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Interviewer: How do you recommend that employment specialists involve
coworkers and facilitate natural supports in the workplace?
Michael Callahan: We go back to the best that we've always known
in supported employment. And I think that “best” is starting
with the employer. I've mentioned the portfolio several times and
in that presentation and that proposal, one of the things that my
portfolio would say to an employer, would be: “We start with
doing things your way.”
For me, natural supports are far more a cultural issue within a workplace
than necessarily a strategy that human service people bring to a workplace.
And I think if we've made mistakes in the past about natural supports,
we've taken a term, which isn't us. If something is natural it's not
us. It's not that we're unnatural; we're just artificial, alien to
the workplace, in the way.
In order to be natural, for me, the easiest touchstone is...what
is this workplace? Who works here? How do they do things? Start with
that and also, if not insisting, at least working very hard to have
it so that an employee, on a supported customized relationship with
an employer would start exactly the same any employee would: with
our supports. And it would be hard for an employer to come up with
a rationale, why a person would not start the same way anyone else
would, with supports. I can understand an employer having a concept
or having a concern, maybe we can't start in a way different from
everyone else that would have to be negotiated.
So for me, it all starts by the cultural perspective, the cultural
appreciation. And in doing that, I think we teach employers every
time a problem emerges, in terms of a natural way of doing things.
Our response builds capacity within the workplace. If all we do is
kind of carve out a space for us to work with a supported employee,
we are creating a difference from the beginning that then we have
to kind of sell to the workplace. And I think workplaces aren't always
buying what we have to sell in terms of how different it might look.
Where as if we start with the way they do things, we might reach the
same place, in fact I hope we reach the same place, if that's what
the person needs. But, then the company understands because they're
buying in from their perspective. So, for me, it's that cultural sort
of appreciation for every workplace. I think almost a harsh thing
to say, but a real thing to say, is: if a job developer's in a work
place and the culture of that workplace is not at all friendly to
any sort of notion of treating a person with a disability in a manner
similar that they would treat another employee, that's probably not
a good workplace for that person to be working. Because they're not
going to be very likely to really embrace the kind of strategies that
I think are part of good natural supports.
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