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Jeff Thompson:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson. With October being National Disability Employment Awareness Month, I attended a Student Career Networking Event put on by State Services for the Blind of Minnesota. This event was attended by students and parents from across the state and adult professionals from a wide variety of corporations and businesses. And to start it out, here’s Tou from SSB.
Tou:
Hi, this is Tou, SSB Transition Navigator or Work Opportunities Navigator. Today, SSB were hosting an event, the student career networking event, where we have adults of blind visually impaired volunteers to come and share a little bit about their professional lives, their career pathway, and kind of the things that they had to do to be successful in their roles. And students are coming from all over the Twin Cities, from the state, to come and learn more about these adults that are potential versions of their future selves, or to at least learn about the different possibilities that they could walk for themselves, and to really just learn what’s out there.
Joshua Olukanni:
Hello everyone, my name is Joshua Olukanni. I’m currently a senior at the University of Minnesota, majoring in human resource development. My aspirations are to go to grad school and then hopefully secure a full-time position in human resources or in tech sales.
I am keeping my options open right now, and I am here today to kind of get more knowledge about what the people in my community are doing day to day, and learn more about the potential opportunities.
I feel like the main thing is getting good people around you who can mentor you and teach you what opportunities are out there. As a blind person myself, growing up struggled with the idea that I could do a lot of things. But once I got good mentors around me who were running companies, supervising people, working at 45-in companies, working at different things in different positions, it kind of motivated me and showed me that I could do the same. So just, you know, exposing yourself to people who are doing what you want to do is what I would say.
Keegan Granle:
My name is Keegan Granle. For college, I’m thinking either Duluth or the Twin Cities, and for a career I’m thinking probably psychology or some form of engineering. Psychology, I’m looking to be more of a therapist, so that’s kind of my thing.
Don’t let your vision or whatever you’re going through, don’t let it hold you back. Kind of just push through it, try to push through it as much as possible.
Tunmi:
My name is Tunmi. I am a blind, totally blind student who’s in their second year of college. I’m currently in the computer tech support and administration program, which will allow me to pursue several different jobs that are available. I honestly, the advice that I would recommend to people is, even if it seems like you are unable to succeed or, you know, there’s a blockade in front of you, you always have a hammer to crush that blockade and, you know, get through. It’s not over, even though you think it’s over.
Tash:
My name is Tash. My career and goal is to open a mansion and run it for kids with all sorts of special needs. My goal and my advice to all of you is to get back out there, do what you need to do. I value people. I value safe environments. I feel like everybody is human too. So my advice is, let’s be equal. Let’s get out there. Let’s make this a safe environment. And let’s make a new first start every day.
Hazna:
I’m Hazna. I don’t know. I’m thinking about going to U of M. I’m a senior in high school, so. Not sure yet. Maybe nursing? Yep. That’s about me.
Bola Bashir:
My name is Bola Bashir. I wanted to study being a lawyer for people with disabilities and low vision. I don’t take any college classes yet, but I will take it next semester. And then I will move on to a four-year college to continue my career.
Alyssa:
My name is Alyssa and I want to be a movie director. I don’t know really what I’m going to do for college. I am taking a PSEO course this year, which as a 10th grader you can take one college course and get the credits from it.
So I’ve been doing that. I don’t know what college I’m going to. It might be the one that the PSEO is through, but it also might be a different one. So I don’t know. Yeah, but I have a lot of ideas and I want people to enjoy them.
Brady:
Brady. My college aspirations are college that has a decent hockey team and doing sports, marketing or management. I just really want to make it better for all those blind people out there. Of course we were going to come for the pizza too.
James Van Te Steeg:
My name is James Van Te Steeg. I hope to go to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to go into, but probably something in liberal arts. Make sure to have networking and connect with others.
Jeff Thompson:
Students went from table to table talking about their aspirations and learning about the jobs that these adults had and succeeded in and asking questions to help them better navigate their own journey.
TomTebockhorst:
Hi, my name is Tom Tebockhorst. I’ve been working for six years at Target Field and two years at Target Center. At Target Field I do concessions. I’m working at the same concession stand where I do condiment cart in front of our stand and the other stand next to us and then the rest of the time I’m wrapping hot dogs and then I also stack them here after the seventh inning and then at Target Center I do links in Timberwolves.
During the Timberwolves. I work up in a kitchen where everything we make goes to other stands. I love both my jobs. They like hiring blind people or people with disabilities.
