Good morning, welcome to day three of Stanford theory diversity summit. Thank you, for those of you that have participated into the past two years. And you have all contributed to exchanging great ideas, and started good discussions. We really welcome your feedback. So please send turn in your feedback form. Each day has its own feedback form. Today, we have a very full schedule as well. First, we are going to start with Dr. Michael De Meyer, who will give the keynote presentation on self determination. And then we are going to have a session on small businesses big impact. After that, we'll have the second keynote presentation of the day with Dr. Sarah Rankin. And then we'll take a break. And some of you have signed up for network networking sessions. Please pay attention to your emails. In case there are some changes and the login information and so forth. In the afternoon, we are going to also have to distinguish employer panel. And after that, we'll have the last session of the day. The title is leveraging strains and opening doors in K through 12. How working together makes a difference. So for those of you that don't that haven't joined just yet. I just want to let you know that all the sessions are going to be recorded and transcribed. Please check out some website for YouTube videos of the previous days of the conference. They are already available. For those of you that have just registered today, you won't receive your zoom webinar links just yet, so please utilize our YouTube live stream on our website. All questions from the audience will be submitted through the q&a function at the bottom of your screen. The moderators will try to cover as many questions as possible. Now it is my distinct pleasure to introduce Dr. Michael wittmeyer. Dr. wehmeyer is really one of the my idols in many ways. He to me, he is the father of self determination. Dr. De Meyer is Ross and Mariana beach, distinguished professor of special education, Chair of the Department of Special Education and director and senior scientists of each center on disability in University of Kansas. Dr. Lee Myers Research and scholarly work has focused on issues pertaining to self determination, positive psychology and disability, transition to adulthood. The education and inclusion of students with extensive support needs and technology use of people with cognitive disabilities. He has published more than 450 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, is an author or editor on 42 Tech's soon to be 43 Next. Next year in May, we're going to have a book together that would highlight self determination and self and also this strength based model of neuro diversity. Dr. wehmeyer is past president and the fellow of the American Association on intellectual and developmental disabilities, a fellow of the American Psychological Association. He has been recognized for his research and service with Lifetime Achievement Awards from numerous associations and organizations, including the American Psychological Association, American Association on intellectual and developmental disabilities, Council for Exceptional Children and the arc of the United States. Dr. v. Meyers, keynote presentation is titled, self determination, strengths based supports, and the dignity of work for all. Please join me in welcoming Dr. wittmeyer.
Thank you very much more insight. I appreciate the opportunity to be here and to virtually share some of my thoughts about these issues of self determination, and the dignity of work and really looking forward to you know, what is work like in the future and the centrality of issues of self determination and autonomy and choice for all people for that. So, my thanks to Dr. Fung and to all of the support staff who have provided the opportunity and and to reach this distinguished and broad audience. So I'm going to share my screen here and get everything set up.
And
let me get the subtitles turned on. And I think we're go so and what I want to talk about is our work in self determination. But you know, really broadly the role of these issues of self determination and strengths based approaches to achieving what I think ultimately, are our goals in enabling people across the spectrum people with and without disability really, to live full, rich lives and lives that are marked by dignity and respect. And I begin with a quote on this from one of the people with autism here in in my region I it's a, it's sort of an overcast day here in Kansas, it's clearly turning cold in the The leaves have been falling. And john paul bovie is a man, self advocate from Missouri State over who has been very influential. And, you know, he was asked to talk about issues related to self determination and self advocacy. And he made a statement that I think in easily summarizes what we really want to achieve, and that is that people with autism and people on the spectrum should be treated with the same dignity, respect and equality as people without autism. And so, you know, as a as a an objective as a goal that is closely aligned with what we see in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. article three, which is the the agenda principle states that the overarching general principle is respect for inherent dignity, individual autonomy, including the freedom to make one's own choices and independence of persons. That is the governing, overarching principle of the convention. And, you know, it echoes what john paul bovie talked about in terms of dignity, respect and autonomy. But you know, we, those of us who work in support roles, or people who are in self advocacy, roles, families, whatever, whatever your role, I, you know, I think we've become accustomed to language like that, without really thinking about what it means. And I just want to point out that when the CRPD talks about inherent dignity, inherited is something that exists within a person or something that is a permanent and an inseparable quality of a person. And dignity refers to the state of being worthy or honorable, an elevation of character of, of worth of value. So we're when we, when we proclaim, and we claim, the, the, the notion, the principle of inherent dignity, we're, we're claiming that, in that, that people, like all people, people on the spectrum, are worthy of respect of dignity are inherently valuable, simply by virtue of their status. As a person. You know, I know that you've probably learned a lot about work and work related issues. And, you know, what I want to emphasize is something that Pope Francis brought up and that is the, the fundamental dignity of work. One of the reasons that that people want to work is because there is a dignity there is a value, one, one sees oneself as a valued person as having as being able to contribute to the efforts of
society of the community. So work has many, many roles. But I think that, you know, one of the importance of work is, is that it, it communicates, you know, that people have value that people have worth, I've worked most of my life with people with extensive support needs. And just, you know, and I can clearly remember in the 80s, when this movement toward meaningful work and supported employment and multiple ways of getting people decent work. It's simply the presence of people with with more extensive support needs, in workplaces, change the dynamics. So work is is critical for a number of reasons. But certainly one of those reasons, relates to the dignity and you know, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So shifting from the CRPD, to another UN Declaration of Human Rights, talks about inclusion in work as a basic human right. Article 23 says everyone has the right to work to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment. And, you know, it's these issues of choice that I think among the things that you've seen in some of this language that I think it's important that we grasp onto and I'll talk a little bit more later on about roles of autonomy and choice in 21st century and beyond work. But that, you know, the right to work is fundamental if people are to, to participate in the cultural, the societal, the political, all aspects of life, in the community. You know, one of the primary barriers to work has not in my mind, Ben, had anything to do with the person Or people themselves, it has to do with how society has structured, how society is structured itself, how, how disability itself, it has been understood. And I know that I don't have to tell most of you these things, but I think it's, it's worth reiterating, you know, we come at disability historically. And I've done quite a bit of work. And I realized early on, if you will, that in order to really understand the importance of self determination for people who were marginalized, and, and left out of the mainstream, I needed to understand how historically disability was understood. And, you know, the earliest, you know, mid 1800s, through the mid 1900s, really, disability was an extension of the medical model and, and it was an interiorized state, it was an individual path ology. And when we, you know, when we understand disability as a problem within the person, as, as these this historic way of understanding disability as we understand, you know, in that way the person is, is perceived as being broken and diseased and pathological and a typical on average, and it becomes, it becomes, you know, inevitable that people are treated as something less than fully, participants in society as fully, really human in many ways. You know, in my work, I kind of come to what I think are five overarching things we should have learned from these historic understandings of disability. And the first is that if we understand people as different, it really inevitably becomes construed as inferior, as leading to discrimination and maltreatment. We just have so many, many, many examples of that.
