responsibility and should have the opportunity to work and be a part of their community. The second part is that it needs to be consumer focused, that it needs to be focused on the individual and what that individual wants to do. The third piece is it has to have strong programmatic and fiscal planning. Back in 1984, we spent most of our time on looking at the programmatic pieces to supported employment. Today, more than ever, you have to focus both on the programmatic and the fiscal aspects of conversion and of employment services. And last but not least, more again today probably than ever, it has to be focused with partnerships and collaborations. Supported employment, competitive employment, cannot be done in a vacuum any longer. You have to be a part of the total community and not just the total community of disability, but the community that you live in and work in. So let's start on the first piece, which talks about missions. I'll read to you our mission from 1984. See if this sounds familiar to you and any of the missions that you still have or that you still hear. In 1984, TriCounty TEC's mission was as follows: TriCounty serves individuals, infants and adults who need special training, education and living arrangements to improve their quality of life and become active participants in their community. By the time I got through saying that to many people, their eyes glazed over. And as I began especially at Chamber of Commerce meetings or other public meetings to build from there, I had lost them, totally lost them. And so in the past couple years, TriCounty TEC's mission now is: "Helping people succeed." Three words. Now, those three words, we have four divisions, all have expansion on them as you go to the different divisions. But when someone asks now what the TriCounty TEC, what does it do, it's easy to say we help people succeed. If we talk about the employment program, we say we help people find and keep jobs with employers like you and help provide that on-the-job training. And we help that person become a part of your work force. We can help you cut down on your turnover cost. We can help you fill positions with qualified employees. We can help you in many ways. Sometimes they will look at me and say we thought you worked with people with disabilities. And we thought you worked with special populations. And I'll say well, yes, we do that, too. But our mission for the folks that we work with is helping people succeed and helping them be a part of their community. So one of the things that we believe strongly is that to be a part of the community, you have to look and feel and talk and dress and everything else like the rest of the community. And helping people succeed kind of did that for us. It almost kind of turns lights on that probably should have been turned on years before. But we began to believe that what we really did was we offered a service and that service really was supported employment, and supported employment is an outcome-based method of helping people find and keep jobs. So that's one of the things that worked with us incredibly. Along with missions, the organization has to be value based. For example, when you ask the following question, the answer has to be yes in all cases, and that question is: Do you believe that all people, regardless of disability, can and should work? That should be the first question that you ask your board member that should be the first question that you ask your staff. That should be the first question that families have to answer. And most importantly, the consumer that you're working with should say yes, this is what I want. So when you look at your first part of conversion, if you don't have a mission and if you don't have an organization that buys into the mission, that all people have the right, the responsibility, and should have the opportunity to work, then you've got some work to do. Because all of the rest of it won't work without that. I work with a number of organizations that go: A values clarification, we have done that so many times. We have done value clarifications over and over again. And my message to them all the time is if you don't do it again, if you don't look at values clarification or at least determine that your organization has the values that it takes, you're going to be spinning your wheels for a while and you'll be coming back to it. So it's so much easier to do it right from the first. The second part is consumer focused. What's funny about most of our programs is that when we ask a person when they first come in, what do they want, in most cases they say they want to work. They say they want a job. They say they want in one way or another to be part of community. In so many cases you look at whatever you call your plan in whatever state you're in, and that plan has an outcome: Competitive employment. But what is built in so much of the time is so much process to get the person there. Someone did a study once, and if they had done all of the things on a person's program plan, it would have taken them something like 119 years before the person would have a job. So, the first thing that you need to look at is some form of person centered planning. If you are serious about placing people in job, and if you're serious about assisting that person, then you've got to basically make them the center of the process. And one of the best ways or only ways to do that is to sit them down with the people who they know and trust and want to work with, and look at what in fact they want to do and who is going to be there to help them. It's got to be based on wants, not needs. And wants is sometimes not what the person can do. We started a number of years ago, instead of doing any formal evaluation; we started looking at functional evaluations. We started looking at what do you do over the weekend? What do you like to do? What are the kinds of things that interest you? What do you do over the weekend? First of all