Testing the captions.
>> Ben Santos: Good morning, everyone. Sorry.
>> Jenny Sichel: I will introduce you. I have housekeeping to go through.
>> Ben Santos: Sorry.
>> Jenny Sichel: It's all good.
I think we have all spotlighted right now.
>> Interpreter: I only see the interpreters are spotlighted. Are the presenters going to be spotlighted with us?
>> Jenny Sichel: Yeah.
>> Interpreter: So, they can see who is speaking?
>> Jenny Sichel: Yes, right now, myself and the interpreter are only spotlighted or spot it will? Hello, everybody. We will give it another five minutes or so and then we will get started. Maybe slightly longer. I want to confirm, can people put in the chat really quickly, one second. Do you know what it might be -- if you can see myself and the interpreter or if you can only see myself.
Okay, looks like we can see both. Beautiful. Thank you all so much. Not a webinar without technical adjustments, you know? Okay, I'm going to get us started. My name, for those of you who haven't been here the past couple of days. My name is Jenny Sichel. I'm the operations director with the National Council on Independent Living. 2009 welcome you to the last day of the Biennial Institute. I'm a white female with curly brown hair that is pulled over to one side and I have on a floral top with blue rimmed, blue glasses. Today's webinar is brought to you by the IL-NET is brought to you by collaboration with NCIL and the University of Montana with support by the National Council of community living and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Captions are available in Zoom. You can click "show subtitle debate your Zoom menu bar to turn them on. Captions are also running at Ai-media. The URL is a little too long to read, but I will post it in the chat as soon as I post it in housekeeping. It will allow you to change the font and color and contrast of the captioning.
ASL Interpreters are present today and will be for all institute sessions. We are presenting gallery view, so the Interpreters should always be available. You should be in side-by-side mode if you want to see the presenter and Interpreters at the same time. If you're not in that mode, you can go to the menu bar, that says you are viewing Jenny Sichel's screen and click view options and click side-by-side view. You may want to click dual screens. You can optimize the size of the Interpreters. We don't recommend joining these sessions by mobile or tablet if you want to see the Interpreters and the power point at the same time. Although, if you join by mobile or tablet, you can scribe left on most of those devices to change your view.
You do not need to be on Zoom video to access the sessions. We will read all slide content and questions out loud, so the content will be accessible to those participants calling in by phone or can't see the content. We content you will be able to send chat messages to the host and panelists. We ask that you reserve the chat for requests for technical support or if the panelists do ask you to submit content questions that is fine, to do that at that point. There are a number of other easy accessible ways to ask questions to presenters. If you're on Zoom, you can type your question into the Zoom Q&A tab. You are welcome to e-mail your question to me. My e-mail is Jenny@NCIL.org. If you are only on the phone, you can you press star nine to indicate you have a question. Finally, and this is the most important, people, nearing the end of the session, we will show you the link for the evaluation that will be put into the chat box. The evaluation will also open after the webinar closes. We would be extremely grateful if you can take a few moments to complete the evaluation, because it really, really helps us. I am emphasizing this, because it really does help us formulate a better webinar experience in the future.
So, we hope that the accessibility and logistic tips have been helpful for you. Please let me know if there is anything we can do to improve your experience at the IL-NET institute. Now, it is time to begin the first part of our presentation on leadership on the CIL, I want to introduce our presenters this morning. I am going to whoever speaking first take it over.
>> Ben Santos: Good morning, everyone. My name is Ben Santos. My pronouns are he and him. I'm a white male, short, brown, messy hair wearing a blue and white flannel shirt. I'm a manager at Access Living of Chicago and I have been at Access Living for about eight years and I will tick it over to Trish.
>> Trish Seye: Good morning, everyone. My name is Trish Seye. I'm the director at independent living at Access Living. My pronouns are she/her and I am a black woman, big hair, and I have been at Access Living going on two years now. And I've enjoyed working there during this time. I will kick it over to Wanda.
>> Wanda Lopez: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having me today. So, my name is Wanda Lopez. I am a Latina, and I have pepper hair, I'm wearing glasses today with silver trim. I'm wearing silver earrings with a necklace and a light green top and I have light-colored lipstick on. I work with the housing council program at Access Living and I have been here for about five years now. And my pronouns are she, her.
>> Michelle Garcia: Hi, everyone. Can you hear me?
>> Jenny Sichel: One second, Michelle. Hang on one second.
Michelle, you are under Ben Santos.
>> Michelle Garcia: I am changing it now. I'm having trouble with my screen.
>> Jenny Sichel: Are you able to turn your camera on?
>> Michelle Garcia: No, I'm having so much trouble. I apologize.
>> Jenny Sichel: That is okay. I wanted to make sure you were spotlighted if you did have your camera on. Go ahead.
>> Michelle Garcia: My name is Michelle Garcia. I'm the manager of community organizing at Access Living. I oversee organizers around health care, housing, racial justice, and immigration. And so, we work in these areas to advocate and educate leaders. We also ensure they know of their rights and services available to them. And I've been at Access Living for 12 years, I believe now. It has been a minute. And I know I'm not showing on the picture, I apologize again for this. But I'm a Latinx woman and I sit in a wheelchair. And I have blondish-brownish hair. My pronouns are she, her, ella. Thank you.
>> Ben Santos: Hi, everyone. This is Ben speaking, so let's go over a bit of what we will be discussing today, what we will learn, what is our agenda for this workshop. We are going to understand the way that a CIL can self-calibrate to facilitate consumer control and empower for a specific community, understand why having co-conspirators is important, especially for multiple marginalized people with disabilities and investigate how consumer control can drive access for the CIL.
I'm going to give everyone a brief overview of the CIL in Chicago, the city we live in and being the CIL for the Chicago metro land area. Access Living, as I mentioned, we are based in Chicago. We were established in 1980, so we have been around for 40 years now as a CIL in the city. We have over 70 staff members. We, as most CILs, we have an advocates department, Civil Rights department, independent living department and I'm going to have Trish talk about the independent living and Michelle talk about the advocacy department and I will talk about the Civil Rights department very quickly.
I will start with development, because that is me. I'm sure you understand how development works. We raise money for the organization. We make sure the lights stay on and we can implement all of our programming and have the capacity to serve all of our consumers and we make sure our great work is being heard and spread throughout the region, the state, and globally if we have a story big enough to sell. We have finance and administration programs to make sure that everybody runs smoothly here at Access Living. Before we get into independent living and advocacy, we have a Civil Rights department where we focus a lot on fair housing rights and we focus a lot on ADA Title II and Title III investigations. We are making sure that people have access to public places, and we have to make sure people have their fair housing needs met. To describe the independent living department, I will kick that over to Trish.
>> Trish Seye: Thanks, Ben. I'm the doctor of independent living, living -- Director of the independent living and we have 20-plus employees. It is comprised of our community supports, which is our MLPD program, which is the mayor's program for people with disabilities, we have receive funding from them and our housing council, which is Wanda who is on our panel today, financial literacy, our PA, personal assistant training coordinators and our referral coordinator is part of our community supports team. We have reintegration, which includes our housing locaters and our independent living skills trainers and our Social Security specialists. Finally, we have our youth team, which is comprised of our youth coordinatorses, which they have both fast track programs, DJMC and other programs to support independent living, so a lot of moving parts within independent living each day and it covers all things as it relates to being able to live independently.