even up to you know, more recent years, if you haven't read the book, The boys in the bunkhouse by Dan Berry was published, maybe, I don't know. 678 years ago, it's about man with intellectual disability who were who were taken from institutions in Texas and other places, and forced to live in in servitude essentially, in and work in an eviscerating a turkey, eviscerating plant. So you know, the way these these really sort of astounding ways that people have been treated, that's not ancient history. It exists today. And it does exist today because we still too often think about disability as as a problem within the person. You know, the second thing I've think I've learned is that is what again, we should have learned long time ago, separate is never equal. When we segregate people, when we separate people, we tell them that we think they're different. And of course, that means we think they're inferior that and and it leads to discrimination and maltreatment. One of the one of the messages I think we have to get from this history is that, you know, I often tell people I've worked in the field really now for five decades beginning with as a special educator in the early in the in the 70s, and 80s. And I know, you know, I've looked at the the literature and the, the only universal truth from decade to decade to decade is, is that people with disability have achieved more than the previous decades, literature and beliefs, thought that they would, we are constrained by our own lack of imagination, as to how we can enable and support people to live full rich lives in the community. So, so much of what we need to do both at an individual level but particularly as a societal level is to remove the barriers that And, and to and to remove the the low expectations that come with these historic ways of thinking about disability. And to that end, I think that, you know, I mentioned this, I think one of the conclusions we can come to, if you if you're looking across the history is we've always been wrong about what people with disability can achieve. And we're probably wrong. Now we need to understand that our biases, our stereotypes, our expectations influence what we do to support and often get in the way. And I believe fundamentally, that the the primary injustice committed against people with disability throughout time has been to deny them the dignity afforded to person simply by their status as human beings. It's it that has happened time and time again. And that is what we need to, to, to address to focus on and to work with, in concert with people with disability people on the spectrum. Again, quoting from john paul bovie, tall, he talks about the importance of the disability rights movement. And I think, I think as I'll talk about, in a moment, it has been the disability rights movement that has that has pulled us out of our, our, our limited way of thinking and, and doing things, you know, he talks about the importance of people first in this case, but again, he uses terms around fighting for humanity, for rights, for respect, and for dignity. I've had through the course of my career, the distinct privilege of getting to know and to work with some of the pioneering self advocates in in both people who have personal experience with disability and people who have, who have who have been there to support them. And, you know, it is it has been the relentless I think, since you know, really the independent living movement since a picture there have a bet Noreen a Bednar, yay, was a Swedish philosopher
who introduced the idea of the normalization movement and the idea in the 1960s, that people who were marginalized people with intellectual disabilities who he was working with, had the rights to live, you know, normalized lives. I had the privilege to meet Professor Neary A number of years ago, and not, not just circumstantially, he authored the first call for self determination in a book call in a chapter in a in a, in a book that introduced the normalization principle to North America. He authored a book in 1972, called the right to self determination. It took the field about 20 years and it took people like Ed Roberts, and it took events like the signing of the ADA and you know, people like Bob Williams and Ari neeman, and tmls and Liz Weintraub and Nancy Ward and so many people who have, who have made strides it took in that 20 years or so between Nerys first call, it took those people working to create a context and a culture in which we could begin to recognize and support this, these issues of self determination. I want to I'm going to talk in a minute about social ecological models of disability. But, you know, I want to acknowledge and recognize the importance of the disability identity movement, the work of people like Paul longmore and others who have made the very clear and and obviously on target point that that disability the disability experience has been experience of, of cultural devaluation and socially imposed restriction and, you know, in in a way in in a seminal book that that he was a co author on co editor on He defines, you know, the disability experiences a struggle for self definition and self determination. So again, when we talk about these issues of self determination, we talk about identity and, and the what people with disability and people who are marginalized, understand, as critical for them to overcome the barriers, and, and, and to, to work to remove those kinds of barriers. A sense physician statement says the same kinds of things, the social model of disability, which of course, focuses a lot on identity development, talks about the recognition of civil rights and dignity of people who are neuro diverse and, and of creating a world in which people can benefit from support from services from tools from the kinds of supports and enable all of us to live learn, work in play and to fully participate, this issue of full participation is critical in in achieving the kinds of outcomes they want. And, and again, as associated with respect and with self determination, as the guiding principle. In my work, I've worked as in multiple roles, but primarily in a role of educator, the, the, the social, social, ecological model, or the person environment fit models of disability that that were the gun in the, in the 1970s, and 1980s, as the medical field, understood that viewing disability, particularly in other long term health care, issues within a, a pathology, land lands had very limited, limited utility. So it was the it was the field of medicine that began, you know, issuing,
and through the World Health Organizations, of course, the International Classification of impairments, disabilities and handicaps, and then in 2001, International Classification of functioning, disability and health. And of course, as I know, so many of you know,
you know, what, what, what the ICF particularly did was that it recognized that the experience of disability is not simply rooted in impairments to body structure and function, but it's it's all about the interactions are between one's health and impairments, if you will, health conditions, but environmental factors, and personal factors, and it's really all about how all of those impact activities, and then full participation and that, in the same way that Professor longmore talks about disability and identity in as, as a search for self determination, that I think the ICF particularly situates this in, in participation and, and I think that in many ways, the best way to understand participation is as self determined involvement in one's life. You know, all of us have different routines, we have different things that we like some of us are more solitary, like to sit and read in the evening. Some of us like to go out and be very social and be with people. It's not a matter of participation is not a matter of some quantification of how much you're doing. It's are you doing what you want to be doing? Are you living a self determined life in all roles? So you know, the ICF uses the notion of a pattern of life and that's roles, life situations and activities, all the things that comprise one's identity really, and work is a really important and part of that as an identity. And, and and as a way to fulfill these, these full participation and inclusion. So you know, I think these The, the movement toward identity, disabilities identity, the World Health of these social ecological models, they revolve around these issues of self determination, full participation, there are a number of implications, I had the privilege of editing the Oxford Handbook of positive psychology and disability. Seven, eight years ago now, and, you know, on the positive side, you know, I couldn't have done that 10 years before that we didn't have a language to talk about strengths and positive aspects of disability. But that has emerged over the last really two decades. And, again, driven by the self advocacy movement, driven by the visibility of leaders in who had personal experience with disability, and and driven by more of a focus on positive elements for all, all people, and there, there are huge implications. One such implication is that these are strengths based approaches, we, you know, where we begin with what people do well, we begin with what they like, what are they interested in? What do they value, that's where we start in terms of supporting and enabling people to live full, rich lives, disability becomes part of a not apart from human functioning, typical human functioning, it is just one of the myriad of ways in which humaneness is expressed, right. You know, these, these approaches focus on the environment more than changing the person as an educator, my role is, in fact, to teach and to enable young people to learn things and gain knowledge. But we focus on on what you know, on not only enhancing personal capacity, but changing and adapting and the demands of the environment. You know, there's a focus on full participation, the assumption is that every person can live learn work and play in their community, they be fully valued participating members of society. And it emphasizes support to not programs and what I mean by that is when we, when we take a disability as pathology and lens, we tend to create programs that are based upon those, those those pathology so we have a classroom for a kid with this kind of disability, we have a workplace, for the person with this kind of disability, what we want to move to is, is a paradigm in which supports are provided to everyone that supports they need to live the life that they want to leave. And, you know, I honestly think that we know how to do that. If at this point, I think it's about it's a matter of will and focus and a willingness to do so. You know, I've talked about supports, I've been involved in efforts to try to you know, there's an old adage, you, you measure what you value, and you value what you measure. And so we've been looking at ways to begin to measure and to understand what we mean by supports. And basically, you know, I'm gonna default I mean supports or anything that promote the interests and causes of people with or without disability enable them to access opportunities, relationships, within integrated work, school living environments, and that result in greater independence, interdependence, productivity, inclusion, life satisfaction, human functioning. In other words, I'm going to argue that supports are anything that enable a person to live a self determined life, to live the life that they want to live. There are you know, there are lots of implications of the shift in towards strengths based approaches.
Among them are our, you know, it's the focus is on community inclusion, inclusion, there's a focus on empowerment, there's full citizenship and impact and participation and a critical focus on self determination. So let me shift a little bit to self determination and autonomy. And then I want to wrap up talking a little bit about the world of work and where we're headed. You know, just like, work in closing and work is a basic human right, the Universal Declaration of Rights, fundamentally, talks about self determination as a basic human right. You know, using words that are more common in these kinds of declaration, rights and freedoms. You know, the declaration talks about the people being entitled to rights and free But it defines these by the range of effective choices open to an actor to a person. Freedom is about the opportunity to make choices in one's life. Bob Williams talks about this when he talks about self determination, he, he said in in a quote, I use a lot, that self determination is about opportunity, dignity, choice, it's about, about the opportunity to live the American dream, it's about it's a fundamentally about the opportunity to, to make choices, and to live a self determined life. You know, we were familiar with this term self determination, I'll want to go a little bit more into depth with that, because I think they're often misunderstandings. You know, they're both political or national sense of the term, we, if you just Google self determination, what you'll get is, is a whole bunch of 1000s and 1000s, of page pages about the rights of nations to autonomy and and to self governance. What we're talking about are the personal sense, the right, if you will, the opportunities for one to make or cause things to happen in one's life. But you know, I will use the term autonomy pretty widely, we often think of it as doing something independently. But what's really important that we understand that self determination as autonomy refers to autonomy as volition, and that's in my work, we work with adolescents, and that's where this is coming from. But it's true for all of us, the degree to which people regulate their behavior based upon deeply held values, preferences and interests. When I talk about autonomy, when I talk about self determination, I'm wanting to route those actions in what people want to do, what are they valued? What are their preferences, what are their interests, that's what, you know, people who are self determined act, based upon these values, preferences and interests. Now, without, before going further with that, it's important to acknowledge that within the disability rights movement, self determination has been used, in concert with a sense of the importance of, of, of these basic rights to self governance, and to autonomy as independent. So I don't mean to, to belittle that when you hear people with disability talking about self determination, as as you know, as was pointed out by Bender, yay, you know, 3040 years ago. These issues of self determination are both a political, a rights based focus for people with disability as well as having a personal empowerment related focus. You know, people when we talk about self determination, I think it's important that it's about making things happen in your life. self determination comes from the philosophical doctrine of determinism, that suggests that all actions are caused in some way, shape, or form.