in many cases we were amazed at how little some of the people that we were working with had done. We all had the stories of taking someone to the movie for the first time. Or helping someone go to dinner at someplace other than fast food restaurants. We all have those stories. And what we found is when we listened to the stories of what the person likes and wants to do, it makes a difference. So, when a person tells you they want to be an airline pilot and you know because of their disability there is no way they can do that, you can really help them by gearing them back to what are the kinds of thins they might be able to do at a local airport that would in fact put them near airplanes or put them in proximity to the things that they like and want to do. The next thing is real choice. And again, it goes back to what the person wants to do and the interest that they have shown you. It's really easy to look at the board and see what jobs are available and say okay, I know this person can do this job. It's a lot harder to say: The job that this person might be able to do or want to do isn't there yet, and to continue to look at those kinds of things. Balancing the family, and I have versus the consumer choice. Because in many cases we talk about working with the family, and we do talk about having the family involved and really a part of every decision that the person needs to make. However, we believe that our service is to the consumer and we believe that if the consumer indicated to us that they want a job, and they are willing to try as hard as they can, we work as hard as we can with that family to convince them that that person should have a chance. One of the things that we started doing years ago, when we became very serious about employment and about that being the best, best option for people, was we quit giving tours of our organization. Now, we sold our building so we don't have anything to tour anymore. But what we did was we began to stop giving tours. And in fact what we would do, we would take families to businesses that were employing people with disabilities that we had helped place, and we let the families talk to the other families or talk to the individual who is working. Plus we worked around break time and we tried not to be obtrusive, but we found more and more that when the families talked to families and the consumers talked to the consumer, that the choice issue became easier to deal with. One of my favorite quotes and one of the only ones that I'll give you today is: Destiny is a matter of choice, not chance. Most of us live our lives totally believing that. We believe strongly that we can be whoever and what we want to be. What we don't do in many of the programs that we have and much of our field is give the consumers that we work with that same chance. We really have felt over the years that it was up to us to take care of them, to take care of safety, to make sure that nothing happened to them. And unfortunately, that is what has happened. Nothing has happened for many people. So, as we looked at conversion, and as we began more and more to believe in the arena we were in, this destiny became more and more important to us and we wanted to make sure that everyone we worked with had that same opportunity. It's really easy to say it, it's a lot harder to do it. But when you start looking at what the choices are that you made in your life and the kinds of things that you've done, then it's a lot easier to see why someone else might want to do the same things. Looking at programmatic and fiscal planning, the two have to be hand in hand. Like I said years ago, you could pretty much do a conversion effort or you could start to look at it, because funding wasn't as difficult as it is now. As you look at it, there are three major things that you need to look at conversion with. The first I start with is management. If management doesn't support it, it's most likely not going to happen. The key to management when you look at a conversion effort, or you're looking at major employment services, you're looking at services that are not offered at a desk. You're not looking at services that are offered with people behind their desk from 8 to 5. You are looking at a situation where your staff has got to be out in the field. So management kind of changes direction totally. Management becomes a support system, rather than the driving force anymore. They are not the ones in charge. They are not involved in every single decision that is made. And for someone like me, who has been a CEO and used to making the decision that was very, very difficult. One of the things that we did in order to show this more visually and help explain it was we turned our organizational chart upside down. We start with our consumers at the top. They drive our services. Our direct services staff are next. The reality is, if your direct services staff are not out there doing their job, then we in management don't have our jobs. Because we are a dependent on the ability of the direct services staff to make the placements and help people become a part of their community. The third group are your whatever management structure you have, supervisory, management level. Comes down to the CEO then who is the pivotal part of it. We tell our staff that our job is to make a couple decisions a year that we need the overall information for, but lastly that it's to support them. The bottom or the foundation of the organization is the board of directors. It's up to the board of directors to make sure the organization can be perpetuated and it's up to the board of directors to make sure that the policy and procedure is in place to make sure that staff can do their job. When we take a look at staff, there are all kinds of things you can say about staff, they are not the staff that we used to hire. They are not the people that we used to hire to come in and work in our workshop from an 8 to 5 time. Staff first have to be