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Ron and Nancy #1

Ron:  Hello my name is Ron Rucker, I'm President and CEO of VIA of the Wehi 
Valley. My colleague, Nancy Brooks-Lane,  and I are here today to discuss 
providing quality service delivery for people with disabilities, primarily 
around employment, and what we want to do in presenting this segment.  We talk 
about providing services for people with disabilities. We talk about real work. 
We talk about real work options and people moving out of facilities and taking 
advantage of those real work options. One of the things that we run into when we 
share examples, is that it seems people don't believe.  Whether it's families, 
funders, or individuals with disabilities themselves, or even our colleagues as 
providers, [people] don't really believe that it can happen for their people 
that have disabilities.  

It kind of falls into a couple of categories.  The most prominent one seems to 
be, "But my folks are too disabled," or "My folks are really, really disabled.  
They can't be as disabled as yours."  I hesitate to use the word "disabled," but 
that's how it's presented as a question.  What we hope to do today is talk about 
the two most important things:  the kinds of jobs that people in our 
organizations are obtaining through our efforts and also, technically on the 
other side, how the funding matches up because that's the second most prominent 
question, I think, that comes up.  Nancy, I think you'd like to share your part 
of how we're going to put this presentation together.

Nancy:  Sure.  To me this is the most exciting piece of systems change because 
you really do get to see how significantly people's lives change and also the 
quality of their lives change.  In our particular program, which is the Cobb 
Douglas County Community Services Board in Georgia, we have focused on some 
employment options that fall under a self-employment type of modality that focus 
on resource ownership, business within a business, and then more traditional 
form of self-employment.

Ron:  Right and my examples are going to focus in my organization.  Even though 
both Nancy and I operate what are called traditional CRP's, Community 
Rehabilitation Programs, we have come at this in somewhat a different way.  We 
believe they're complimentary, but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm 
going to take a point and Nancy's going to take counterpoint.  We're not at 
odds, but we're coming at this in a different way.  We hope the two will give 
you some very clear examples of what we're talking about.  My organization is in 
Pennsylvania.  I think it's very important that we qualify, that in giving these 
examples, we're not in your state, we're not in your system. We're going to be 
talking about this in terms of where our organizations are geographically, 
politically, and financially. 

We do believe that what we're talking about does and will translate, if you 
listen to “how”, not so much do the “yeah buts”. Whether it's about the 
disability level of the individuals that you're serving or supporting, or 
whether it's about your own unique funding problems and connecting funding to, 
creative funding, to people with disabilities.  I think that's the key in the 
examples that Nancy and I are going to be sharing.  These are examples that 
start from "We can do this," not "We can't do this." I think that's the key. 

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