behavior is governed by these, you know, antecedent or other events. So self determinism is about making things happen in your own life, it's about causing things to happen in your own lives, that people who are self determined, act in ways that are caused by their preferences, their their interests, their values, their goals, and not, you know, by someone or something else. So we've talked about self determination as an innate as as volitional action that enables a person to act as the causal agent in their life. And a causal agent is just somebody who makes or causes things to happen in their own life. And all of us do this I I taught students with the most extensive support needs, many of whom had limited traditional communication. But nevertheless, I knew when when they were happy when they were unhappy, whether they liked a task, whether they were hungry, you know, they were they made things happen in their lives. You know, and and if I listened, and if I was attentive, I could then act in ways that would support them based upon their own volition. But based upon their own action and this notion of volitional action, you know, it's just not doing what you know, people think of volition, perhaps, as being sort of hedonistic you go out and you do what you want to do. But it's really about making content, it's acting based upon conscious choice. So we act volitionally, based upon not only what we want to do, and what what's important to us, but to, we act volitionally, in that we were conscious about what we're doing, we act and we do things that enable us to achieve a longer term goals. So, so you know, volitional action that enables people to make or cost things and in their lives. You know, I don't have a lot of time to go through a lot of this. But you know, there's lots of myths. It's not about being in control of your life, none of us have control over life. It's not about just doing something independently, most every one of us have other people and other things do things for us. And it's not just making a choice, or just being involved in planning for one's life. But those are important elements, but it's about being at the center of making or causing things to happen in your own life. Now, you know, I want to return for a moment back to these notions of work, because I think, work is changing. And not only I think that a great, great many other people think that and these issues of self determination and autonomy and are becoming even more important. You know, the futurist, I work with a man named Liang Xiao, who's who's a leader, international leader and entrepreneurship and created a creativity, he wrote a really good book called reach for greatness, it talks about how schools can change, and that we can build schools around student ownership and volition and self determination. But he makes the point in in a number of writing that, you know, as more and more things become automatic, automated,
you know, this idea of, there's a set of skills that we all have to have to be successful in work, that's all changing. And what's happening is that, as, as time goes on, and more things are automated, the full spectrum of human talents is to becoming economically valuable, I'll give an example of that in just a minute. You know, we can, we can, we can abandon the notion of average, the notion of average has no real huge utility for us anymore. We understand that all human beings are differently talented, they have different desires and interests. And, and it's those things that we need to focus on that enable to enable people to live successfully. And that, you know, we need to create systems, both in schools and other places, in which people are enabled to be unique and creative and entrepreneurial, and to take advantage of what you're what they're passionate about. And, you know, as adults, we learn things because we care about things, we're passionate about something we're interested, learning is tied to passion. You know, what, a lot of the people looking at what 21st century work, work in life. And and, you know, we've seen it the pandemic, that work life is combining sometimes not in ways that we want. But as we look forward, you know, young people entering the world of work today will occupy not only job, multiple jobs, I've heard folks talking about the fact that, you know, five or more careers. I mean, we're as educators, we're having to prepare young people, for jobs that don't exist right now, that 510 years from now. So we need to we need to enable young people and all people need to be supported, I think, to be adaptive to, to, to be able to communicate, to solve problems, to be engaged in decisions, all the things that are important initiatives of self determination. In the December 2019, December 2019, that seems like a lifetime go doesn't it? issue of Forbes magazine, there was a feature on the highest paid YouTube stars of 20 Oh, That year. And the third highest paid YouTube star was this young woman anastassia, who was born in Russia somewhere. And with cerebral palsy, she's a young, young girl still with cerebral palsy, and her parents when she was young and going to physical therapy and doing those things began videoing her to, to post on YouTube so that her, her family could see her progress. And, as they did that understands Yeah, has a very bubbly personality and in the ways of social media in the 21st century, more and more people began to watch these videos and and to subscribe to these videos. And so her parents went to a YouTube channel person, and they created unique channels and a YouTube marketing strategy. And in the year, 2019 Anastasi, his income was estimated to be $18 million
out of six YouTube channels. And over, I can't even remember a billion or more subscribers across these things. She's an international star in and you know, and, you know, who could have predicted that right? Nobody knew this YouTube phenomenon was going to be the phenomenon 10 years ago, you know, I think that understands his example is that we need to put aside all our presumptions, we need to find out, you know, she was, she's valued because she's ever personality, because of, you know, her her, we need to do that for everyone that we, that we support that we care about, that we we engage with, you know, in the field of work in vocational rehabilitation, there's there is a recognition that, you know, the world of work is not what it used to be, you don't enter a career and stay in the same job for 30 or 40 years, you, you know, there's going to be multiple jobs. And so there's movement toward what's called a life design approach. And life designing is the idea that, fundamentally, we have to construct our own careers. But we, we also need to be able to construct our own lives, that young people are going to have to learn how to construct and to build their own lives to identify what they're good at, and to be able to put those into play. So in our work with adolescence, again, this is not a disability issue, as much as it is everyone we emphasize enabling young people to become experts in constructing their own career paths, and, and taking on their own transitions and address any address addressing threats and opportunities and designing a better life. And that is all about being self determined. It's about addressing small and large problems in your life, it's about having setting goals and creating plans, and engaging in those things. I'm not going to go into any depth at all about it, we have actually worked on a model that enables people with and without disability, but our work has been in the context of disability, to to, to self direct, self regulate problem solving, leading to setting and attaining career related goals. This involves a person solving problems, what are my career and job goals? What are my plans, what have I achieved, they solve these problems, and enables them to set and achieve goals that are net that are related to career it's about designing their own lives. We, you know, puts support people in roles of facilitating, enabling people to identify what they do well, what they're good at what they need to, to learn. And that there's there's more information on this website, if you what you want more information about that process, there's a facilitators guide. There's work out there, you know, I want to close. And we can we got a few minutes for questions I was, I had the privilege of speaking of doing a eulogy for some friends of mine, a colleague, and in red Turnbull. Their son Jay worked at the at the beach center, he was a man who had multiple labels, including autism. But he worked at the university, I worked with him, he was a valued member of our community here in Lawrence, Kansas, he died unexpectedly about a decade ago. And I got to thinking about what I would say, in this eulogy, you know, I'm used to talking but you know, that's a high pressure, you want to get it right. And the day before the funeral, the University posted on its website, a
memorial, an article, and the title of that article was long term employee, you know, passes away, and I thought about that, and I thought, you know, in, in, in most circumstances, that that headline would have read, disabled man, you know, passes away or, or, you know, son, disabled son of distinguished professors passes away. But that headline, and the story recognized the dignity of the work that Jay had done for 20 years, and the value that he brought to the university community through that work, and I realized and what I said in, in, in the you eulogy, the next day, was that, you know, we're in a lot of different businesses, if you will, we may be rehabilitation, we may be medicine, we may be therapy, we may be, you know, we may be parents, or maybe self advocates, but ultimately, really what Jays life taught me. And what that headline reminded me is, is that ultimately, we are in the dignity business, and that is what our goal should be. And our objective should be as the CRPD states, the the, the desire to enhance dignity, respect, autonomy for everyone. And with that, I'm going to close and I'm happy to take a couple of questions that may be out there.
Thank you so much, Michael, for for this presentation is so rich in information. And I, I, I personally appreciated the historical context and the comment you made about, we've always been wrong, and we're probably wrong now, which, for me, kind of inspires me to keep learning and to continue to grow. So thank you. Thank you for that, as well as for your entire presentation. So we do have a few of some questions from the audience. So I will just jump right into that those. One question. Comes I think from a parent, she says, I feel that my young adult son was on a great path for independence and the self determined life. It is my opinion that the pandemic has caused this progress for him and his peers to take a couple of steps backward. Loss of job isolation, except for zoom. Can you talk about how you think this pandemic has affected the progress made in community inclusion and specifically work? And how and what can we prepare or plan for once a pandemic has passed to get back on track?
Well, that's a really excellent observation. And I couldn't agree more. I think that, you know, this has been, I think, a clarion call for us. You know, there's an old adage I have worked in, in transition and tangentially in supporting adolescents and young people to transition to work and you know, there's, it's the old last hired first fired an outcome. And to some degree, the pandemic is just the latest example of that, that, you know, there's any time that there's a recession or any time, you know, in this case, a health crisis. So, you know, I think we have we have got to We've got to use this as an opportunity to to recalibrate, I think, you know, I think business is going to be recalibrating, you know, I was telling the crew before this, I used to travel quite extensively, I'm not sure that's going to happen, you know, people have discovered issues of zoom and everything else, you know, there are opportunities that are going to be brought, you know, we were moving in these directions in terms of future work. And the pandemic has expedited a lot of things. And unfortunately, what happened in pandemic is we took our current model, and we impose it upon what the possibilities in terms of work and learning and all sorts of things are. So we need to, we need to disentangle we can't just, you know, the my context is, is schools. You know, and and schools have had a tough time and teachers are, it's really difficult. And there's no blaming here, I understand it. But you know, you read stories about kids sitting eight hours a day in front of a computer, you hear you hear stories about having time out from something, you know, we can't we can't just keep doing the same thing. So I think we have to look at, and I think it does go back to that issue of self determination. What is it that you do? Well, what do you want to do? You know, we cannot rely on the generosity of employers to ensure that people have meaningful work. That's, that's one of the problems, I think, with supported employment. And it's why self employment and customized employment are at least nominally better models, because those involve the person and really emphasizing what people bring to it. And I'm not bashing supported employment here. I, it's, you know, but you know, one of the reasons I mean, if you look at 1985, we had about 20% of the, the workforce funded through DD the DD system was in in supported employment, if you fast forward to 2010 2012, the latest data I've seen, it's still 20%, we've made zero progress. And that's because our model has relied on, on the goodwill of of systems. And so we've got to shake those systems up, we've got to figure out what it is that we can harness, you know, one of the messages I learned and it's sort of, not as directly related to employment, although of course, the primary quote, form of employment is still segregated for far too many people, not not the questioners, circumstance. But the pandemic pointed out how how incremental ism has not worked. In our field, we can we have been making incremental steps toward inclusion, toward meaningful work toward living in the community, we have set minimal goals. And what that has resulted in was people with disability living in high risk nursing homes and institutions where they were at, at much higher risk for disease and for death. We've got to just abandon we've got you know, I think technology, we've got to embrace technology, we've got a, we've got it, we've got to know what not just, you know, video conferencing, that's, that's just one small element of this. We've got to embrace what technology can can do. You know, if I had more time, we would have talked about some of these issues. So, you know, I didn't really answer the question very well, I think we just have to rethink that. I think we have to use this to recalibrate and think how we can move forward. differently. And and, and, and, and refocus. So.