mission driven. They have to be very, very well-trained. The biggest mistake you can make is hire somebody and say okay, go play. They have to be outcome focused. They have to understand what they are actually looking for and what they are looking for is to help a person find and keep a job. You've got to pay competitive salaries. We get back into that fiscal arena of if you don't pay competitive salaries; the people are not going to stay with you. You have to look at bonus and incentive programs. All of the job coaches know what they need to do in order to keep their jobs, performance standards. And they know how they will be rewarded when they are able to do that. We hire for attitude and experience and we don't -- we emphasize that more than degrees or specific skills. We want people that can come in and have an attitude of success, have an attitude and experience that says I can help this person be the best that they can be. There are a lot of things out there, like predictive index and things along those lines that help you pick staff, but the reality is you still need to be able to take a look at a person, listen to what they say, ask them that question about do they believe that people can and should work, and then you begin to get a good idea about this is going to be a good staff member. Last, the board of directors has to change. Our board of directors for years said don't worry, Susie will get it done. Not a problem. She has the staff to do it. Now more than ever, staff have to be policy driven. They have to be outcome focused. They have to understand what they are there for as well. They have to promote the quality of the organization. They have to be out there not talking in materials of how good your buildings are or how big your staff is or how big your campus is. They have to talk in terms of how many people you placed, what the outcomes of those placements have been and why the kinds of services you're offering is really good for the community as well as being good for the organization. They have to have environment expertise and experience. Our boards are some of the first places that we make placements. They are willing to open the door to us and let us take that chance. And, luckily, we have been very successful. They also have the responsibility of perpetuating the organization. The fundraising never goes away. Never goes away. There is an organization in Tennessee that is right now doing a capital campaign for conversion. They feel very strongly that the organization needs to be totally community-based. They are not able to locate all of the dollars immediately within their existing resources, so they started a capital campaign. And they are doing well. I kind of wish I had thought of this. As you get into this, the kinds of things that you need to expect as you move toward conversion and as you move toward more community-based kinds of services, you need to expect fear. Well, people are afraid of everything anymore. Fear is probably one of the most common emotions that everyone has. Those of us who think that our consumers and their parents and staff don't read the papers and don't know the things that we do are kind of nuts. Everybody is worried about what is going to happen with cuts. Everybody is worried about what is going to happen with the economy. Everybody is worried about if we go to war. So all of the things that have people afraid, you know, are there. And they are going to be there no matter what we do. But what is the best thing about that fear is if you work together in an organization, and bring your staff together, that fear can actually turn into an incredible positive energy, because you have everybody working together toward a common goal. And when you have that going for you, that fear actually becomes instead of that impending doom feeling that wakes us up in the middle of the night and what is going to happen next, it turns it into a motivating force for an organization. And when you have fear turn into a positive force, you've got some real power as far as an organization goes. You can expect turnover. As you move to more community-based kinds of things and people look at how hard it is and they look at it from the standpoint of how hard it is on a day-to-day basis, instead of looking at what the outcomes are, you'll have turnover. That's not so bad. You probably need to have that turnover and you probably need to look at that as an opportunity to begin to hire some of the new people that are going to make the organization even better. It's hard to lose people, especially if they have been there for a while. But none of us are totally -- all of us are expendable. Not one of us is guaranteed a job for life. You can expect chaos for a while, especially if you do a major conversion. As good as the idea sounds and as organized as you think you are, chaos can be a part of it. The good news about chaos is the same thing as fear. It gives the organization an opportunity to pull together, consumer, staff, parents, board, at whatever level and really move in some kind of positive kinds of movement. And the last thing is celebrate the surprises. You will be amazed at where some of the most exciting things happen as you move toward community-based and as you move toward more employment based. You'll have someone come in and say we found a job for so and so, and it will be wait a minute, we never thought they would be able to work. And all of a sudden you find they are out in the community, making a decent salary doing good kinds of things. And our first job coach was our bookkeeper. She was tired of doing bookkeeping. She wanted to be a job coach. She did an exceptional job and worked for us for four years, and went back to bookkeeping. But the surprises as you moved towards community-based services are wonderful. Celebrate those every chance you get. Let everybody know, no matter what part of the organization they're in. The next part about conversion, and