We start within the nursing homes that is for the location, once we move them out of the nursing homes, we go to the financial literacy and community reintegration, so that is the nuts and bolts of independent living.
>> Michelle Garcia: This is Michelle. I will be speaking on the advocacy department and what we do and who we all are. So, in advocacy, we are a team of 10 or so of us. We have -- we are comprised of policy folks, along with advocacy, so we have an education policy person, diverse and reentry. The education policy was prettystraightforward. They work on education policy as it refers to those who might have discrimination issues and who need supports in getting the services they need while in school. Then we have a diversion and reentry. This position is very new to us, but we felt we really needed it, because there are a lot of folks who are folks with disabilities who have been in the system, this is the prison system or justice system that are coming into the community again and they have disabilities. So, helping them get the services and supports they need as they are reentrying the community. How are they getting the services that they need like housing, mental health supports and we have the diversion and re-entry and policy person who supports that process.
And then we have a health care policy person who is in charge of, you know, monitoring as well as, supporting any comments written by us around policies that impact persons with disabilities like Medicaid and other community-based services that we have or that we need.
And then we have a transportation policy person, which this position is also new to us in some way. We had one, but this position has expanded, so we work on transportation in regards to public transportation, but also the ride-share, like Lyft and Uber, and PACE paratransit, PACE paratransit is the service that people with disabilities receive and that is where our policy person works to ensure if there are any issues regarding transportation that we may have or encounter that they speak up on our behalf or find services that we might need. In transportation, there are so many delays or discriminations against people with disabilities, so that's there for us.
And then, on the advocacy side, like I previously mentioned, we have a racial justice organizer, which they organize a group of individuals or beaters that we call them in implementing laws. In this case, they are working on a campaign that we is all SESSA. They are working on a campaign that would basically provide supports for those going through a mental health crisis other than call police or any police force entity. They would bring in mental health support, so anyone going through a crisis can feel safer with a mental health service being by their side while they are having this crisis instead of calling the police.
And then, we have the health care organizer. This person is in charge of, again, another group that we call or a group of leaders -- let me back up a little. For the racial justice group, they are called advance leadership through power and in the health care arena now, the group that this person leads, his name is Ryan. He leads task force for attendance services. They advocate for services and supports like access to home and community-based services is very much needed. They are also advocating, at the moment, which I think is key for accessible emergency services for people when they get picked up. Say they are in an emergency situation and they need to go to the hospital via the ambulance. A lot of us in wheelchairs or have any type of equipment, like wheelchair, Walker or whatever, or communication device, we're not being allowed to take and, I'm I'm sure this is across the board, but we're not allowed to take our devices in the ambulance with us, so they leave our devices behind or our equipment behind, then we're stuck without them when we're transported to the hospital. It is up to us afterwards to figure out how to get the equipment to us. So, we're trying to figure out a way in which we can work with the City of Chicago to ensure that there's a process in which the chair or walker can come with you rather than stay behind that is in the health care arena.
In the housing arena, Kathleen works with a group of leaders working tirelessly and ensuring there are home modification funds to ensure the housing that is available for folks with disabilities is made accessible, so we're working in that front to ensure there are many for home modifications, but there is work on the front of ensuring that the rent or payment that there is some type of -- there is no increase -- in there is an increase, it is not an increase at any given time. All of the increases are kind of like steady instead of bumping it up whenever they feel or -- I'm blanking on the -- I was doing to say renters, it is not renters. The landlords, I'm sorry. When the landlord feels like, I have to bump up your rent, it is called the SOI campaign, so that is what they have been working on.
The group name is called DRAC and they are tireless leaders working for quite some time on these campaigns. And lastly, we have another group working really hard on immigration issues with folks with disabilities. And this group is another group that has been really focused on working on the intersectionality of disability and immigration. It has gone fairly much more traction in the most recent years, because of the fact that immigration and disability has been really at the forefront given, you know recent or past administrations at the federal level, but also issues that have been impacting us at the local levels, like immigrants being sent to other states to our state here in Illinois and needing supports and services, for example. How do we bridge that gap for immigrants because they are a marginalized group as well and there is a lack of supports for marginalized groups like people with disabilities and we add another piece to it like they are immigrants, so because they don't have documents. They are undocumented, it is harder for them to receive some type of service. So, bridging those gaps has been a challenge, so we manage to work with organizations that help us bridge some of those gaps and we're still continuing to work with them to bridge all of them if it is possible. So, yes, that is what we do in the advocacy department.
>> Ben Santos: Thank you so much, Michelle. I know we covered a lot on advocacy there, but we're going to see it through a lot of what we discuss in the future, because so much of what that work does is based off of the feedback from our consumers, but we can move on to the next slide.
So, brief overview of the City of Chicago. Right in the middle of the country, there's about 2.7 million residents in the City of Chicago overall. There are 77 distinct neighborhoods. Access Living is lucky to be centered in the middle of Chicago more or less, so we have great access to all of these great neighborhoods. Over 300,000 people identify as disabled in Chicago. About 20% of Chicagoans were born outside of the United States. Chicago is a very international city, so we have a lot of intersectional work that needs to be done in many different ways. As we can see here, we have at least 146,000 people identify as LGBTQIA and overall by race, which includes disabled and non-disabled individuals, Chicago is about 31.7% white, 32% black, 28.3% Latinx, 5% Asian, and 3% from two or more races. As we can see, there are a lot of intersecting identities in the city, which inform a lot of the work that we do. We can move on to the next slide.
This is sort of kicking off our first real topic. We got our introductions done, so let's get into it. We're discussing consumer control and Access Living. The question we're asking ourselves is how does Access Living set itself up to successfully bake consumer control into everything we do? That is the overlying idea here, how do we operate as an organization to ensure the consumer voice, the advocacy voice informs our work and everything we do?
How does our organizational structure support consumer control? How do we as an organization support consumer control? There are a lot of different ways that we can speak about what this does and we're going to have Trish and Wanda and Michelle go into specific examples, but for my end for development, one way we can ensure that we have consumer control and support consumers in our capacity, we have things like an admin department, communications department, and we're taking on the capacity, so program staff can focus on community needs specifically. One of the ways you lose the consumer control or lose the ability to serve your clients and consumers is when you have to do things beyond just that service, when you have to fundraise, you know, when you have to meet and greet with funders and you're trying to raise money, or if you need to do blog posts or if you need to do sort of anything outside of that. That takes away time that you can be having, serving your consumers and you can be listening to them directly. We're lucky enough as an organization to be large enough and dynamic enough that we can have dedicated staff that focus on these needs, so our programmatic staff can focus on these things specifically. I will kick it over to Trish to speak more about how our organizational structure supports consumer control.