Thank you. And you're actually in your answer are kind of touching on some of the other questions that are coming in. So I'm going to ask ask one of those to see if you have anything more to sort of add about that or any specifics. But this question is, how do we direct young people to make realistic career choices that also reflect the needs of the marketplace? jobs are matched for person skills and the needs of employers?
Yeah, you know, I think that's the reality today, but I don't think it's going to be the reality tomorrow. So first of all, I think we have to, you know, I think Anastasi his example was was an extreme example of, of how things are going to change in the future and that, you know, I think I've been involved in as I said, transition planning and and, you know, and I think the the problem has been that we start With what's out there in terms of jobs, and we try and match people based upon to some degree preferences and abilities, we've got to start with the person, what is it? They do? Well, what do they like to do? What can we build on? And then Where can we find places that that person's skills and that, you know, that's, that's what self employment was all about. It's what Customized Employment can take to that next level. So, you know, we, we have a self determined career development career design model, but another model called the self determined learning model of instruction, I gave you that website, self hyphen, determination.org, we have, we have worked very hard to enable young people to learn to set goals, and one of the premises of this is that we don't go in and we don't say, Oh, that's not a that's not a realistic goal for you to set. Young people learn that, that something is realistic or not by setting goals and trying to attain them and getting the supports. And young people can learn that they that, that they that they're not going to achieve a particular goal, you know, that they may have said, so the process is designed, so that as students set goals and create action plans, and then monitor their progress, if they're not making progress, they change their action plan. And if they if that doesn't work, they change their goal. So, you know, I think that we get there by enabling young people to learn through these processes of working through these, and honestly, we've done this, we've worked with 1000s, and 1000s of students who and over the last five to 10 years, we've been working in inclusive context, this is something all kids need. And, you know, self determined learning is something that's important for every kid so. So I would say let's begin to shift. And let's put students in the center of that. So that students learn that what they're, they're the goals they want, are not goals that they can easily attain. But let's not, let's let's let's shift the paradigm from being what's out there in the community to what it is that students do well, what do they like to do? And let's, let's find out ways that we can create meaningful employment opportunities based upon that.
Thank you. There's so much clearly to discuss when it comes to employment and opportunities and finding them. So thank you. If you are able to stay for just a moment, I've got one last question. We have many questions. But we did have several questions coming in related to language. One being Is it time to get rid of the term disability, and we had several around autistic adults and having sort of ownership over their own identity language. And I'm wondering if you can talk just a little bit about the connection of language and the language we use and its connection to self determination?
Yeah, well, and I, I'm ready to abandon I mean, I think we ought to be thinking about what supports do people need to be successful, independent of any factors. I mean, you know, disability as a, as a construct, hasn't served a lot of people very well over time. And I think that there are some changes to how it's understood that I've tried to emphasize, but nevertheless, you know, I've been advocating for moving to sort of a supports based paradigm, let's just, you know, we don't need to talk about labels or disability. And, you know, I'm, I think that, you know, I think it's, again, I brought up the issue of identity, disability identity and the importance of the social model, you know, I'm, I am really excited to see that becoming a major role that people are proud of who they are for what they are, and that, you know, we're, you know, our world and our societies are so much better when people are just who they are. And so, it's always difficult to, you know, it happens, I know, at the level of policy and, you know, if you if you become too ambiguous, then the people that need the resources of the policy, don't get practice. But, you know, I think we're moving in in ways that make some of these, you know, I'd love to see federal law read done so that we look at supports and what support needs people have, and we don't worry, and we don't, I mean, we spend an enormous amount of money and time diagnosing and doing those things. Now there. You know, there are value to people themselves and families in having information. I'm not not saying that, but, you know, so. So I, I would endorse these ideas that, you know, move away from from these kinds of languages. And and, you know, I think self determination is something that's important for everybody. It's important for people who have personal experience with disability, because they're not they don't have equal opportunities to access it. And so we've got to at least be able to point that out. But you know, I think the self advocacy movement, the neurodiversity movement, are the folks that are that are best to make to have that voice and, and to to send that message. So you know, the more people who are out there who have personal experience saying this and talking about these things, the better. So
thank you so much. Thank you for all you've presented today and, and for having some time to answer some of these questions. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's my privilege, and my best everyone out there, thanks for what you do.
Thank you, Louis Meyer. This is really inspirational talk. And there's so much that we are needing to do to really make self determination, really at the center of a lot of our activities in the neuro diversity at work initiatives. So with that, we are going to have about 10 minutes. Break right now and then we're going to be going to the next session at 945. And the next session will be small businesses. big impact. See you soon
Good morning, everyone. So welcome to Stanford neuro diversity summit. Some of you may have participated all along in the summit. For those of you who just joined welcome, we would like to let you know that all sessions are recorded and transcribed. Please check our summit website for YouTube videos. All questions from the audience will be submitted through the q&a function at the bottom of your screen. The moderators will try to cover as many questions as possible for today's session that Meeker will conduct the q&a. Duck is the founder and CEO of life Sherpa and assists assistive technology platform focused on your diversity workforce development. We're very happy to have him with us. Welcome to charm, small businesses big impact session. Our objective is to empower small businesses, owners and managers and initiating neuro diversity at work initiative in their companies. Today we'll have speakers representing their organization that help individuals to find meaningful employment and among other programs. Now I'm very happy to introduce Dr. Laura Lawrence Fung. Dr. Fung is a scientist and psychiatrist specialize in autism spectrum disorder and is the director of Stanford neuro diversity project.
Thank you, Mark for the kind introduction. The objectives of this part of the conference is to really empower small businesses and managers on in initiating neuro diversity at work initiative. And we want to provide them tools to enhance business owners and, and so they they would bring something out after this session. This is our lineup for today. In the next hour, we'll have a lot of information so it's going to be 10 minutes per presentation. And hopefully, you can get some tools in your back pocket after this hour. This can this conference that on the first day, Dr. Hala, NaVi already talked about the autism at work employer Roundtable. And as you can see, there are a lot of names that you can recognize. So those are the large companies, there may be some companies that you're not aware of. So those are probably the small to medium sized companies. So when you're looking at the breakdown for neuro diversity initiatives, a lot of the time you really remember the large companies such as JP Morgan, Chase, Microsoft SAP, the xe technology and UI, and they actually will be speaking this afternoon, they have done really tremendous and we would really want them to continue to scale up their their diversity at work initiative, the small to medium sized companies, there are really a handful. As you can see, there are only 15 that I can name instead of the 22, large corporations. So now, why are we talking about small to medium sized companies, because the small to medium sized companies actually made up the larger part of the workforce in the United States. For the companies that are mid size that this between 100 to about 2500. And the small companies with fewer than 100 people that make up more than 60% of the workforce in the United States. So when you're thinking about having the neuro diversity at work initiatives, and we are actually dealing to help about 5.4 million people that are on the autism spectrum to get work. And the large companies so far, collectively, they have got probably a couple of 1000. So we have basically three orders of magnitude difference between the demand and the supply. So in order to actually increase the scale, we have to think about not only the large companies, the small to medium sized companies, if anything, they should do a lot more. In fact, really many orders of magnitude of, of the effort that we need from them small business and can have big impact, they actually employ 57 million Americans. And as you can see from the last slide to 60% of our total workforce, and there is a lot of good new jobs that are actually coming from the small businesses as well. So why were we again, inviting small to medium sized companies to join the neurodiversity movement, because just like what I said they represent 60% of the workforce. And also they are more agile than large businesses. A lot of the time they don't really have their human resources department, the owner of the company can take the initiative, and then just make things happen. Large companies a lot of the time, after planning, there are many hurdles that they need to overcome, in order to actually get near a diversity at work program, really working.