about being more community-based and having people more and more as a part of their community, is that you have to belong. You know, someone once said that belonging is the imperative part of morale value. We all want to be part of our community and part of our world and belonging. I think that sometimes we in organizations forget how important it is for us and our staff to be part of everything. While I was sitting on our Chamber of Commerce board of directors, one of our respected people in our community came up and said: Boy, you'll never believe what they are trying to push down our throats with the Americans with Disabilities Act again. And I'm sitting here going okay, here we go. And he said: Do you know what they started doing now? They have started putting Braille on all of the ATM machines. Now, isn't that the most ridiculous thing you have seen? No blind person will drive a car to the ATM. At that point I raised my hand and said excuse me. Let me remind you of something. There are a number of people with visual impairments working throughout the community. There are a number of people with visual impairments who are paying taxes, buying at the grocery store and shopping all of the different places that you work. You forgot about them. But let me remind you. They may be going to work in a cab or having a friend drive them, et cetera, but when they get that ATM card to get their money out of maybe one of your banks, they need that. How many of you are comfortable giving your PIN number to someone else to get your money out? Not many. Everyone tells us don't give out your PIN number. So the reality is that Braille is important if you want a part of the market that you never had before. And that part of the market happens to be the market of people with disabilities. So it's critically important that as people within the community have these very, very shortsighted views of what disability is about, because when you think about it, most of us in the field have done a really good job of keeping people with disabilities kind of out of the mainstream. We have kept people either in workshops or kept them in isolated situations, in school programs. The reality is that we have done a real good job of not allowing the community or not encouraging the community to think about what, in fact, should the community be doing to embrace diversity and to bring these folks that have buying power, that have the same wants and needs and goals as the rest of us do, to, in fact, be a part of the community. So belonging is critically important. Not just from the standpoint of taking your message to the community, but also asking the community back what are the kinds of things that you need to know so you can be better prepared to deal with people who can help your business be viable, to help our community experience more diversity? You've got to participate. You've got to participate yourself and the consumers that you serve. There are so many local government committees that -- the local government is always looking for people to be a part of. All of us are busy. All of us have more on our plates than we ever anticipated. The reality is, if we don't participate in the community, the community won't know we are there. Consumer involvement is important, and not just in civic clubs that have a club for people with disabilities so they are separate. Not just there. We need for consumers to be involved in plain old ordinary clubs just like we are. They need to be involved in parts of the community where their input can be valuable. The other thing that we need to be are experts. And again, you know, when the community thinks about disability, do they call you? Do they call you to talk about Americans with Disabilities Act kinds of things? Do they know that you know more than a very narrow slice of life? So being an expert in your community is supposedly impossible, but I'm finding from a standpoint of being an expert about disability in our community, we are able to do that without any problems at all. And then something that we keep having pointed out to us is you've got to market, market, market. You've got to market, market, market. We still don't have a lot of people that call and say: Please come help us find someone who has a disability to be part of our workforce. We are still out there. The job coaches are out there every day taking the message that we help people succeed; we help people succeed by helping them become a part of their community. And by the way, that also helps you mister or missus or Ms. business person, because we can help you have an employee that is going to stay with you, that will do the job, that will grow as the program grows, et cetera. It's funny, because as -- people have an answer for everything. When the economy is good, we can't find jobs. When the economy is bad, we can't find jobs. And what we are finding is whether the economy is good or bad, business still needs the same thing and business still needs reliable employees who can do the job in a consistent manner on a daily basis. And there is nobody better in most cases to do the jobs than the folks that we are working with in all different areas. So the market, market, market is something that I can't stress enough. Funding and partnership collaborations are the kinds of things that will make any new effort work totally, whether you're just starting your conversion effort or whether you're going through it. As you put together a plan to take to your funding sources, and I guess that would be one of the major, major differences between now and 1984 and 1985, when we started. When we started, we basically put a plan together that says we want to try this. And we want to see if it works, yes. We will guarantee everybody a place back and we will make sure that nobody gets lost in the shuffle. So we were able, in the early days, those of us that worked on conversion efforts, we were able to do a lot of things that are not there