>> Trish Seye: Thanks, Ben. One of the major, I think is our communication. We rely heavily on communication to disseminate what is going on at Access Living and in the disability community as a whole. So, our communications department, they give our current programs that are going on, our Town Halls, which a lot of times our consumers attend and are able to ask a lot of our local lawmakers in terms of the questions that we have as it relates to disability, and our disability rights. We have special events that go out from the communications department, as well as job postings. Just this year, we started disseminating a monitoring report in our staff, which includes media or news updates in Access Living, but also across the country. This helps us keeping us abreast of any disability happenings and whether it is an issue that us at Access Living want to take up or support, so our communications is integral for the entire organization, because if you're looking at advocacy and you're looking at our legal department, all of those departments, as well as independent living and what is going on there, we need communications in order to be able to disseminate that, so the programs that we are having, and the things that we are discussing will be able to be disseminated, not only to our staff, but also to our consumers. I think we're moving on to the next slide, Ben.
>> Ben Santos: Actually, we can -- there are still a couple of things that we can talk about on the previous slide. Trish, I know you were just talking about, I know we wanted to talk a little bit about organizal structure in regards to our DEI work as well. Do you want to speak to that, Trish?
>> Trish Seye: Sure. As it relates to DEI, over the last two years, we brought in independent contractors to discuss DEI work and the importance of antiracism work amongst our employees, which is pivotal in the work that we do for our consumers. I believe that those things start internally, and then that moves externally in the terms of the service we provide. It gives us more of a landscape of what is needed within our community, so we can provide the necessary services that are needed to our consumers. We were able to see a lot that came from the pandemic in terms of services that weren't provide and things that our consumers needed prior to the pandemic, but I believe it became much more pivotal that we made sure that they receive those services. We have an equity team that is made up of our board members, our senior leadership staff, and some members of our staff as well.
And so, we go over our strategic plan and how some of the things that are included in the DEI work and the training that we are receiving, how that can be incorporated into our strategic plan at Access Living. All of our senior leaders have participated in a racial crossfit session, which was given by one of our DEI board members, so that was over the course of earlier this year. All of us went through the crossfit program.
I also want to talk about, we will talk about burnout as it relates to our staff and why it is important. Do you want me to go into that, Ben, now?
>> Ben Santos: That would be great and then we can kick it over to want Dahl or Michelle for that.
>> Trish Seye: Okay, one of the things that we kind of honed in on is stressing the importance and providing training to avoid burnout with our staff, and training on how to deal with stress, and working at Access Living. I think it is really important, once again to kind of make sure that the staff receives the necessary tools that they have in order to work effectively, because that creates a good relationship with the consumers that we serve on a regular basis. We have had ongoing training as it relates to that. I know I send out to my independent living staff, many training opportunities as it relates to burnout and stress. During the early days of the pandemic, we also offered and provided mental health days in addition to the sick and vacation day that were available. Some of our meetings are catered to discussing the temperature of how everyone is feeling.
I know in independent living, I may be dating myself, but if you remember years ago Channel 5, after cartoons, they had a "one to grow on" so, I started at independent living, a one to grow on, something that we can take on ourselves to boost up morale and take us back to our why of why we're doing it and a member of our staff, they all share something each meeting for us to all take and one to grow on, so we call that "one to grow on." These are things we do internally, so we can be effective externally as well.
>> Ben Santos: That so much, Trish. I think that is a great point. You know, as I'm sure all of us realized over the past couple of years of the pandemic that burnout is a real thing, and it is something that organizations really need to take seriously to make sure they can maintain a top-level support for their clients and supporters to make sure their staff is working at top capacity. One thing I want to bring up and kick it over to Michelle, because Michelle organizes the Latinx organization group. One of the things is bringing the groups and our organization is offering reasonable accommodation for staff and consumers and the need to not have to fight for these things and the need to not have to have them in place and people don't need to proactively request them. Michelle, do you want to speak to reasonable accommodations and accessibility offers?
>> Michelle Garcia: In the organization that we have, yet in changing lives" translated into English, we have accommodations approach here and it has been successful for the last, what, six or seven years or so and that has been a change, but it has been really, really great. The group is conducted, the meetings and everything are conducted in Spanish, and then we have Interpreters, Spanish to English language interpreting and we have ASL interpreting. We have folks who are only English speaking in the group, but are immigrants, and we have folks who are deaf who are Latinx or immigrant folks who are deaf, so we have been able to really successfully bring in accommodations for everyone to be part of the group and feel part of the group.
We have this thing, not just in the group as a whole, but as part of the organizing team, we kind of -- similar to what Trish was mentioning, we have a thing where we kind of feel like a big family, so we try to support each other in whatever which way, so having this accommodation has really grown the family and we have had successful individuals participate in the group. So, like I said, it has been something we have learned as staff on how to bring in Interpreters to interpret from Spanish to English and ASL, so they interpret to the ASL interpreters to English and while the folks who are interpreting in ASL to the people who are deaf. It has been a success dynamic that we have been able to create and a successful family for the group morale and group gathering and working together towards advancing the campaigns.
>> Ben Santos: Thank you so much, Michelle. Very important stuff, obviously, as a Center for Independent Living, accommodations are critical to our work. Before we move on to the next slide, I want to give Wanda a chance to speak. One of the important things we want to discuss in this slide is about cross collaboration with other departments and other staff, and Wanda who is our housing counselor will work with our housing advocacy organizer, our DRAC, our housing advocacy work as well and we want to speak to how cross collaboration between departments and between staff in many different ways can help foster a cross-disability approach to our work. Wanda if you want to speak to that really quickly.
>> Wanda Lopez: Sure, Ben. Hi, this is Wanda. When I think about the cross collaboration, at Access Living, being able to come together and collaborate from the different perspectives, I call it a "picking each other brain's session" starting with the housing program, our Civil Rights team, financial literacy, cross disability. As Trish mentioned, our MOPD, which they provide services and equipment through the mayor's office for people with disabilities in the home. It allows for us to sit at the table and have discussions about options to meet consumers' needs in these areas, but also respecting the consumer's choice.
>> Ben Santos: Thanks so much, Wanda. We can move to our next slide, please. Great. Next one, slightly similar, but with a different focus. Our next question deals with our does our organizational culture support consumer control? I will kick this off to speak about our mission.
So, first I will read our mission, the mission of access living is that we ignite disability power and pride, provide critical services and breakdown systemic barriers to create a stronger, more inclusive society. So, you know, a lot of mission statements, you know they summarize what the organization does and sort of the defining characteristics of why we do this work. For Access Living, this is a very personal, um, personal thing to them, the mission. As you know, most CILs have a requirement be on staff and boards. The buy-in is crucial, regardless of disability status, once you engaged in the world of disabilities, specifically at Access Living, it reveals the barriers that people with disabilities face and it becomes very personal. It is something that I noticed at my eight years at Access Living, they understand disability and disability culture, but it is also really great to see internally how our own perceptions of disability, our own perceptions of ableism that we did not realize before comes out, and you can take these lessons that you learned in this mission and apply it, not only to your work, but to your life in general, so that is a key thing about the work is to make sure the mission has personal resonance for people executing the work. I will kick it over to Trish who will speak more in depth about the cultural mindset that we have at con Access Living.