And also think about people on the spectrum, for example, apprentice model, or apprenticeship model can work really, really well for them. And it can also work really, really well in small businesses. Because there are a lot of the time the company are only having small teams, and one on one supervision and small teams are actually best for neuro diverse individuals. So this translate, why is that big? Why is it better because small teams can translate to less complex, hidden curriculum. So this is all good. We are selling to everyone that small to medium sized businesses should involve. And right now really the COVID is not helping. The impact of COVID have been really causing a lot of the small businesses to actually close their doors according to this very recent paper in proceedings of National Association of National Academy of Sciences. So, when we are looking at the number of responses, there are about 4000 responses from small, medium sized companies. And when they are looking at the likelihood of remaining open by December of 2020. And they This question was asked in April, they, there are some, some of them that are thinking about, they would not be able to continue to open and especially for those that have little cash, so, the orange would be the amount of cash would be larger So, so the definitely there are more able to sustain. But the ones that have little cash flow, they may not be able to sustain as you can see. So, we acknowledge that this is really tough time. But why would small businesses still want to be involved in the during diversity at work initiative, even during the pandemic, because during diversity is a competitive advantage. As we A lot of us have been talking about, there's so much depth in every diverse individual can bring to the table. And embracing neurodiversity is just the right thing to do. And most people know someone who is neuro diverse, neuro diversity at work initiatives can be synergistic with the financial model of small businesses, when you actually know what to do. So a lot of what the other speakers are going to talk about would be the nuts and bolts on what can be done. And this, I will encourage the speakers to also point out how that is relevant in light of pandemic as well. So one example of that is tax benefit. So this is a federal benefit for businesses who have employees with disabilities. So this is called Work Opportunity Tax Credit. And it can be up to 90 $600 per employee for the tax benefit. And there's really little paperwork, there's no limit for the number of individuals an employee can hire. So this is almost $10,000. If your company has 10, that means is $100,000 tax credit. So for small companies, this actually makes a big difference. So other benefits that other speakers will talk about would be the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funds. And on Tuesday, tomorrow at one, there's also another session on paid internship programs. This program is very important because on the business owners only need to provide the training to the interns and provide the opportunities and the regional center actually paid the interns, the owners don't even have to pay the interns.
So the last couple of minutes I'm going to just impose on you on the ecosystem model of neuro diversity initiative. When we're talking about neuro diverse individual is not really just a neuro diverse individual that we are trying to support. We we need to recognize that there are a lot of players involved. Family, friends, mentors, therapists, in the educational system, there are a whole bunch of people, that's teachers, the school officials, and so forth and employment setting similarly the supervisors, the colleagues and so forth. So in our staffing every diversity project, we have the various different programs that are targeting different parts of the ecosystem, so that they are diverse students Support Program is mainly on the education setting. Then there were a diversity of work program is more on the employment setting. This Stanford neuro diverse candidate registry is focusing on the diverse individual. The job bank is focusing on getting the jobs and the special interest group is actually for everyone. Nearly diversity courses at Stanford, it's primarily focusing on the Stanford students. And there is also a high school camp for the high school students. And we just launched this now Network for K through 12. neuro diversity education and advocacy. And this is for the K through 12 level not only for the students, we also welcome the teachers and the families. And for neuro diversity awareness program, basically we are just talking to different targeted individuals. And basically, when you're thinking about the neuro diversity initiatives, the first thing is, you have to ask, Where are you in the ecosystem? Who are you? And what are you doing to help with the initial neuro diversity initiative. If you're wanting to explore how you want to contribute to the scale, or to scale up the diversity at work initiative, please send us an email you may already be signing up to some of our initiatives. But if you are wanting to do something novel, let us know we may be able to help. And thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Dr. Fung. In order to move forward and make sure that every everyone will have a chance to have q&a we'll just keep going with to the next speaker. One second. Now, I would like to welcome Stephanie signal. She is the Employment Service Manager for the pommery Center in San Francisco. Take it away, Stephanie.
Sorry, I was muted. I was just thanking everybody and saying that I'm here today to talk a little bit about how to use employment services and or regional center funded paid internships, to create low risk partnerships that will increase inclusion and create a more nuanced understanding of workplace accommodations and supports. As an employer or potential intern, if you choose to engage with an employment services provider to implement a regional center funded paid internship program, you will be able to access the following on and off job services provided by trained professionals. Interns can benefit from on the job training and employment services specialist will be available to assist an intern with understanding and navigating tasks, responsibilities and relationship building. This level of support will decrease as needed throughout the internship. Some employment services programs are also available to provide things like group classes, travel training, Hard and Soft Skills Training off site away from the traditional workplace. Employers will benefit from having a trained inclusion and support professional coming in and assisting with setting up accommodations for interns and increasing knowledge and language that is inclusive. Increasing inclusion in the workplace allows people the opportunity to feel as though they can be their authentic selves be supported as needed, and still allow them the opportunity to be successful. Some employment services providers will also take the time to provide training to employers around accommodations and inclusion in general. That way, employers that may not have a well developed inclusion plan can begin to have that conversation and implement as needed. Both interns and employees can benefit from long term services if the intern becomes a permanent hire. When a regional center client becomes a permanent employee, they are then able to access long term employment services like the ones mentioned above. These services are not meant to be a replacement for traditional on the job training, and most providers are not positioned to stay on the job with clients 100% of the time. The goal of long term supports is to provide minimal interventions and be available for any issues that may arise as needed. So in the field, Pip, referred to the paid refers to the paid internship program funded by regional centers. These internships provide real work experience for interns. for employers, Pip is an opportunity to gain an intern that has access to on and off the job training as needed. Employment Services and PIP exist at no cost to employers or interns. This is a resource that can be utilized at any time by both employers and interns in order to create a more functional and inclusive workplace, gain relevant skills and or open up employment options. communities at your company. Some interns or employees would rather have employment services provided solely off site or possibly virtually these types of plans can be discussed. There is no one size fits all solution for employment services. The goal is to create an individualized service plan that supports the needs of the intern and the employer. Not all potential interns need or desire employment services. By no means do employers or interns have to use employment service professionals. They can reach out to the regional center and navigate the program independently without the above stated supports. Pippin interns can learn and develop skills from working professionals in a field that interests them. Another advantage of PIP is that it provides payroll support for interns through regional center funding. This ensures that interns will be wage earners during the length of their internship. This allows interns to begin to meet their financial goals without first securing employment. With so many unpaid internships out there. This is a real advantage for regional center consumers looking to engage in employment. Employers gain a human resource that can assist and support tasks. Interns take on some responsibilities independently and complete projects as needed in ways similar to traditional employees. Because the regional center funds the paid internship program, if an employer decides to engage in this internship opportunity, they will pay zero payroll payroll costs during the length of the internship, all payroll is handled by an outside service. The goal of PIP is to support the employer with a low risk opportunity to try out an individual and then an internship with the hopes that they will then be offered a permanent position or that employers will consider creating an internship program to assist multiple individuals gain relevant skills to help ensure long term success with other employers after completing an internship. The regional centers willing to fund these internships with these subs in mind, people deserve a chance to use their skills inclusion is not going to just positively impact an entrance experience. But your organization as a whole, an inclusive environment tends to be more open, accepting, and when people feel heard, they feel valued, and that benefits the bottom line.
Many individuals joining the workforce have a limited understanding of the processes related to employment. This can be everything from interviewing and onboarding, to navigating conflict working as a team and our time management. Internships are one way to increase exposure and an understanding of these processes. This understanding will increase confidence to take on this and other new experiences and responsibilities moving forward. Employers benefit from an increase in productivity and project completion as an intern becomes more comfortable, confident and better acclimated to the work culture and their responsibilities. Regional Center PIP offers payroll and benefits for interns that will increase financial literacy process exposure and give interns real world experience that they can apply to their careers. Long term benefits of PIP include an increase in transferable skill knowledge primarily related to soft skills and general skill develop related to things found at most jobs. These are skills that can be built upon and will open up doors to individuals that may not have been opened otherwise, paid internship program funded through the regional centers provides the opportunity to access professionals, projects and experiences that may not be found in educational or other programs settings. paid internships give individuals the opportunity to reach financial goals and better understand ways that they can plan for their future based on current and future income. In all hopes, an employer will do one of two things offer permanent employment to the intern, which will mean that they have a well trained and supported employee that already knows the ins and outs of the company, or with an increased understanding of multiple training strategies. An employer has the possibility for an internship program that can help support multiple individuals as they enter into the workforce. Long term employment is not the only possible outcome. Employers can also consider adding an internship program for individuals to gain skills and possible professional references and experiences. Regardless of the outcome, both interns and employers will gain valuable knowledge around how to support and be supported in the workplace in order to bring out the best in everyone. If there's anyone listening that wishes to engage in an internship, first figure out a few things primarily what type of work you want to do and when you want to do it. If you feel able to take the necessary, necessary steps to reach out to employers to set up an internship independently, then feel free to do so. Funding is available through your regional center and can be discussed with your social worker. Don't let anyone stop you. There are many ways to achieve your dreams and support to help you get there. You don't need any special skills, just a willingness to try and work hard. Employers you to determine what types of duties or jobs that you have available for interns the preferred schedule for interns and if there's currently anyone available to To assist interns with training and accommodations, employers should also consider if they feel it would be best to bring in an employment services professional such as myself in order to assist them with setting up accommodations and providing support during the implementation and life of the internship. Both interns and employers should reach out to either a regional center or an employment services provider they use a lot utilizes PIP and ask about next steps.