anymore. I think today if I looked at converting, one of the first things I'd do is put together a strong programmatic and fiscal plan that I would take to a lot of variety of funding sources. I'd make it outcome based. I'd tell them exactly what we could and couldn't do, focusing on the could. And the reality is that is no different than what we do now as we prepare our budgets for whatever our developmental disabilities funding source is, the mental funding health source is and the vocational rehabilitation funding source is. So I put together a plan that was outcome and performance based. I would let them know for sure what the outcomes were, and if those outcomes -- and that the outcomes were competitive employment and that the -- if it's supported employment, that the supports were in place to make sure that employment lasted. Then I would make sure that they knew it was performance based. And they would understand that we hired staff and that our organization worked from a performance base. I would take it to all of the current funding sources that I dealt with and I'd sit down with them in a new way of doing business. Funding source partnerships are very interesting. Sometimes in Florida I found that funding source partnerships means we take what they give us. Now the reality is if you are looking at conversion, community-based things, it's a new approach. You have to go to funding sources and say look, this is what we are willing and able to do for you. And this is actually how it will make you look good as well. It sounds very simple. And it sounds almost impossible in some cases now. But that's what they're in business to do is help people be the best that they can be. We have just let it become watered down by allowing the majority of the field to really offer services that don't go that way. So you need to stand up and be counted. Go to your funding sources and say this is what we can in fact and will give you. Look at new funding sources, not just for the existing services that you're offering, but also for new services that you can offer. For example, in our area, we found that we had no luck really working with our one stop system and with our workforce board as far as people with disabilities went. We now have -- however, we found that they had a significant number of the hard-to-place welfare recipients who they had no luck with at all. Now we have a fairly lucrative contract with them to provide job coaching services for people who are significantly hard to place through the welfare system. And that added a new arena to us. Instead of us being single funding stream with just a disability stream funding, we expanded not just in the employment division, but all of our divisions into new and exciting funding arenas. One quick example, in our children's program we started working with just children who had disabilities or diagnosed conditions. Now we have expanded that to a program that pays a visit, a developmental visit, to all newborns in two counties. That is all newborns, not newborns with issues or identified with any kind of risk, et cetera. So that program has gone, have a narrow funding stream to the community realizing that if we can in fact provide the services now, with the outcomes we do with people with significant disabilities, imagine what we can do with the rest of the world. So again look at new funding sources along the way. And again, that goes to the diversified funding base as well. If you're struggling out there like most of us are, our organization struggles, the more diversified the funding base, the easier it is to plug the holes when a crisis comes and to give you a little bit of stability as you go through voc rehab changing their rates or the Medicaid waiver becoming over extended, or all of those things that are happening to us now. The diversification gives you the ability to take a more business like as opposed to a crisis based approach to management. So, the funding partnerships and collaboration are probably 20 times more important than they were when we first started or when we ever heard about supported employment years ago. As we kind of come to a close and kind of move to some questions, I'd like to kind of talk about the future. The future is really, really very scary to all of us right now. It's unclear. It's unclear. But I think what TriCounty TEC believes and I think what most of us in the field believe is that we'll survive. We will survive. Gloria Gaynor, we will survive. But we will survive primarily if we recognize the worth and ability of all citizens. If we are strong business and personal, we have to stand up for our beliefs, we have to be strong in our business and we have got to be strong in our personal lives. We have got to be flexible and willing to change, and that willing to change sometimes is on a dime. And, also, we need to never forget what our mission is. And it's a big mission. It's a mission that all of us have kind of taken on as we have come into this field. And that is helping people succeed. And hopefully as we move through the next few years that are somewhat unclear, that if we basically sit back and make clear what we believe our mission is, what our vision is for people with disabilities, and we work very, very hard with all of the partners, especially with that consumer as the number one focus to what we're doing, we will be able to not only survive, but grow and prosper as well. So I think now I'm going to turn it back over to Teri and we will take questions and she will tell you where we go from here. Thank you for tuning in today. >> TERI BLANKENSHIP: Thank you. Well, we hope you enjoyed this webcast and that you'll join us in the chat room. If for some reason you're not able to post your questions in the chat room, we will leave the bulletin board open. And there is a link off the webcast page for the bulletin board. Thank you for participating and we will join you in the chat room. (End of session.)