>> Trish Seye: One of the things we have been working with and with most organizations or companies in general, a lot of times there is a heavy emphasis on education only and looking for candidates to work at our,s. One of the things that we look at lived experience versus education only. We find there are a lot of people who have the experience to work in the positions that we have within our CIL, and they have been looked over in the past because not having the education, the bachelor's or what may be considered the standard for a particular position. So, that is something we have definitely looked at and have changed in terms of the requirements for hiring.
The other part of that is the actual job postings that we send out when we are looking to hire. In the past, it has been kind of sent to the traditional job sites, but we have looked at following a more diverse look at that in terms of the job sites we have been sending that to and that includes sending it out to our local community colleges, as well as HBC Us and additional sites based on demographics. I will give an example for the personal assistants training program. We were having a lot of difficulty in receiving training for personal instants and assistants and those coming in, so we started looking at where can we send these job postings out so we can hire more PA's to come in for the training programs. One of the big asks from our consumers were to have Spanish speaking PA's, so we marketed to Spanish speaking communities as well as community colleges and particular areas within the City of Chicago.
Another thing for the PA program, we marketed to a local radio station, so that was something that we wanted to open it up to a brooder -- broader scope to what we have done in the past. I also wanted to reference the expectations that we have set out in our performance evaluations, and so one of the things that I like is the self-evaluation portion of it, and it asks a lot of open-ended questions to our staff in terms of providing feedback on their accomplishments over the year, as well as what are they look to do as it relates to our consumers moving forward and the training that is needed to be able to accomplish that.
The other path of it that is in our evaluations is the initiative that is taken that is something that we definitely look at as we are going over the evaluations for the year. How much initiative is taken and helping our consumers in going above and beyond the basic elements of the job descriptions that we have? Also, ethics and honesty in the work that you are doing and being mindful of your "why" at all times and in that process, the ethical in the work that you're doing. The last thing is your problem-solving skills. I believe when you're working in a CIL there is no one or two things that would be alike. When you're working with different consumers there are different asks that we receive that can be completely different in one department, so having problem solving skills to go out of the scope that may be something that may be a norm of how you normally treat a situation, but you can broaden and think of alternatives, as I always say, to help the consumer based on the information they are given and based on what they are asking in order for them to live independently.
So, being able to be a huge problem solver and I will say Wanda can relate as it relates to housing and as we look at housing locaters as well, when we look at outside of the scope of the norm, this is what the move looks like, but there could be barriers faced in that process, excuse me, so it is important to be able to find ways to still be able to service our consumers and ultimately they're satisfied with the work that we're doing as well. I think that starts also with how with evaluate and give appraisals to our staff each year.
>> Ben Santos: Thanks so much, Trish. Great stuff. Really important to be able to support that as we go through our work. I am going to kick it over Towanda. I want to have her speak to another important stuff about fostering consumer control and really making sure the organizational culture is robust is sort of staff activities and trainings that we do. I'm kicking it to Wanda, because she has done a lot of those things, especially during Hispanic heritage month made a great presentation and had great food, too. I will kick it over to Wanda about the trainings and opportunities we can offer to our staff to support this.
>> Wanda Lopez: Thank you, Ben. This is Wanda. When we were discussing the kinds of activities and trainings that we were able to pull off in the organization, a lot of times, trust me, we used when will there be time? When do we have the time? So, I want to talk about why it is so important. Access Living provides opportunities to make sure we're in line with consumers' needs, because that is important. We have to make sure we represent the people we serve. Some examples are customer service, self-care, how to practice emotional intelligence, training on LGBTQ+, those are some of the internal trainings that we have had within the organization, and those are the ones that I can remember within a short period of time. This has been an ongoing practice since I have been at Access Living for five-plus years and I know those who have been here longer can speak to more of that.
Some external trainings are extensive diversity, equity and inclusion training that we outsourced and mental health first aid that deals directly with those services in Chicago. So, there was an organization that deals directly with those services. We also make it a point to celebrate events. As Ben mentioned, examples I put in were PRIDE month, Black History Month, Hispanic heritage month, we have had bring your kids to workday, so when it is a national day, prior to COVID, we were able to bring in our kids and they were able to experience the work that we do. Weigh had them do activities and we had them tour the facility and have them get involved and they loved it.
And, let me see, last thing I want to say, we understand how busy a CIL can be, however taking the time to provide continuing education in practices in these areas has allowed us to serve the disability country with more understanding, wisdom and heart. Thank you, Ben.
>> Ben Santos: Thank you so much, Wanda. We can move on to the next slide. I know we will be taking a break in 10 minutes, so I want to get through the next one, which is why it is important to look at root causes of issues that consumers experience, specifically why it is important to be a co-conspirator and not just an ally.
Very quickly, the definition of an ally and co-conspirator in this sort of setting is the idea that an ally is someone who understands the issues and works more to learn more about the issues and may speak up in private groups, but it's not something that is something that they are actively engaging. so, a co-conspirator does not co-op the cause, they don't perpetuate the savior mentality. You can see that in nonprofit work, right? Do the nonprofits that we see all around, does their leadership represent the population that is being served? Are the voices that are being served or the voices of the population being heard? Are their ideas being taken into consideration? That is such a critical piece of disability work and the disability movement, because we have seen for years, you know, people with disabilities were treated by institutions and there was never that sort of ability for the disability voice to be reflective in the work that is being done, so it is so important for the co-conspirator for us to do this work and not just offer services to individuals with disabilities, but also work to remove barriers that we see through legislation, through policy, there my other way. It all sort of comes together, and I will kick it over to Trish to speak to the sort of lack of services hurting communities of color and sort of how we need to make sure our work is done in a way that is supporting, not just supporting, but also actively improving the lives and removing the barriers for these populations. Trish?
>> Trish Seye: Thanks, Ben. One of the things that I mentioned earlier is that we were able to see from the pandemic just the type of divide that existed as it related to services that were available within our communities. So, the pandemic did highlight those things as it related to, number one, our PA services that are available, and especially during the pandemic, and since the start of that even up until now, many of our consumers are not receiving the personal assistance within their homes at this time. And so, it was even worse during the pandemic, at the beginning of the pandemic, and we are still trying to receive those services now.
Housing was another thing that we found has quickly become a touch point, key issue that we continue to talk about, especially as it relates to housing discrimination, fair housing that a lot of our consumers, because if there are subsidies giving out to our consumers and then landlords aren't accepting those particular subsidies, because they are not counting that as income, it is a huge problem in terms of source of income discrimination. One of the things I have had discussions with our housing locaters to be aware and to raise the issues when they are speaking to the landlords when the buzz words are being used that are discriminatory phrases that are being used, and fair housing issues that are being raised that we need to have to be having broader discussions behind that, filing complaints and letting the proper channels know, so it is not just lost at this is what happened to this particular consumer and there is not much we can do, because this particular landlord is not allowing our consumer to move in. There are more steps outside of that, so one of the things I'm encouraging our housing locaters as far as reintegration as a whole following the additional steps what we can do past that no, and if it is not that particular unit or house to find other avenues for them to receive the house they would like to live in, the unit they would like to live in, but also still holding these landlords accountable for the blatant discrimination that is happening.