I hope this helps you better understand how PIP and employment services can be used both by interns and employers. Thank you so much for your time, and I'm here to avail I'm available to answer any questions that you may have.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Stephanie, for this wonderful presentation. I I truly love the tip program. And I, myself personally try to use it as much as I can. So for the next speaker, I'd like to introduce Brandon Anderson. Brandon is the Operations Director, journeyman w GP at California workforce Association.
Good morning, and thank you, Mark. Bear with us just a couple minutes, maybe not even minutes.
All right. Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Brandon Anderson. I'm the operations director with the California workforce Association. And it's my pleasure to present for you today this brief presentation I titled supports for small businesses, nor diverse individuals and the public workforce system. And Mark, go ahead and move on to the next slide. Just a little bit of context setting for you the public workforce system is funded under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Are we are we Oh is landmark legislation that Oh, go ahead and echo back one slide, Mark.
Thank you,
is landmark legislation designed to strengthen and improve our nation's public workforce system and help get Americans into high quality jobs and careers, and to help employers hire and retain skilled workers. The remainder of this slide really describes how that system is funded federally, and those funds are filtered down to the states and then administered at the local level after the local workforce development boards, 45 of which are in California, and their network of America's Job Centers of California where services are publicly available. Go ahead move on to the next slide mark. Under veoa, all services are required to be universally accessible, we have a section 188 requires requires that services be fully accessible and offer necessary accommodations to provide to job seekers with disabilities so that they can effectively and meaningfully participate in the programs provided by the job centers and the workforce boards. It guides physical and programmatic access to title veoa services and basically requires that states adhere to the tenants of ADA. It also allows for states to define additional accessibility requirements within their own states and local systems as well. Go ahead and move on to the next slide mark. Our system the public workforce system under Title One is a dual customer system. The local workforce development boards or local boards and their ajcc is the Americans Job Centers, assist job seekers and connecting individuals with the most significant barriers to employment with training resources was wrapped around. Wraparound supports and supportive services needed to obtain and retain gainful employment or complete training programs. And they connect employers with qualified talent and individuals to meet industry needs. There are resources available for small businesses and entrepreneurs to design and implement incumbent worker training access to wage subsidies, the watse program as alluded to earlier inductor funds presentation, as well as employer of record and payroll services, general services through the workforce system are available through the Cal jobs system. That's www dot Cal jobs.ca.gov. Go ahead and move us to the next slide mark. I'm going to go briefly through these two slides. It just goes into a little bit more detail what services are available specific to businesses as well as job seekers. But I'd like to get us into some of this specific disability initiatives in the system. The local boards and their business services representatives work with local employers and businesses to hire new employees or search for ways to retain, to train or and or retain their existing workforce. Primary services include recruitment, access to lmia or labor market information, wage subsidies, workshops, layoff aversion strategies and rapid response programs for employers who might be experiencing layoffs. Go ahead and move to the next slide mark. for job seekers in the Americas Job Centers of California, they they help individuals with career and skills assessments, pre employment skills workshops, which are free vocational skills training and access to funding to pay for that training, as well as connection to community resources and supportive services that would help individuals in training programs successfully complete those programs, following any training or service plan for individuals at the job centers our placement and retention services. So we'll get you connected with a job and help me and help make sure that you're maintaining that job and retaining that job for up to 12 months following that placement. Go ahead and move us to the next slide mark, and this will be the meat of my presentation here. A few ongoing initiatives in the public workforce system that are particular to individual individuals with disabilities include the Disability Employment accelerator, which is a grant initiative funded by the Employment Development Department and makes available Governor's discretionary funds underway for local boards to implement programs that connect people with disabilities, including college students who are close to fulfilling their degree requirements, particularly in career technical education, working toward or having obtained a recognized post secondary credential with meaningful career opportunities in that career. A few other initiatives in the public workforce system are also targeted to provide funding to organizations that provide services to specific populations called out under Viola. One of these populations is persons with disabilities, including those with ID DD these initiatives and tail employment pilot projects under the English language learner co enrollment pilots under the labor agency, that workforce accelerator fund from the California Workforce Development Board and the breaking barriers to employment initiative also under the state board, California Workforce Development Board. Go ahead and bring us to our next slide mark.
One of the most exciting initiatives that's underway right now in the public workforce system as it relates to neuro diversity in the workplace is the meristem transformative autism program, which is an employer training, manual and set of training modules that is intended to dispel the myths of hiring and training and retaining individuals with autism. It was brought about by Senate Bill 866, breaking barriers in employment for adults with autism, and was developed from the point of view of youth that had been through work experience or employment themselves. So it's a very unique product. Go ahead and move us to the next slide mark. This is important and this is important training as we know, I'm sorry, let me back up meristem training meristem tap training is easy and free and very important. As we know every year 50,000 students with autism graduate from high school and most of these young people remain unemployed are or are in part time minimum wage jobs well into their 20s. While there are programs to help this population prepare for a career for California employers do not have the tools unnecessarily to hire, train and retain this untapped and valuable group of employees. The meristem tap training is in is was brought about just for that purpose to meet that exact need. I go ahead and bring us to the next slide. The medicine tap training is free. It's available to any employer looking to participate and as available at tap autism.org. Training is virtual and supported with a comprehensive manual and any employer that's looking to go through a training is has access to follow up with American representative hope in the hopes of maybe implementing their own autism or diversity and inclusion hiring programs or maybe assessing their own existing programs. The meristem tech training entails two hours of training total, which is administered in five easy to digest modules each around 20 to 25 minutes. Shameless shameless shameless plug. We are looking for interested employers to participate in American tech training. If interested or know any business owners who might be please visit or for too long, the most untapped training website tap autism.org. Go ahead and move us to the next slide mark. I'm going to end my presentation with a series of supports and resources that are available at the state and federal levels in California, for individuals with disabilities outside of my title one way old world. The first and primary partner in this effort at the state level, of course, is that we will try to form provider vocational rehabilitation, which in California is the Department of Rehabilitation under Rio, title to the adult ed program, California adult education program for for K 12. And those entering college in particular, our access to referrals, I'm sorry, access to referrals, access to referrals to programs, such as workability one and two. As we just heard the regional centers, run the paid internship program, which is one of the best resources for for this population. Go ahead and move us to the next slide mark. This slide of supports is really geared toward employment vocational resources at your community college office offices. Most will have it DSPs office the disabled students program and services office to provide access to programs like workability, three and college to career. The Ticket to Work program under the Social Security Administration is administered by various local vendors training that provide training or employment services and allows for SSI or SSDI Social Security benefits recipients to protect their medical and cash benefits, if they would like to try working or to get into a vocational training program. The leap program for state employment is an alternative testing and an interviewing process for state jobs. Recent expansion, a couple key things here, there was a recent expansion of state classifications eligible Felipe so there's a lot more jobs now available for the leap program if you have not seen and and neat benefit to sb 866. That brought about the meristem tap training also established some key changes to the leap program, which would change the permanent status definition of an employee to now include those appointed to the position after completing the probationary period under leap and would require the individuals referred to hiring managers through leap be included in the same applicant pool or list as other eligible applicants which had not been the case till very recently. Next slide mark.
final set of resources for you and some underutilized programs the CalHFA CalFresh EMT employment training program in June 2019, supportive services and training resources under the SNAP program was expanded for for recipients of SSI and SSDI. To be eligible. The medical working disabled program allows for certain working disabled individuals to become eligible for medical based on their net countable income. And the CSBG funding available through the community action agencies provides funds to alleviate causes and conditions of poverty in local communities more broadly. That wraps up my set of state and federal resources for us. And if we go to our last slide here, Mark, it'll just be it'll just be the thank you for your time. Slide. Again, if you'd like any information on the meristem tap employer training, we are looking for employers to test this training, implement programs, visit tap autism.org. My contact information is available here as well as the Cal or as well as the CWA website. And I'm happy to take any questions with time that may be available at the end of this presentation.
Thank you, Brandon, for this very informative, informative presentation. We're gonna move along to our next presenter once Give me one second and attendees please. If you have questions for a specific speaker, please write their name. So we're able to answer those questions. Thank you. One second. So our next presenter is Jerry de tillow. Jerry is the CO director of Jobs Plus employment and vocational services at caminar.
Hello, everyone, just once getting the slides on the break the silence there for a second. Go ahead. Again, Hello, everyone. So next slide, please. So a little bit about my background. Hopefully everyone can hear me.