I would highly recommend anybody who likes sports and wants to go in the food series business. I would highly recommend applying either Target Field or Target Center because they have just been awesome for blind people. They’ve been helpful but now we’re helpful and that’s my story.
Walter Waranka:
My name is Walter Waranka and I’m working with Lutheran Social Services as an employment specialist. And what that means that I do is I work with individuals with disabilities from the beginning helping you to determine where you want to work, what kind of work you want to do, creating a resume, interview skills, anything to help build your confidence and then when you’re ready we go out and we look for jobs, apply for jobs and then you get hired for the job.
And the main thing I do afterwards is I will stay with you for as long as need be to help you settle in and most importantly down the road to help you look at advancement opportunities which I feel is the most important thing for us with disabilities.
Jeff Thompson:
How can they find out more?
Walter Waranka:
They can talk with their SSB counselor or you can just check in to call Lutheran Social Services and ask to speak to our Employment Services Department.
Rocky Hart:
Good morning everyone, this is Rocky Hart with the Helen Keller National Center. We are a center that is headquartered in Saints Point, New York and we provide training to individuals with a combined hearing and vision loss. In other words individuals who are deafblind who are seeking employment. So we provide services such as independent living, orientation and mobility, vocational skills, assistive technology training.
We have services available at the center in New York but also we provide services in the field as well. We have ten different regional offices throughout the country and we have a number of different field staff who provide an itinerant training to individuals who are interested in that. Our website is HelenKeller.org. You can learn about the center. There’s certainly a lot of information there.
Steve Decker:
So I am Steve Decker. I’m a senior manager of digital accessibility at Target. My role is to manage a team of consultants that works on the Target.com website and the apps and we make sure that it’s accessible to everybody. So certainly today we’re focused on folks who are blind or have low vision but my job also encompasses just the whole plethora of disability.
People who are deaf, people who have mobility challenges, motor difficulties, anything like that. I work with designers and developers. So really all phases of developing features for our app and website. We make sure they’re accessible. My consultants and I, yeah, beyond that, I have a wife and three daughters. So all in all, you know, blindness is not what defines me or my success.
I’ve been able to do just about everything I want to do and lots of things I never even thought I would do. Download the Target app. Oh gosh, we’ve tried to make everything accessible.
Email us at accessibility@target.com. If you have feedback, beyond that, from a blind and low vision perspective.
Fill your toolbox. I use Braille every day, even if you’re not fast at it, even if you didn’t learn it when you were young. It’s super useful. I read things when I’m in Zoom calls so I don’t have to listen to someone talk over my screen reader. Sometimes I inspect code with Braille.
It’s been super important. And then just, you know, having a network of blind people is instrumental in success. If you don’t know how to do something, you’ve got to ask other blind people how they might have done it. If you face discrimination, and sometimes we still do, it’s great to have other blind and low vision people to help us advocate and fight for our rights.
Chris Peterson:
Hi, I’m Chris Peterson. I am an accredited financial counselor and the founder and CEO of Penny Forward. We’re a nonprofit organization founded and led by people with blindness and low vision who empower each other to navigate the complicated landscape of personal finance. We offer self-paced online financial education courses as well as group workshops and one-on-one financial counseling. We focus on everything from basic budgeting through credit, debt, taxes, social security, healthcare, saving and investing.
And we also do focus on employment since it’s hard to make good financial decisions if you just don’t have enough money to throw around and becoming employed or self-employed is the best way that we know of to bring in more money.
CharlotteCzarnecki:
My name is Charlotte Czarnecki. I am an investigator with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Minneapolis Area Office. We investigate complaints about employment discrimination based on protected classes such as a disability, your age if you’re over 40, your race, your national origin, your gender or gender identity. I investigate these complaints. I review documents. I talk with people and I try to settle complaints and I make recommendations whether or not the laws that we enforce have been violated.
It’s pretty complicated work but it can be done and it certainly can be done by a blind person. I use a human reader to help me interpret documents and get information that the documents may be kind of confusing visually so she helps me.
She also helps me make sure that my documents that I create are professional because I write a lot of documents like requests for information, letters, memorandums, regarding my recommendations and different things like that. It can be done. I did a lot of on-the-job training, watching people do interviews and on-sites and different things like that. I do have a degree in counseling which is very important for this job but it’s not necessary. It’s very important but not necessary. You just have to have a passion for equal employment opportunity and will help you get there.