Another thing that was highlighted was food scarcity. The other thing I wanted to talk about earlier is using the program within our organization, which is important to be able to use, but we were able to see how much technology divide there is with our consumers, because you have some that would rather be able to use technology instead of coming all the way into our organization for training that is available, but we find that a lot of our consumers don't have computers or haven't received training on how to be able to navigate a computer in order to log in for a Zoom meetings, log in for training, log in for our Town Halls. Highlighting those different areas where there was a lot of gaps in the services that were available. I think the pandemic kind of shined a light on those things, and what we've been doing is working towards trying to find different funding opportunities that are available, so we can bring in additional technology for the technology divide as well as providing training in order to be able to have our consumers learn how to be able to use computers, log in for particular meetings, because it makes it easier in terms of the travel of getting to our organization.
So, it is really important that we look at -- I think although the pandemic, there was a negative end to it, but in all negative things there are lights that are shined on things where we can improve things within our community, and I think that is what we're able to do now.
>> Ben Santos: Thanks so much, Trish. Wanda, really quickly, do you want to, I know Trish touched on sort of how the lack of funding has created a lack of opportunities with housing, but in your experience on your housing council work, can you speak to sort of the specific issues that you found from the lack of funding and, I know the lack of affordable housing in Chicago is at a crisis point right now. If you wanted to speak to that really quick.
>> Wanda Lopez: I'm sorry, I was muted. Hi, it's Wanda. I'm back. So, root causes, all right, I think when I was writing something out for, this we continue to search for answers in this area, finding the balance between consumers' wants and needs and it is a delicate line. Our approach is meeting them where they are as a starting point. Providing consumers with the education and resources they need in order to navigate the housing world just doesn't happen overnight.
On an overgoing basis, we bring in the Civil Rights team and that is what Trish was talking about. To our housing group meetings to discuss disability discrimination and we do a great job in helping them understand how they may be facing discrimination tactics, as Trish was mentioning, and they don't realize it, so providing them the education is key.
We also bring in our financial literacy program, because it coincides hand in hand with the housing program. Many consumers are now renting and our financial literacy program works with consumers, I believe an 11-week program on working on credit because many consumers may not understand reading a credit report is something that a lot of us aren't too familiar with. It is a requirement in joining the financial literacy program, we do have a large base that benefits from participating.
>> Ben Santos: Thank you, Wanda. We appreciate that. We're at the one-hour mark and we will be taking a 10-minute break. Something you can sort of think about, I have a question to think about during your break, what does a co-conspirator look like and think about your own experience and different organizations and in your own life when you were an ally or an organization was an ally or when they were a co-conspirator. Enjoy your break, everyone.
>> Jenny Sichel: Just checking if we have an ASL interpreter. Awesome, hey, I just want to welcome everybody back from their break. That was about 10 minutes. And I wanted to remind everybody to fill out the evaluation link that we are putting in the chat. It is very important to us, and we take it quite seriously, so if you can fill that out, take a moment to fill that out, that would be great. And I'm going to hand it over to Ben to continue.
>> Ben Santos: Hello, everyone. Before we get back into it, I want to thank everyone joining us today. I don't think I mentioned that. We appreciate everyone taking the time, I know silt not everyone's idea of paradise to join a two-hour webinar on a Friday.
I did notice in the comments sort of, how do we tie what we have spoken back to leadership outside of the CIL, how we make a leader full organization? We did not tie super specific into that, we were granular. All of these items are critical to help create a leader, you know, this idea of ally versus a co-conspirator, you need to be a co-conspirator, because you need buy-in from the people you are leading. In terms of consumers and consumer control, a lot of our work that we do, especially in our organizing work, we have organizing groups, as we mentioned. There are groups organizing around health care, groups organizing around Latinx issues. What we can offer is the people who are organizing these groups that we have noticed have a specific sort of ability with being able to sort of speak to the needs after the community to sort of take on more responsibilities within the group when we notice we have these leaders, we offer leadership sort of training and opportunities.
We've done -- what is the word for it? We have done retreats where we encourage people to become leaders. Every year, we take groups with us to the state capital, Springfield, Illinois, and we teach them how to advocate to their legislators and we train them before we go to Springfield on how we advocate specifically in the legislative sense, how you go to the capitol, how you find their offices, what meetings to attend and how to participate. We always go with a pitch in mind. There is always some sort of legislative push that we're working on.
In the past couple of years, we were really focused on a bill that would reduce police interaction for people in a mental health crisis, so we bring our groups to Springfield with us and we would push this idea, this concept, this upcoming legislation that we have this proposed bill that we have on the legislators and take the consumers that have been given the tools and trainings the ability to advocate on their behalf and they can speak directly to their legislators. I don't know, Trish, do you want to speak anymore to how we develop leadership within our staff itself or something like that?
>> Trish Seye: Sure, absolutely. That is definitely something that we talk about on a regular basis. We actually started with our senior leadership team prior to my coming to Access Living. We started a future building leaders program at Access Living where it reveals three major components of leadership, not only from where you are now in a particular position, but what it looks like five years out, and so forth. You work from that particular goal in mind and then there are additional training opportunities that are available. So, what will be happening soon is soon, it will be rolled out to our staff. It went from our senior leaders, now it is within our managers and supervisors and after that, we will be rolling it out to the remainder of our staff and what we hope to build from that is, not only garnering what the interest is from our staff, but what we like to do, from what we're able to see in the leadership capabilities that we see in our staff in the work that they are doing, there are additional conversations going on under the umbrella of building future leaders. It will be based on the goals of the individual staff leaders and what they have to build upon them. It is very important within Access Living and how it relates to our evaluations, it goes on what additional trainings would you like, and a lot of those are leadership training classes that we have for our staff at Access Living.
>> Ben Santos: Thanks, Trish. Yeah, this is Ben again. What you mentioned is important, because leadership is one of the terms that gets thrown around and often doesn't mean anything in practice. I think it goes back to your point earlier in the conversation when talking about burnout, if staff does not feel empowered to getting the experience, because they don't feel the buy in and it is important that we don't just say we're a leader for organization, but don't give anyone the opportunity to develop that. Developing leadership isn't the same thing as, you know, learning a new language or something like that, where you can just read a book and figure it out. It is a lot of experiential work, it is a lot of support from the organization itself and a lot of things that we have spoken to in terms of cultural stability and consumer control, I think a lot of that ties into leadership as well, because it is important that we give these tools to our staff, so they feel empowered to be leaders and we pass those on to our consumers as well. Think is a great point that was brought up about leadership and we can tie that into our continuing work as well. Trish, do you have something you wanted to say?
>> Trish Seye: Yeah, I thought about this as we were talking about it, every six months, although I can't meet with all of my staff individually, because it is 20-plus, but every six months, I meet with each of the independent living and we discuss what their goals are, what is going on first within the department. Some of the things that will help them in their individual position, but also what are some of the goals that you have as it relates to your job, and as it relates to what you want to do next for yourself and your career as well as if there are leadership opportunities that you are seeking. So, I would like to talk one-on-one. I know our staff are talking to their managers and supervisors throughout the year, but every six months, I take time to have one-on-one conversations as it relates to that as well. It puts everyone on the same page, so it is not a surprise that the manager may know what this person's goal is, but the director may not know what the person's goal is. It puts everyone in alignment on what the goals will be for our staff moving forward in terms of developing leaders within our organization.