I'm the CO director of caminar Jobs Plus Jobs Plus is a program that provides individual individualized training and assistance and support to consumers with disabilities to be successful in competitive employment. I have 23 years experience with Working narrative we're working with and helping neurodivergent individuals and those with other disabilities secure and maintain employment. Next slide please. A little bit about Kevin our jobs plus counter Jobs Plus was founded in 1964. We are karf accredited. We're a nonprofit organization that helps more than 20,000 people each year. In Solano County's Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, San Francisco, San Francisco and Butte counties find jobs and a host of other services were of high fidelity program focusing on best practices and integrated treatment for a wide range as mentioned of disorders. We work to meet intermediate and long term goals of the clients. We place clients in many different areas and depends largely on client preference, education and background skill set. Would they have been placed at such places as Menlo College, the Department of the US Department of Veteran Affairs, bone appetit, Salesforce, the Ritz Carlton, the San Francisco library, Amazon, San Jose department of recreation and of course, Stanford University. Next slide, please. So some laws that are protecting those with neurodivergent conditions as mentioned by previous speakers. the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination and employment mandates federal agencies to provide technology for those with disabilities to perform their work. The Americans Disabilities Act, which was amended, originally, which was originally 1990 and then amended in 2008 prohibits unjust termination and retaliation for employers in response to employees asserting their rights. government entities must make all resources available to individuals and disability status cannot be used as reasoning for not hiring the person. Next slide, please. So more laws, as mentioned before, we Ola, the work force, innovation opportunities acts, no federal funding will be provided to programs that unfortunately have just discrimination. One Stop systems must be set up to provide case management housing and employment opportunities for those with neurodivergent conditions. Next slide, please. So how someone receives supported employment services. So largely, we pull from a pool, we pull from a pool of applicants that are provided through the Department of Rehabilitation, they are notified by a client either coming in and asking for services or someone is referred to them, then the client chooses a vendor such as Jobs Plus, and then the vendor Jobs Plus in this case would perform an intake, employment prep and job development. Next slide, please. So the current standard for the IPS model, individual placement and support IPS model, client choice, as mentioned before is the most important part. As I mentioned, it is based on their skills and abilities, and then what the market will bear at that particular time. We believe in rapid job search, which means that we are going to initiate outreach to employers as soon as possible prepare the clients for those meetings. And we are always searching for a competitive wage, and then we provide job support. So as you can see, in the picture, there is a sheltered workshop, which is obviously outdated. And society as a whole wants to move away in my experience from this type of sub minimum wage. It's not competitive work, and they also come with few benefits. Next slide please.
So our services through supported employment applicant preparation for competitive jobs, we will tailor a resume to meet the needs highlighting the skills and abilities of the client for the employer will solicit information about job openings and interviews from employers, by our job developers going directly to the employers and talking to them about their past experiences either with supported employment or making sure that if they haven't had experience with supported employment, that we can help them understand that process. We that the clients experience and preparation for jobs they apply for. We simulate job interviews for the clients, we do videotape them to make them give them a better understanding about the way they're being perceived and viewed when they interview and then also going through the mock interview process. asking some of those difficult questions, such as why you might have a gap in employment, or why indeed you want to work for this particular employer, which is one of the most important. Another nice thing that's provided by the Department of Rehabilitation is the funds so we can secure appropriate interview attire. When you feel good, you look good. And with all the other things that precede the interview, we put the person in the best chance to succeed. Next slide, please. Okay, so job coaching, a lot of people are curious about job coaching, we either do it on or off site, it largely depends on one or two things, either the clients choice to have it on or off site, or how we can work with the employer to ensure that Either one works best for client success. So what it is essentially is training above and beyond what the employer might already provide. We try to establish relationships with co workers for potential mentorship, and natural job supports. I'll talk about that a little later. building a relationship between the client and the employer is key pi, we want to empower the client to seek additional training and opportunity for advancement of their own volition. And we want to instill a certain level of confidence through the coaching, transition the client to working more independent and gradually throughout the first 90 days of the job. And then our service fades out. And depending on which funding source it can go on indefinitely or it can go sort of intermediately as the person needs. Next slide please. So, placement and sustained employment success, kaminer is a industry leader. In successful employment outcomes, a vast majority of clients coming to caminar are placed with within the job within 90 days of coming to intake, and a higher percentage of those people will last at least 90 days. And then much further on. Of course caminar prides itself on working directly with the employer and coach to create a, like a triangle, if you will, and with the client to ensure success. Next slide, please. Long term support there are 21 regional centers in California that pick up often where the Department of Rehabilitation leads off in terms of funding for consistent support throughout the job in most cases, independent living skills. iOS workers are another service that is provided by the regional centers. Of course, job coaching, and other support is based on the need and the scope of what the regional center has to offer. Next slide, please. So benefits of working with neuro diverse populations, right. So tapping into a network of potential employees that had been vetted for specific employers based on that person's skills, abilities and education, as I mentioned, providing jobs not only providing jobs not only benefits the employer with a qualified candidate, but also society as a whole. That was mentioned earlier, there are certainly economic contributions because of employment for the community. Increased diversity in the workforce, as mentioned previously, is good for the workforce as a whole. And it companies as all integrates the neuro diverse into society and gives a sense of community to both the employer and the employee. That last statement cannot be under overstated. tax incentives. As mentioned a couple times, though, there's a work tax opportunity credit up to $9,000 to hire those on the autism spectrum and other disabilities. barrier removal credit which is 15,000 a year for qualified expenses, and disabled access credit for companies that are making less than a million dollars a year in total revenue.
Next slide please.
So innovations by leading companies to increase work with newer neurodivergent populations as mentioned before a couple of them, so some of them SAP Microsoft MP Morgan, Hewlett, Packard, Freddie Mac, Ernst and Young. So they are working very hard to target target recruitment of those on the autism spectrum, and adjusting the traditional interview process to better match the candidates. The autism internship programs, customer onboarding process, taking initiative and providing accommodations, changing company culture, to welcome retain those on the autism spectrum, creating a company sponsored buddy system as I talked before natural supports. job coaches work very hard to ensure that there is inclusion and then a support system. Once Coaching fades out or decreases to a point where there is a huge amount of hours worked by the client that is not paid for in terms of coaching coverage. So building a buddy system is super important. It's great that these companies are willing to, to really sort of grab onto that and make it part of the round. Next slide, please. So, supports from Stanford to increase companies work with neurodivergent populations. Obviously, the Stanford neuro diversity at work program, their neuro diversity job bank, which is job match with a large pool of candidates, much like the Department of rehab provides to companies like camminare Jobs Plus, next slide, please. So for more information, feel free to reach out to caminar about any questions about the whole gamut of disabilities, including for the neuro diverse, Stanford, of course, or you can email me directly at Jerry de caminar.org. And then for more information, you can reach out to our executive director who has many years of experience Michael Shaukat at Michael asset caminar.org or if you're further north, San Francisco jobs plus@caminar.org. So next slide, please.
Again, my references Thank you so much. And I look forward to listening to the rest and fielding some questions.
Thank you, Jerry, so much for your presentation and talking about employment services. Your company will be moving along. Whoops. Our next presenter, I would like to welcome back Dr. Fung, who is the director of center neuro neuro diversity project. Thank you, Dr. Fung.
Thank you, Mark. I'm going to talk about the strength based model of neuro diversity and how it's applied to small business in the neuro diversity at work initiatives. So there are four major components of the strength based model. The first is positive psychology. Second is positive psychiatry. The third is scandalous theory of multiple intelligences. And the third, the fourth is chickering, seven vectors of development. I'll talk about that in a little bit in more detail. We considered neuro diverse conditions as conditions rather than disorders. And we acknowledge challenges instead of deficits, because a lot of the characteristics of the neuro diverse individuals can actually be spinned as both challenges and strains. It depends on the context. I'll explain more in my presentation tomorrow at six o'clock in the mental health session. Apply and we want to apply a stream based model across the entire spectrum of their diverse conditions. Positive Psychology was initially started by these two psychologists, psychologist Martin Seligman, and my hi HSN Mahi and they basically propose that positive psychologies core, our well being contentment, satisfaction, flow, basically is the immersing oneself in an activity and get satisfaction out of it. And the other course our happiness, hope and optimism. So basically, when we are thinking about positive psychology, we can think about how to develop someone to be a more positive with a lot of the positive attributes of that person, and positive psychology over the last 20 years, have 50 free publish definitions but basically, to summarize this slide is really about strength interests and growth or development. Traditional psychiatry and positive psychiatry contrast that here, positive psychiatry is really about positive attributes instead of pathology and risk factors. We focus on protective factors and neuroplasticity, traditional psychiatry focus On treatments by relieving symptoms through medications and short term psycho therapies, but positive psychiatry is really about increasing wellbeing and growth through psycho educational interventions, which can last for a lifespan. entire lifespan. And test is a small preventative measure. Seven factors of development includes developing competence, managing emotions, moving through autonomy toward independence, developing mature interpersonal relationships, establishing identity, developing purpose and developing integrity. When we are looking at these seven factors, we asked three questions, how do we help never diverse individuals to achieve these developmental milestones? And the second question is, how do the people around them that can change their environment do anything to help the neuro diverse individuals to achieve these developmental tasks? And the third is, what about the mental health providers? What can they do? The fourth component of the string based model is the seven that is the multiple fear the theory of multiple intelligences. So unlike the IQ test, that includes only verbal linguistics, logical mathematical, and visual spatial domains, there are other domains like musical rhythmic bodily kinesthetic, naturalistic, interpersonal is basically the ability to relate with others. intrapersonal is the ability to understand self and existential. So when we are thinking about human abilities, if we are going to go beyond what we are typically thinking about, we can actually discover a lot more strains of people.