Steve Jacobsen:
One of the things that I have been trying to impart, well two things I’ve been trying to impart to the students that talk to me today, is that if you go around this room you can find blind people and low vision people doing almost anything that you could think of wanting to do. So a student should know that if they have a dream there’s somebody else who is paving the way for them and can help them make that dream possible. The other thing I really am trying to make clear to students is that the more tools you have, the more skills you develop, the better off you’re going to be when you get on the job market.
There’s a lot of support in high school. There’s pretty good support in college, disabled student services offices and the like, and they’re there to help. But you don’t have as much support on the job. So experimenting now with using other tools will benefit you when you get out on the job. Because when you’re on the job, employers are going to be willing to help you, but the person who is responsible for you succeeding is yourself.
Jennifer Dunnam:
I’ve been talking to people today, a lot of folks, you know, it’s early in life and they don’t quite yet know what they want to do. One of the biggest pieces of advice that I give that helped me a lot was the fact that any little job or any little activity that you do is developing skills and you never know when those skills might be needed. For example, I used to participate and still do at times in preparing materials to be mailed, you know, folding letters and envelopes and blah, blah, blah. But it was really helpful to me and teamwork and whatnot. And even now today I use some of those skills in my current job.
I studied language for a while. I did not end up doing a career in languages, but I did work at the university and braille books and it was very helpful to know some languages when I had to braille a French book.
So the advice would be just take in everything and pay attention and you just never know what great opportunities you’ll have because of some little thing that you were connected with before.
Justin Salisbury:
So this is Justin Salisbury. I am a cane travel instructor and I’m also a PhD student at the University of Minnesota. I’m working on a PhD in curriculum and instruction because I want to be a professor who trains cane travel instructors. I think here you get to meet a lot of blind people and people in different careers. Hopefully it helps to really expand people’s horizons and the way that they think about what’s possible because if you see blind people are pretty much working in pretty much any job except Uber driver at this point. There are ways to make a lot of different careers work for us and so coming and networking in a place like this, it really helps hopefully to send a message that anything is possible.
Jeff Thompson:
Midway through the student career networking event, they all enjoyed pizza and then started out the breakout groups consisting of human resource professionals answering questions about the interviewing processing and the workplace environment experience.
Ann:
Yes, this is Ann. I’m a payroll manager at Land of Lakes and I think that a lot of disabled students might think that they can’t do certain things or maybe they don’t have the experience to do it but I think your daily lives, you are doing wonderful things and I think it’s just a matter of understanding how to identify the amazing things that you guys are doing and putting it on paper so that employers can see what you’re doing.
Edgar:
Hi, my name is Edgar. I work for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. I’m currently a human resource intern that specializes in recruiting students. While I would say when it comes to students falling into the Minnesota Department of Transportation or just state government in general, it’s just really focused in on what you want to do as a career. Whether that’s STEM, HR or other business roles, we offer a lot of different opportunities at my agency but every other state agency as well.
The state government does an amazing job at being ADA accessible for a variety of people with different needs, whether it’s blind or visually impaired students or employees deaf or a harder hearing or wheelchair or sex-able building and other variety aspects of that. When it comes to just trying to get a role at the state government, I would just really focus on your skills. If you’re a student, what courses you’ve taken, if you’re looking for a full-time role, I would really just focus in on making sure you meet those minimum qualifications because that’s super important to state government since you look for merit more than anything else. You can find more information at minnesota.gov/careers. Every state government posts their positions on the website, the Department of Transportation and every other state agency as well.
Jeff Thompson:
While parents gather together to network amongst themselves asking questions and sharing ideas, meanwhile the students all gathered with the Minnesota Association of Blind Students. There’s some discussions, some questions, some music, and a lot of icebreaking going on.
Ben Zheng:
My name is Ben Zheng and I am the President of the Minnesota Association of Blind Students. We are a student division that helps promote the welfare of blind students. We like to send our students out to different enrichment activities to help learn new things and network with other students and overall just give them an easier time getting through the education system. You can find us at the NFB of Minnesota Affiliates website or you can personally contact my phone number at 651-272-9096.
