Transcript - slide 9

Interviewer:  You said that there were 66 people that have jobs at this point using the home and community-based waiver through Mill Creek. I am just curious if you could give us a description of some of the work that you have been doing?

Danny Cowart:  It's really a broad spectrum of different types of jobs. We have been both challenged and pleasantly surprised at the same time. We've got production-type work and packaging-type work in facilities. We have people cleaning school buses. We have people packaging and delivering newspapers. We just had an Employee-of-the-Month at Barnhill's Restaurant. One individual with significant disabilities was employee-of-the-month.

We have entrepreneurial things where we find as close a match to what the dream is of the person, and we stay as close to that as possible. We don't always make it; but if someone has a dream of driving a big truck, then the place to start looking would be in the trucking industry where they could be around these types of vehicles. We do a lot of that, and we are very proud of that.

We have some people who have significant disabilities who use wheelchairs, and they are working. Michael Callahan and Norciva Shumpert’s philosophy on discovery and customization has really helped us when we started with supported employment. And by the way, VCU has helped us. We gained a lot of insight from our coursework with you.

But with customization, we don't go out looking for applications as much as we used to. We look for tasks, conditions, and those variables that we can find that fit. Then we try to support them in a way that would be as least intrusive as possible.

Interviewer:  I think you have hit on a very critical point [and] that is the customization of a job that fits the person’s interest. At one point, we may have just been looking for a job. Now we are doing more customization of the job.

Danny Cowart:  That's right. We have found that for the employers this is not "Oh my, we have a person with a disability. Let's do a good thing."

Employers really have tasks out there that, for economic or labor market reasons, can't get those tasks done efficiently. We have a product, for lack of a better term, that is marketable. [We have] a person [with] a skill, who can do [a job] that the [employer] is having a hard time filling.

I'll give you an instance in a rural area. A small country store had one clerk. The clerk had to also be the one to do the stocking, because they couldn't afford another person. We had a person that had severe seizures. We [gave] him a helmet and a scooter. He [works for pay] 4 to 6 hours a week, and the place is kept very well with his help. Now the clerk does not have to leave the checkout counter to do that. They have cut down on pilferage on items being stolen while the clerk is in the back. For the store this is a win-win.

back to top