>> Ben Santos: Thanks so much, Trish. As we move on, we're approaching the last sort of set of discussion here and we will make sure we incorporate how we tie this into leadership outside of the CIL. So, what we're going to asks next is sort of case studies and consumer control and leadership, so this is the fun part where we get to talk about actual stories from Access Living about how consumer input or involvement has driven the work done at Access Living and we will be sharing stories there. I will tick it off before I kick it over to Michelle, Trish and Wanda.
Just as far as consumer driving change in our organization and our state as well. A couple of examples, I mentioned the bill that our Governor signed last year reducing, basically if you call 911, you have an alternative now. When you were in a mental health crisis there are alternatives to police response that was pushed by our group. One of their family members was killed by a police interaction and came to us and how can we work to get this solved, so that is something that was taken on through consumer control and became something that our organization pushed through our racial justice organizing group, which got put into bills, which we pushed our Senators and representatives to support the bill and become co-sponsors. After a long period of time, especially with the pandemic causing massive delays to legislation all over, we saw this bill signed into law. In this coming year, January 2023, it will be a law in Illinois where if you're experiencing a mental health crisis there are alternatives to police response.
That is one example, another example is we do housing work. We run a housing organizing group and that housing organizing group members would bring up several times they experienced homelessness in their past and the shelter system is inaccessible, if they had a chair and it was on the second floor, they couldn't access the shelter. That became an issue for our housing organizing group, so they took that on. They said, let's try to meet with the people who run these shelters, let's talk to the city. They weren't getting anywhere with it. The city did not want to talk to us. So we involved our legal department. We said, it seems like a violation of the ADA and we can't get people to voluntarily change, this so we're using our legal department to kind of push that. I think we're in the discovery phase in the spring and alleging that the shelters are inaccessible for people with disabilities.
Another example before I kick it over was a few years ago. I mentioned the leadership trainings, every year, we take a group of our consumers who have a particular interest in removing these barriers through legislation, through policy work who are interested in the inner workings of our government. We take them to Springfield, Illinois every year during legislative sessions to advocate and they take Amtrak trains to go there. Amtrak was very accommodating, so they would remove seats and let chair seats sit together, instead of one per car. We like to travel as a pack. One year, Amtrak to remove the seats, it would cost $25,000 a person. Again, these were our consumers. This is something that we were experiencing as an issue for our consumers and we took up the cause. We said, you know, we can't -- taking this away, having Amtrak take away our ability to bring our people to the state capital is a huge blow to the organization, a huge blow to our leadership development, so that is something, again, we cross collaborated our organization. We worked with our legal team and we, you know, have enough, you know ability and capacity to engage with Amtrak. We were able to talk with them and eventually they realized the error of their ways and we worked something out that it was no longer $25,000 and it went back to the standard fare and they agreed to remove the chairs to allow chair users to board.
A lot of our successes, a lot of our grants, these weren't decided by our board, these were not decided by our President saying these are things we need to prioritize, these came about by listening to our consumers and then taking action. I will kick it over, let's start with Wanda, if you want to give us a little success story or a story about a case study of our work. Thanks, Wanda.
>> Wanda Lopez: Thanks, Ben. This is Wanda. This is my favorite part, because I get to share with you just a little bit of my consumers. I'm only going to do one, because I know we're on limited time. I'm going to talk about Mr. W. Mr. W. is one of our consumers and he has unique challenges. He is a blind individual who was recently incarcerated and he was displaced. But Mr. W. wouldn't allow any of this to be a stumbling block for himself. Mr. W., within five months was able to find a unit, market himself as a desirable tenant and was able to sign a lease this past week. He went through our programs and he was able to subsidize a rental program and he does not have to pay more than 30% of his income for the rent and he is only receiving $9,000 a year and many consumers that is what they receive.
Mr. W. once told me, people told him there are things he can't do, so he made sure he was going to do them. Since working with us, we were able to connect him to our financial literacy program where he learned how credibility impacts his goals. He is working with our advocacy department on a project for persons incarcerated with disabilities and he is working to pursue his own goals to become an entrepreneur. Mr. W. reminds us all that no matter the obstacle that we face, if we set our minds to it, we can achieve it. Thank you, Ben.
>> Ben Santos: Thank you, Wanda. Like I said, I love hearing these stories. Next, Michelle, do you want to share a story with us, please?
>> Michelle Garcia: Sure, I was going through my head on what stories I could share, because we have several. One of the things I want to share is so, most recently the Latinx and immigrant group has been working on a campaign to advocate for Medicaid for undocumented individuals. Access to health care for undocumented individuals is crucial, but it has been a huge fight. I say this, because they have been turned away in many instance. I had stories of our leaders who have been turned away in the hospital setting, because they don't have any type of insurance. With this, the fight for Medicaid, -- sorry, I muted myself by accident. The fight for Medicaid that we have been having the last couple of years. So, we started in 2021 to advocate for Medicaid for seniors 65 and over and we won that fight at the state level advocating for seniors, because we saw an increase in older adults, especially with COVID hitting in 2020. We saw a huge increase in undocumented immigrants, they were older and needing to access, for sure, like medical entities to get the assistance and supports they needed in the medical field. So, they got Medicaid in 2020.
So, we were able to successfully advocate for Medicaid for seniors, and then we said we can't stop here. We need to increase. There are still folks who -- there is a large population from 19 to 64 who need Medicaid, and so we fought for other folks for a larger number, and we kind of put it in scales like in a bunch. We started off with 55 to 64 and we got 55 to 64 as of last year. And we were super happy, because now people who are 55 to 64 have Medicaid who are undocumented, and we said we wanted more. This year, as of July, so recently, as of July of this year, we fought and won state Medicaid for undocumented for folks who are 42 to 53. Yes. So, we are going in strides. So, our next hurdle is to get 19 to 41.
And the reason we're going in hurdles, because when we brought it to the attention of our legislators in Springfield, it seemed like a whole bunch of, it is a lot of money, right? It is a lot of funding and they were like, what? We can't fund all of these people. It is a lot of money. It is a lot of people. So, we decided we're going to do it in churches, if I may. That -- in chunks, if I may. We're still in a fight for us. There is a huge lack and there is a need of home and community-based services where undocumented immigrants have disabilities. Even though they qualify for this Medicaid, it is a Medicaid-like program. So, they can get medical services with this Medicaid, but unfortunately, unlike regular Medicaid that most of us with disabilities would get, it does not qualify undocumented immigrants to get home and community-based services or long-term services, so we're fighting for that to be included. This brings a lot of joy to us, because they did not have any type of health care to begin with, so for us to fight for Medicaid at the state level and get something, it has been huge.
A lot of our leaders and consumers have applied and gotten Medicaid, so now they feel more comfortable going to the doctor and saying, I have health insurance, this is it. Before, you know, they were weary of going to the doctor, and not having health insurance. Thank you.
>> Ben Santos: Thank you, Michelle. Trish, is there is a story you wanted to share?
>> Trish Seye: I really appreciate the stories that Michelle and Wanda have shared. I'd share more so the type of success stories that we have had as it relates to our collaboration with our funders. We received feedback from our consumers and a lot of times we have to have conversations with our founders surrounding some of the policies and procedures in place.
One of the things we talked about earlier is the digital divide and the mayor's office for people with disabilities there was an sensitive devices list that we -- assistive devices list that did not include tablets and including that for our consumers, because that was a definite ask, especially in the heart of the pandemic. You had people who were needing to access certain things that they would not be able to come into stores or would be able to access because most things were shut down during that time, so getting that particular "win" of having tablets being added to assistive devices list was big for us based upon the consumers' request.
We go back to our funders, which we call our primes, and something that we call minimal, but in terms of furniture selection, furniture companies that we are in partnership with and it is based upon the feedback that we receive from our feedbacks as we're moving our consumers, stores we're going to. So, I think all of those things are equally as important, because we take the information that we're receiving and we go to our funders to see how we can implement that from that level as well.
>> Ben Santos: Thanks so much, Trish. We can move on to the next slide. All right, leadership beyond the CIL. This is our last slide before we get to Q&A. This is our big wrap up of everything. Leadership beyond the CIL. How has working with consumers driven your leadership beyond the CIL? What has that leadership looked like? How did Access Living's organizational structure and culture support our ability to lead beyond the CIL?
We're kind of tying everything together, personally the way I see leadership beyond the CIL is after doing this work for a while, you realize you can't stop seeing it everywhere, how disability lays over everything and every issue. If you're someone involved in something already, I can almost assure you that the disability voice needs to be up front and center with that organization you're with, the issue you're facing. If you're part of the neighborhood group, I bet that neighborhood group does not have disability awareness. I bet they wanted to join a group, but they didn't because they couldn't attend the meetings or something like this. I have this disability lens everywhere I go, if I'm going to someone's house or an office building, the first thing I do is check the accessibility of it. Is there steps? Is there is a ramp? Are the doors automatic? You can almost not stop thinking about it. It is one thing to notice it, but it is another to incorporate it into a leadership sense.
I'm a big name in my homeowner's association or something like, that being part of the CIL and having the disability awareness should compel you to be someone who pushes for disability features to be added to, you know, your condos or something like that, even if it is not something that directly affect you, you know the value of these things. I will say that, for me personally and just the experience I found is you know, most people are woefully inadequately prepared and don't have a sense of disability pride and disability power, which is so important. Disability pride and disability power really allows the individual to become a leader, not be ashamed of their disability and advocate for themselves. That is a leadership quality in and of itself, especially if it is something that is intimidating like your school, if you attend college and it is not accessible, the last thing you want to do is speaking out. But being part of a CIL, understanding disability pride, disability power, can empower you to go to your school, be that leader, get others to collaborate and join up and another important thing for leadership, if you look at Access Living, people can see it works. They have these success stories. It is not the constant David versus Goliath that we try and nothing ever changes. We have seen tangible change come about because of the leadership initiatives that our consumers took and we sort of molded that into something that became much greater than just an idea. It became something that we were able to implement and practice and we saw the results of it.
The legislative victories that we have had only come with being able to empower the leadership opportunities. I want to kick over to, maybe, Trish, I know we talked about this before, but sort of a general sort of overview on leadership?
>> Trish Seye: No, I think to tagalong to some of those things that you talked about Ben in joining forces, because it extends out of your work conversations. When you become engrossed and involved in the disability movement, it continues in leadership conversations. I have developed many connections on a Saturday going out to eat with friends in at different organization and we get to talking about housing and from there, we develop a collaboration that would benefit within my CIL or within another organization where we can all join forces in some way. So, I believe being able to have kind of the mindset of disability movement and disability conversations comes at any time, and figuring out a way to incorporate those important conversations and how that will be beneficial within your organization.
Another thing I credit Access Living in doing in just from me coming from a public housing sector that was something I had done for 10 years prior to coming to Access Living. Now, I worked in an ADA department in public housing, but being able to bring the lens of public housing scope of things and bring it to Access Living I believe is really important. It kind of broadens the scope of what is needed as it relates to housing, not only for myself, I think when you're looking at bringing in other leadership from other organizations and combining forces with that, that is how you incorporate disability across the board and that is how you incorporate leadership as well as you're doing. Did anyone else want to?
>> Wanda Lopez: Ben, hi, this is Wanda. Let me turn my camera on. So, this is Wanda. I was just going to tack on bullet point number two, because I think it is important for everyone to know that anyone and everyone can been a leader, right, and in every area, every aspect. I know Trish was mentioning casual conversations on a Saturday. When you believe in something, you can stand firm on what you believe in, and also, you can speak boldly to that, and I think it is important in this area that the passion that we have for the work that we do, you can't help for it to overflow into other areas of your life. So, for example, issues in our children's school. My daughter's school for example, when it comes to accessibility. My daughter doesn't have access need, but that is not the point.
When I think about within churches, being at a church where I was there wasn't accessibility, and when I was there, I started working at Access Living and all of a sudden, I had an enlightenment where I was like, wait a minute. I was able to get them the information they needed to get the process started. So, having the understanding of leadership can take place in all of these different areas outside of the actual CIL is important. I just wanted to mention that.
>> Ben Santos: Thanks so much, Wanda. We can move on to the next slide. I want to give enough time for Q&A, I believe that is where we are at next. Let me read off from our question and answer list. just a reminder in the chat, please complete the evaluation. fill it out and say nice things about all of us. If you like. Honest feedback is the best.
There are smaller centers that do not have the luxury of having all of the departments. It would be helpful to share info that applies to smaller centers. Yes, that is something that I have come across in discussing with other CILs and other nonprofit,s. We are fortunate enough to have departments like finance, communications, development, things like that. I know plenty of nonprofits and others have directors writing grants. I wish there was a great shortcut or easy answer to say there is this one weird trick you can try to make everyone easier, but that is not the case. One that I would mention, and a lot of organizations don't want to hear, this because it costs money, but things like communications and developments are basically or they should be if they work well are revenue-generating positions.
If you can invest in a grant writer or a fundraiser like a major gift event person or a half-time or something like that, as opposed to putting it on the Executive Director or someone who was running a program, you'll make more money back from fundraising, and things like that than you would and in grants, than you would if you had someone who couldn't dedicate the time to it. That is tough because it involves revenue, but it is revenue generating and it bulks up you are donor base. If you don't have the capacity and you have to do this sort of work along with your primary work, I would say the most important thing to do is be extremely focused on what you're pursuing. I can speak from the grant world that you should be pursuing grants that are a great fit. If it seems like a stretch and you need to take a week to get it ready and, you know, in pursuit of this work, this money, and you have to sort of leave your other work behind, but it is something that isn't a great fit or a great match, really think about that.
You may have your top level, senior people pushing this, because they only see opportunities and they may be do this, do this, do, this but it is important to be judicious to look for what funding you want to look for. Beyond that, I would say it is important to find out what people are skilled at and use those things. You know, I find Executive Directors are often great at talking to people. They are great communicators, so that is something that I found a great foundation that I want to pursue for. maybe my E.D. can communicate to their E.D. and before I go through the process of writing this entire application, I can get an answer of, "oh, I won't be funding anyone new."
We had a question about how do you relate funders to leadership development, there is always a push and pull with development and fundraising, do you alter your programming to match the money that is given to you or do you base your program on what your consumers want and find the money there? It is often a balancing act. We say, for example, we're running a program and the city wants to fund it and this is a program that we haven't had any funding for.. The city wants to focus on one specific neighborhood opposed to the entire city. Do we -- then we have to decide. Do we have the capacity to serve that, you know, one section of the population or do we want to continue doing this work where we're self-funding it, but it is -- it has a different focus or something like that? We often see that push-pull and that can be difficult, too.
A lot of times, people want you to pursue opportunities for things that don't exist in your organization that require you to hire more people, which is always difficult, because if you hire someone and your grant lasts one year that person gets fired or you have to take on their salary costs. So, it is important to be very judicious when you're pursuing these opportunities, especially when you don't have capacity for it. In terms of consumer control, one thing I found with Access Living is getting able to develop these new programs based you have off of consumers' idea.
We started a program and we took the national temperature and we noticed that a lot of organizations wanted to fund racial justice work, and we had been for a long time wanted to focus on a specific disability community, those who have been affected by gun violence and those who became disabled afterwards. We knew it was an important population and we wanted to fund gun violence population in general. We said, hey, there is are an area that Access Living is a fit and that was developed through a need that we were aware of through the consumer work and I was able to acquire funding for it.
I know we are short on time. We will keep going as we can. Let me move on to the next question. Can you speak why you specified DEI and did not include access and justice? I know Trish, you were speaking about our access and diversity and inclusion work, but we did not include access and justice on, that because the DEI work is something that was supposed to be more of a supplement to our work about accessibility and justice in general. We have economic justice and racial justice work, and also Disability Justice as an overarching thing. I think the DEI work is really important, because you know even though we're a disability focused organization, there is so many intersectional identities within the disability community, it is important that we don't find ourself skewing towards a predominantly white, male-centered objective and focus on how we do things. It is important we take these additional identities and focus on diversity and inclusion. Because people get in this trap that we do diversity work and that is all we need to care about, that is a marginalized population. Disabilities can affect anyone at any time and having that additional layer of understanding is really important.
Next question, how do you allow the hearing loss community to become part of Access Living? This is a challenge for CILs across the country. There are 48 million people with hearing loss in the U.S. alone. that is an interesting question. What I find fascinating is how many sub communities there are. The deaf community the a huge one and there are lots of things we do to support that. On the surface level, there is the accessibility factor. We have a full-time intertreater on staff to ensure accessibility needs are there for our staff and our consumers so if someone shows up to our organization we can provide ASL including CART, and so having accessibility is one layer. Another important layer is training on this sub community.
Just a month ago, our Director of advocacy who is deaf did training on big D. and little d and how that relates. as a cross organization, we can forget that we're including disabilities in our work there are sub communities that have their own sort of culture and understandings and ways of engaging with people. So, I think it is very important that even as a cross disability organization that you do make time to understand the sub communities in there as well.
Let me move on. We got a couple more. The next question, how do you address your legislative action severely limits your ability to advocate and meet with your legislators on most levels? This is a tough one. CILs and nonprofits in general have a tough job of, you know, needing to appeal to our legislators, the people who make these laws that directly impact our community, while also having obey laws that don't allow you to lobby, specifically nonprofits. They really don't like it when nonprofits get involved in any sort of political or legislative actions.
Access Living does have a lobbyist, but we can use that lobbyist for a small amount of time and small amount of funding otherwise, we run into problems with government-funded grants. I'm not super aware of the legislative actions that do limit this, but I know that is a thing. I know as time has gone on, we have seen more and more of this sort of trying to silence people from advocating to make changes and things like that. And you know, I don't know if I have any advice specifically beyond that you need to be extremely careful, know all of the rules. It may help to run it by an attorney or maybe an attorney can do pro bono work for you, but make it clear you know what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do in terms of meeting with an elected officials and advocating. I do think there is always some ability to do so, so maybe if it is not in person or you can't do it as in a capacity of an employee, maybe it is something you can do by yourself and not representing your organization. There are opportunity, but there is something that you have to be very careful and you want someone who has a good understanding of policy and procedures, because the last thing you need is a vindictive legislator who sees you as lobbying against their policy and files a complaint that you're in violation. It is tough, because as a CIL, we try to make these changes, so it is really important that you're very clear and everyone knows exactly the rules before they try to engage with that.
The last question is, let's see, my thought about -- are there two more questions? Oh, got it. Last question, my thought about the literacy program is a consumer would like to know how to balance a checkbook, do they need to have experience with mathematics? What I can say is our financial literacy work, our group, our financial literacy workshops, while they are an FDIC Money Smart curriculum, which is a basis that a lot of programs need, we make sure our programs are consumer specific. We understand some consumers have financial issues than non-disabled people. You can only make a certain amount of money before you get kicked off your disability plan. The population, most of the time they don't have to deal with that kind of issue. We wouldn't want to present a curriculum to people who, you know, have to deal with this. We want to make sure that is incorporated into this work, so we have the accessibility needs. We have the tools we can offer to let people, you know, work on their level, so if they don't have great mathematic skill, oftentimes people in our financial literacy program have been detransitioned from a nursing home and never had a bank account in their life, so we know this is very new to people. We can offer alternatives and options, so people don't have to try to navigate this by themselves and part of this is helping them with the mathematics and explaining the optics of that.
>> Wanda Lopez: Ben, if I can jump in. I won't take long. This is Wanda. What I love about our financial literacy program, again, it is 11 weeks and our financial literacy coordinator is able to take the pace of the consumer into consideration when she is working with individuals. Even in a group setting, I have been present to be able to hear, you know them say, okay, we're going to hold back a moment. We want to make sure everyone is on the same page, not including the volunteers who are there to work with anyone who might have an issue with mathematics as someone mentioned in the comment. I just wanted to mention that. Thank you.
>> Ben Santos: Thank you, Wanda. And that was the last question, it looked like. So, we are pretty much at time, a little bit over. Jenny, I will kick it off to you and I want to say thank you on behalf of Access Living and thank you on behalf of myself, Trish, Wanda, Michelle. We hope you were able to gain a little bit of knowledge and insight on this. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. Jenny?
>> Jenny Sichel: Thanks, Ben. Echoing Ben's statement, thank you everyone for joining this. We will have all of the recordings available on the IL website and here is the contact information for them and this is in the handout in the materials you got over e-mail. Please go and fill out the evaluation survey. It takes all of a minute, maybe two. It would be great to get as many responses as possible. There are over 100 people on the call today, and we would love to get at least 50-60 surveys, so go fill it out.
And once again, thank you so much for coming to the institute. We will see you, hopefully doing the same thing in a couple of years. Thanks, everyone. Have a great weekend.
Bye.
|
| Page of | Downloaded on: 12 Sep 2022 8:09 AM |
|