Anjie Hall:
Hi, well thank you for having us here as volunteers. My name is Angie Hall, she or her pronouns. I am a blind individual with low vision up into my 20s and then lost the rest of my remaining vision. I am the mother to four amazing children and also my husband is a teacher in middle school. I work at the University of Minnesota and I serve as the director of the Disability Resource Center. I also have the pleasure of serving as the ADA coordinator for the university system wide. And so basically I’m all things disability, all things accessibility and it is wonderful to be able to be in the workplace. I have spent all of my career in higher education, have a strong passion for making sure that disabled individuals whether it be students or employees or guests have the access they need to fully participate. It is about equal opportunity and being able to have seamless access and we are in the best time that one can be in as a blind individual because technology has really advanced.
So if there is a good time to be blind it is now. And so being a director is really the best of all worlds and also serving as ADA coordinator because I am able to inform, change from a system perspective and also from an individual perspective through ensuring accommodations.
Jeff Thompson:
What advice would you give to someone who is looking to possibly attend the University of Minnesota?
Anjie Hall:
I think that one needs to consider what environment will be the best fit for them. If they are looking for a large institution, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities is 55,000 students. If you like being in a city then that would be a good environment or maybe you want a smaller environment that is in a close-knit community and in the middle of nowhere and that would be our Morris campus where you have roughly a thousand students and the specialty is liberal arts. What you’re studying is important to consider but more importantly always interview the disability office.
Make sure that they are able to provide the access and accommodation that you need and that you will have the supports and resources in place.
At our institution we have IRA that anybody can use. We have JAWS, Zoom, Techs and Fusion that any of our students can download. We have the ability to produce paper braille, tactile graphics or to have a vendor work with us to do that. We have access assistants who will provide human assistance in the classroom and outside of the classroom. We have a strong digital accessibility team that will make sure documents and web and technology is accessible. We work closely with our faculty to make sure that they are well educated and equipped to provide access and accommodations and to create content that is going to provide meaningful access to our learners.
So at the U we really have some fabulous resources and accommodations that are available to our students. So any college experience or work experience most important part is that remember they are interviewing you in a job setting and you are also interviewing them. You are going to a college experience and you are learning about the college and they are learning about you. So it needs to be a good fit for both you and the workplace or the institution of higher ed.
Jeff Thompson:
As someone who is blind vision impaired yourself going to a college that has great accommodations there has to be a point that you start learning from that experience so you can take it with you when you go because you can’t bring the disability services office with you.
Anjie Hall:
You know we see a progression in growth right. Students are developing with or without a disability and so blind students are part of that journey too that everyone else is on. So we want to make the experience as close as possible to the non-disabled peers as we can and also recognizing that there are going to be strategies that are employed and tools that we do things differently and our goal always is to be able to do what everyone else is able to do. So that means in high school you gain some of the skills and then in college you continue to gain and do as much as possible independently and privately with the supported disability office or an employer if you are a student employee or with your faculty and instructors and then we are moving you towards gaining the skills to be able to be in the workplace. We know that only 15% ish of blind individuals have a bachelor’s degree or more.
That’s not a lot of people, right? So it’s important for us to make sure that institutions are providing the access through removing institutional barriers and also having an eye to individualized accommodations. But we need also the student to do their part to have that curiosity to learn about the resources and the tools and what AI can do for us right now and what technology can do for us and what are some of the adaptive tools that exist for us to have a good quality of life and to be employed to live a full life like everybody else.
Kate Larson:
So today has been a bunch of students getting to meet and you can probably even hear people still talking maybe. This takes so much courage and so much to come at any age but especially when you are a young person to come to a big event where you are meeting with not only peers but also interacting with quote unquote grownups and adults in different fields and hopefully what today offered is a sense of the wider community.
Networking is often just such a big scary quote unquote professional word and what it is is just talking to people and getting comfortable listening first of all and also telling other people about yourself and what you’re curious about and as a young person it can feel really inaccessible to do that right away and what hopefully today is is it showed like grownups are just like teenagers. They have their own worries they have their own excitements they have their own jokes and there’s all sorts of things that we can find commonalities in.
So if today wasn’t something on your schedule these kinds of things happen all the time both in person and virtually and so getting that first step in coming to an SSB event or attending one virtually just start by asking your counselor, text them, call them, email them. This is exactly the kind of stuff that they want to help connect you with.
Jeff Thompson:
To find out more about all the programs at State Services for the Blind, contact Shane.DeSantis@state.mn.us.
That’s Shane.DeSantis@state.mn.us.
Be sure to contact your State Services for the Blind, your Voc Rehab, and find out what they can do for you. Live, Work, Read, Succeed. I want to thank you for listening and until next time. Bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] –
When we share-
What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities