How to hire a veteran, part two

by Col. David Sutherland

Someone told me a story this summer about a large communications agency that claimed it wanted to hire veterans and had posted all of its job openings to HireHeroes.org, but then said that it wasn’t getting very many responses and those that were submitted weren’t qualified. This company decided there just must not be a lot of veterans with communications skills looking for jobs in the Washington, DC area.

Those excuses are a good example of the disconnect between military and civilians. Posting a job on HireHeroes.org is like posting to Monster.com. It’s a start, but it’s not nearly enough. Organizations need to make systemic changes, starting with getting out of their offices and into the field. Even if you don’t have any positions open immediately, isn’t it worth attending a HireHeroes career fair or a trade show like AUSA to meet the impressive men and women who are serving or have served this country? It will also give you the opportunity to learn how to look at skill sets, not just technical ability on paper.

Here’s another thought: hire a veteran as an HR recruiter. Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post wrote a poignant story about Oklahoma National Guard troops returning from Afghanistan and struggling to find work. Due to budget cutbacks, the National Guard soldier responsible for helping veterans find jobs was getting cut himself. Talk about the perfect candidate for an HR department seeking to increase its veteran staffers! Have you reached out to your local National Guard yet to seek out candidates?

JP Morgan made a major change in its organization, moving hiring of veterans out of diversity and into Human Resources. It then created an entire program devoted to recruitment and retention of veterans, focusing on quality of life. To make it “real,” the corporation put Tom Higgins, a former Coastie, in charge of the entire thing. Do you think JP Morgan Chase is meeting its veterans’ recruitment goals? You bet they are.

If you’re a recruiter or HR professional struggling to figure out how veterans fit into your organization, reach out to me via the Dixon Center for Military and Veterans Community Services web site. I’d be happy to give you some pointers and connect you to good resources — people who will work beyond a job board listing and will customize programs to help meet your needs.

These pictures are worth way more than 1000 words

by MacKenzie Olsberg

Orbiters by Kevin Olsberg

Several of my family members have an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), so I’ve had a lot of time to watch the ways they act compared with people in other families. In our house, I don’t dare sit in one of “their” chairs. Rituals must, must be adhered to. To do otherwise risks, well, not the best reaction. The details expressed during dinner conversations can be overwhelming, and discussions often become one-sided very quickly.

This is what I grew up with, though, so I have never known otherwise. I’m older now and, as I realize just how different my family is from other families, I’m starting to appreciate the differences so much more. Sometimes I even crave the comfort of listening to incessant talk about Cubs baseball stats from 30 years ago, or hearing detail after detail about obscure topics like Irukandji syndrome, you know, the condition induced by the venomous sting of Carukia barnesi, a species of Irukandji jellyfish…and, oh yeah, certain other box jellyfish, too.

But really, what else are we going to talk about at the dinner table? How my day went? My day is the same every day — let’s talk about fatal jellyfish stings!

Every once in a while, words prove elusive to my family members with ASD. They can sit there in silence for various reasons. It doesn’t necessarily make them unexpressive or rude, though, just selective in how they want to express themselves, and what medium they want to use to do so.

Sometimes the things we create with our hands in those moments of silence say more than words can to express the way we’re feeling. My father paints landscapes of the sea. Translation: he wants to take a vacation. My sister sews a beautiful ballroom dance dress. Translation: she wants to laugh and feel pretty. And me, with my own learning disabilities? You might find me sitting with a book in a corner or sketching a fierce dragon. Translation: I want to have an adventure.

Moments of silence can become the most expressive time for people who have trouble finding words. To give you more examples, I’ll be introducing you to Easter Seals clients who are telling beautiful stories through their artwork in a series of upcoming posts here on the Easter Seals blog. Stay tuned!

Something is terribly wrong

by Beth Finke

The media didn’t spend a lot of time discussing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) when the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York City last month, but our Easter Seals blogger David Sutherland, a retired Army Colonel, sure was paying attention. A post COL Sutherland wrote called “Important treaty on disabilities languishes in the Senate” was recently published on The Hill’s Congress Blog. An excerpt from his guest post:

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was signed by President Obama in 2009. Since then, it has been signed and ratified by 132 countries including Canada, Ireland and the European Union. Even the Castro regime, China and Sudan – hardly iconic world leaders in human rights and human dignity – have ratified the treaty. But the U.S. Senate, whose constitutional job it is to provide advice and consent on treaties, has sat on the sidelines.

COL Sutherland is a co-founder and chairman of the Dixon Center for Military and Veterans Community Services here at Easter Seals, and his guest post went on to explain that the Convention will be introduced in the Senate once again. He urged senators to join veterans John McCain, John Kerry and Bob Dole, who all spoke out as senators in 2012 in favor of ratification. Read COL Sutherland’s guest post on The Hill in its entirety here. When you’re done, you may end up agreeing when he says in the post that “When some of the world’s worst human rights abusers have ratified an important treaty on human rights but the United States has not, something is terribly wrong.”

2013 Government Shutdown & People with Disabilities

by Jennifer Dexter

Being a native Washingtonian and one of the people that represents Easter Seals on Capitol Hill, it is hard to see what is happening right now during the government shutdown. Imagine if all of the sudden a vast majority of your town was all laid off at once. Knowing the impact this will have for my family and friends is scary. But what I am particularly worried about is what this shutdown and the larger inability of our Congress to reach agreements on funding priorities means for people with disabilities throughout the country.

People with disabilities rely on government services to live, learn and work in their communities. Federal services and supports for people with disabilities have already faced years of stagnant or decreasing funding while the demand for services is increasing. With each step in this ongoing budget debate, services to people with disabilities have suffered. The shutdown will mean that people with disabilities will face delays in applying for and receiving direct benefits; education programs like Head Start may start shutting down; federal funding for food programs like WIC (Women, Infants and Children) and Meals on Wheels will stop coming; and more. These affects will just get worse the longer the shutdown goes on.

Easter Seals is working to stop the shutdown and make sure that Congress prioritizes the needs of people with disabilities. You can help by contacting your member of Congress and adding your voice. Thanks.

$75,000 could be ours

by Beth Finke

At risk of showing my age here, I just gotta say, Paul Newman was one of those actors you just couldn’t resist. It’s still a thrill to have anything at all to do with Paul Newman, so I am tickled to learn that Newman’s Own Foundation has chosen Easter Seals and Dixon Center as one of a few nonprofit organizations to participate in their new Honoring Those Who Serve Challenge.

The Foundation is continuing Paul Newman’s commitment to the brave men and women in the military community, and here at Easter Seals we have a strong commitment to the military community, too: Easter Seals has been serving America’s veterans since WWII. As tens of thousands of service members return from Iraq and Afghanistan with new and unmet needs, the demand for the services we provide continues to increase. Our partnership with Dixon Center has expanded our reach and ability to serve veterans and their families.

Between now and Veterans Day, Newman’s Own Foundation will be donating $180,000 to organizations like ours that have highly-effective programs focused on empowering military personnel, veterans and their families. The charity that raises the most during the challenge will receive a first place $75,000 donation from the Foundation. Second and third place and bonus donations are also available.

This is a tremendous opportunity for us to get more resources to serve more military families, and our goal is to raise as much money as possible so we can win the $75,000 grand prize donation.

Here’s where you can help: please donate now to help us help more veterans. Our veterans have given so much of themselves serving our country, please help us to serve them as they face critical needs of their own when they come back home.

A different look at volunteering

by Beth Finke

Katherine Schneider is a retired clinical psychologist and disability advocate with a new book coming out this fall called “Occupying Aging: Delights, Disabilities and Daily Life.” The two of us have never met face to face, but we’ve come to know each other virtually through blogging. Dr. Schneider’s blog is called Kathie Comments, and I’m pleased to introduce her as a guest blogger on the Easter Seals blog today.

Web of service

by Katherine Schneider, Ph.D.

Dr. Katherine Schneider with her Seeing Eye dog, Luna

My volunteer work on National Day of Service this year in honor of the victims of 9/11 gave me time to reflect on the combinations of serving and being served in my life. I am blind and love to cook — and eat! A volunteer drives me to the grocery store every month, and in exchange, the driver gets a free parking spot in my driveway, half a block from campus here at University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. On the National Day of Service I gave blood at a National Red Cross blood drive, and I was accompanied by my Seeing Eye dog Luna, who serves every day, nobly and selflessly.

I’ve had wonderful opportunities for service, ranging from mentoring blind students to serving on city, county, and state boards. Too often people with disabilities stop themselves from volunteering for several reasons:

• Nobody asks them,
• They don’t know where to start,
• They don’t think they have anything to give.

I think those of us with disabilities are in a unique spot to give help: we know about particular needs and have figured out tricks of the trade to deal with them. I get great joy out of meeting a real human need, and National Day of Service gave me an opportunity to reflect once again on what Rabindranath Tagore says: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

How to hire a veteran

by Col. David Sutherland

When is a cook not just a cook? When he’s doing it for the U.S. military.

A cook in the military handles inventories worth millions of dollars, manages the preparation of meals for a dining hall that serves thousands, turns around meals on a ship whose kitchen is as cramped as any New York City apartment and coordinates closely with foreign vendors and workers to deliver a good product. This is a person who knows how to problem-solve, operate under deadlines and manage large numbers of employees who may or may not speak the same language. This is a person who could do everything from hotel operations to event planning.

It’s true that a military resume looks very different from a civilian resume. But it’s an excuse when HR departments claim they can’t translate our skills or that we lack the appropriate academic degrees. There’s an old military saying that’s applicable here: The only difference between a master sergeant and an MBA is that the master sergeant has been doing it for 20 years.

Lend Lease, a national company with a focus on community development, recently completed on-post hotel renovations at Fort Myer and serves as a good example of a company that helps veterans transition to private sector employment. In addition to holding job fairs for management and development candidates on bases, Lend Lease also specifically targets military spouses for facilities management and leasing positions.

Once the properties are finished, Lend Lease turns them over to the hotel operators, in this case InterContinental Hotels Group. IHG’s Director of Capital Operations, Rhonda Hayes, says that the company has “gone out of its way” to translate the skill sets of veterans to private sector positions – and that it seeks out military spouses as well, allowing them to use a proprietary website for military families to explore job transfers when relocation comes up.

It’s time to break down the barriers that clog up the job pipeline for veterans. Recruiters must be willing to trade skills for education and “in-field” expertise. And they must go where the vets are – not just online, but to bases and community service organizations.

Need a hand? Reach out. And if you’ve got a success story to share with others, post it here.

Employing people with disabilities: are we there yet?

by Maynard Friesz

“Are we there yet?” This is a question that’s been asked in vehicles since the dawn of family road trips. The phrase likely stirs unpleasant memories of the family car jammed with luggage and passengers, who are tired, restless, and impatient by the length of the journey. But the question is also hopeful. Asking it means we are headed somewhere, that we have identified a destination and we are moving toward it (albeit slower than we’d like).

For far too long, our country has been stuck in a long, destination-less car ride when it comes to increasing employment for individuals with disabilities. Americans with disabilities lag far behind their peers in employment. Only two in ten people with disabilities participate in the workforce compared to seven in ten for people without disabilities. Despite efforts to help increase employment for people with disabilities, including the passage of the historic Rehabilitation Act of 1973, jobseekers with disabilities continue to face double digit unemployment.

Some have argued that our stagnant progress to increase employment for people with disabilities is because our country has not established a clear goal, a destination, if you will, in this journey. As the saying goes, “you can’t get lost if you don’t know where you’re going.” We have focused a lot on the journey, we’ve even added helpful mile markers (initiatives and resources) along the way, but we have not always set specific destinations.

Just recently, however, the Department of Labor has released rules related to Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act that could be a real game-changer when it comes to helping to increase hiring individuals with disabilities. New rules will require federal contractors and subcontractors to set a goal of having seven percent of their workforce be made up of qualified people with disabilities.

The focus on federal contractor hiring of people with disabilities is not new. Since the passage of the Rehabilitation Act 40 years ago, businesses and organizations who do work with the federal government have had to affirmatively recruit and hire people with disabilities. What’s new is that our shared objective is now backed by a goal – a clear destination that contractors can measure against to determine progress and effectiveness of their disability employment strategies and outreach measures.

With this in place, we will know where we are going, at least related to federal contractors, who employ 20 percent of the nation’s total workforce according to some estimates. This rule comes on top of an earlier executive order setting a clear goal for the hiring of individuals with disabilities in the federal government.

Easter Seals is proud of our programs promoting employment of people with disabilities, veterans and older adults. Read the letter we sent to the Obama administration applauding this move and you’ll see how much we are welcoming the new disability employment and related veterans employment rules. Our nationwide network of community-based affiliates stands ready to help connect federal contractors with job openings to qualified individuals with disabilities seeking employment. Together, we can help move the needle on workforce participation among individuals with disabilities and be in a position to answer the “are we there yet?” question, now that we have locked in our destination goal. Happy travels!

Inter-generational is where it’s at

by Beth Finke

This is National Adult Day Services Week, an opportunity to make people more aware of the kinds of services available for our parents, grandparents and other adults we love.

The Easter Seals Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Inter-Generational Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, is one example of how adult day services can work to help people of all generations. The center is the primary site for inter-generational programming at Easter Seals Greater Washington and Baltimore Region, and it’s the first intentionally built “shared site” in that region to provide services for children and seniors with disabilities — and help their families – at the same time.

The Inter-Generational Center brings together many Easter Seals core services under one roof:

• Adult Day Services that provide daily social and medical support for adults with age-related impairments, allowing them to age with dignity in the community, while supporting caregivers and preventing “burnout” from the responsibilities of caring for a family member.
• Children’s Services that provide child/youth development programs to families through after-school programs, tutoring, mentoring, summer enrichment programs, volunteer/community service opportunities, and interactive intergenerational programs.
• Assistive Technology Center that provides the latest in low and high technology solutions minimizing the functional impact of a person’s disability.
• Therapy Services that provide occupational, physical, and speech/ language therapy services both in-center and in the natural environment of home, schools, and other community-based settings.
• Family Caregiver Resources that meet the educational, referral and support needs of families caring for a senior or child with a disability.
• Inter-generational Programs that facilitate regular contact between seniors and youth and engage the neighboring community through a variety of programs in a regular flow of different types and ages of people throughout the center.

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Inter-Generational Center was built to deliberately influence a new culture of inter-generational shared sites and programs, and you can see how much everyone benefits when generations work and play together by linking to this short video narrated by staff and clients there.

The next greatest generation

by Col. David Sutherland

If I asked you today if you know someone who served in the U.S. military, how would you answer? Too often, the response is, “No.”

The National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics projects the number of veterans from recent conflicts to jump by 26% in the next three years. These are your friends, high school classmates, and neighbors. Like you, they came of age after Sept. 11, when terrorism invaded the U.S., driving increased security but also increased patriotism and civic engagement. It was this desire to tangibly support their country that propelled many to volunteer for military service, even though it meant deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan.

We were all affected by the events of Sept. 11. Twelve years later, there is still much more than can be done. To me, a good place to start is by connecting with those in your generation that served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Tom Brokaw called the generation of soldiers who fought in World War II “the greatest generation any society has ever produced,” fighting for their country because it was “the right thing to do.” He further credits this generation for returning home and building the U.S. into a global economic and political force.

Brokaw published his book in 1998, long before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan escalated. He may feel differently today, as I do, in that there is a new “greatest generation.” I believe that two million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, nearly two thirds of whom are Millennials, are poised to become our nation’s next “greatest generation.”

I know this from personal experience. I led thousands of Millennials during multiple tours in Iraq, including as the Brigade Commander in the volatile Diyala Province for 15 months in 2006-2007. I watched my troops carry out remarkable feats of bravery and perform selfless acts of courage. They demonstrated all the qualities one could want in the toughest of situations — smarts, guts and compassion.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced veterans with skills in science, technology, and medicine and worldviews on politics and religion. The Boston Bomb victims benefited from the application of tourniquets and the emergency room skills of soldiers and medics who served in Afghanistan. The fictional Skynet in the Terminator movies is being made a reality by young soldiers specializing in satellite and drone warfare. And a major strategy in both wars has been a movement to connect with local civilians on a personal level and make them part of the global community, an effort that is enacted on a daily basis by the young men and women on the front lines.

The U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan officially ends this year and shortly, most of our soldiers will be home. I worry about the future for these heroes and their families — not necessarily their future tomorrow or the day after — but their future five or 10 years down the road. Want to help the next greatest generation? Go to my Buzz blog and read a list I’ve put together of small, simple acts you can do to make them feel at home when they come back.