So when we're applying the strength based model to neuro diverse individuals, we focus on how to raise awareness of their personal streams, increase their trust in personal abilities, and help them learn to engage in relationships, as well as increasing their self satisfaction through success. If we are able to do that in a effective way, then we can move neurodiverse individuals away from negativity and mobility, such as the comorbid conditions, anxiety, depression and executive function, this function, so how about the small businesses, Froman about 10 years ago published this paper on positive psychology at the workplace. And I think this is really the biggest contribution on how we can view positive psychology to be to be applied to businesses. So basically, what we want to make our workplace better is to really infuse strains, virtues and self determination, just like Dr. De Meyer was talking about, in order to really get people to understand that they can actually make things happen. Despite that, there are a lot of things that you cannot control. So the second is about the workplace, having people to understand neuro diverse and neuro typical people like to understand what how to really communicate with each other better. And when we are able to do that, when we are able to actually understand other people better, there are diverse people. And they will depict typical people, if we are all able to try to understand each other better than we can increase the emotional intelligence in the workplace. And a lot of the things that are happening in the workplace has more than just cut and dry. You do the work or not, at there's actually a lot of interactions and a lot of psychological capital that can be gained. And this is hidden curriculum. And a lot of the time, there's not really a whole lot of explanation for neurodiverse individuals. But if we are very, very deliberate in trying to bring them in, we can actually make them understand how to really develop that psychological capital. So this is going to be helpful to give the organization to have good positive organizational behavior and because of of the better functioning The morale would be better and in a team's there's going to be more innovation because there's going to be more ability for people that are having their own unique opinions to be verbalized, and be translated into innovation. And that can lead to great change for the good for the organization. And, and the thought that and one thing that sometimes we would want to consider is that a virtuous organization that can foster a sense of meaning for, for all the people in the workplace can really get the organization to be a stronger organization. So again, I bring you to this neuro diversity initiatives, kind of core is the ecosystem model. So when we are thinking about how to really build the stronger organization, with neuro diverse initiatives, we have to think about all the people that are involved in this ecosystem. When we are able to do that, we are going to be able to understand exactly how we can actually make good change for the workplace. So if you are a supervisor or executive, you may be able to actually make a lot of the changes because you can call shots. And because for small businesses, you are more agile, if you're willing to accept neurodiversity, that can actually really distribute, get your ideas distributed to the rest of the organization very quickly.
So our I'm going to, for the sake of time, I'm going to just tell you that we have the neuro diversity at work program, that are helping companies to understand how to build neuro diversity friendly workplaces. And in addition to helping their diverse individuals in the entire employment cycle, we also help employers into entire employment cycle. And each of the neurodiverse individual with have to support circles. One is the workplace support circle, the other is personal life support circle. And we deliberately make a lot of the connections and support for the neuro diverse individuals and also the employers in order to collectively make the workplace truly neuro diversity friendly. With that, I'm going to end this presentation and let's go to the q&a session.
Thank you, Dr. Fang. I would like to thank all the speakers for the thoughtful and informative presentations. Now I'll turn the tables to doc Meeker. Doc will continue with a q&a until 10:55am. Go ahead, Doug.
Thank you, Mark. We've got a lot of questions. So I'm just gonna in a limited amount of time. So one, I just asked that. Brandon, and Jerry and Stephanie, if you're still out there, if you can take yourself off mute so that we're ready for this. One of the questions, which I think is really important is just around internships. And the The question was, can you speak more about how interns are connected to employers, the best way to go about contacting a potential employer regarding an internship, and how employers are educated about the possible benefits? So how do we get more employers to buy into creating an internship program? Stephanie, are you are you are you on with us?
Now? Yeah, I am. I'm currently traveling, but I'm here. To go. I am I am always stay safe. Right. And, honestly, I
think one of the biggest barriers to participation and employment generally, and the neurodivergent community is outreach. And so I truly think that the way that we reach employers is just by talking to them. And either by having a job developer like myself go in and have that conversation, or even tapping businesses that you might have a relationship with. I've had real success with that. And so Truly, I think that the paid internship program specifically, is a great route to Yes, I think the thing we need to do is just make sure employers are aware about it. And it's honestly it's a cold calling, reaching out to your networks and then possibly reaching out to employment specialists such as myself and others on this web. In order to assess for that, as well. Got it, Brandon, any anything to add? You know, I
can't agree more. It's critical to especially for any any population that experiences significant barriers to access. A significant way in is through these employment specialists, business service representatives and the like, especially where there might be an existing IEP. And maybe that IEP may not be aligned to employment, it may be a good time now, to go go to your serving serving organizations and say, hey, I've got an individual who we did this plan, but now we'd really like to look at employment, where do we need to start and really start that conversation?
Gotcha. Jerry, anything to add to that, I think what people are looking for is, Hey, is there is there some secret not a secret sauce, but some key elements that you've all been able to use in the past to get employers on board with creating these internships?
Yeah, I would say most importantly, is networking. And then hiring the right people who aren't afraid to walk through doors, and talk to people get past the gatekeepers, find out who the key hiring managers are, and really present a, you know, like a host of benefits for hiring people from this particular population. And then, of course, the follow along, ensuring that the person who promises make sure makes sure that all the things promises are delivered on and that creates word of mouth, and of course, more opportunity.
Got it? Got it. So Jerry, well, while we're picking on you, we had a question that came in it says, Why not give job coaches to everyone and tailor the recruitment process to best practices for everyone, instead of siloing people on the spectrum into one program that would benefit many, such as individuals with learning disabilities PTSD, instead? Or is there any talk of this?
Okay, that's a lot. So I'll try to break that one down a little bit for you. So, like I alluded to, in my presentation, everything is about client choice. And for, for our end, we always try to hire Java developers that are open to learning about different the end diverse populations, right department regardless of disability, and then sending them out well fortified to represent those people from each particular disability for lack of a better way of putting it.
Got it. Got it engineering, there was another question here again, picking on you, because you're the easiest one of my spreadsheet right at the moment. What what are the hiring statistics for neuro diverse employees that at some of the companies that have been reading the question,
yeah, I read some of the questions. So I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't have that information that would be sort of information that they that the employer themselves would had, and I would think that would be somewhat proprietary, proprietary to that particular organization. So I'm not sure I just know that the ones that I listed are open and have a lot of information about what they do. And we ourselves have had people, you know, other companies such as Salesforce, there's there's a long list of major employers that are interested in working with a neurodivergent population.
Got it? So Dr. Fung, a question for you. In addition to the small and medium sized businesses is a source of jobs for the neuro diverse What do you think about universities and colleges as employers for this same population in particular, public universities that might have a mandate?
Yeah, that's a great question. And at Stanford, we are exactly doing that. We are we have already started hiring people on the spectrum on campus. So there are others that are doing the same, like Rutgers is doing this. JAXA is doing this. And University of Maryland is doing this. So this is not new. We are really trying to tell more people that we are doing it and definitely there are every week, almost, I get some question about what we are doing at Stanford. And, and definitely we're
spreading the word. Got it? And I think this is a question I believe this is. This is really for for the group that I asked. The question is, how do we balance hope and Blaine, do you feel there's enough acknowledgement of the realities of disabled marginalization in the narrow, diverse movement? Or is there too much? Can we as a community come to accept that our experiences are diverse, and when one person experiences is helpful, others may experience as a reproach? Let's start with you, Jerry, since I'm picking on you, give me an initial response to that.
I don't think there is enough. I think the more word that we get out there, and the more people that are willing to walk through doors, and I think you'd be shocked at how many people even though they have people within their own families with disabilities don't understand the scope of what's possible. So I think getting the information out there and making yourself known. And, you know, touting you know, some some past success that you've had with other companies, of course, remembering HIPAA, but certainly, for lack of better word, just really highlighting all the all the great accomplishments that people have already achieved, and that what can come in the future. Brandon, anything to add to that?
No, one of the trends I've seen in our public workforce system is a push toward competitive integrated employment, which is a critical effort, obviously. But one of the things I think we see speaking to kind of the marginalization issues of access is once you start pushing things like CIE of certain portion or segment of the population that also gets left behind. And there's less access to employment supports like sheltered employment or supported employment resources, or resources, which are still critical in these programs. And so, the critical the critical Crux here is the nature of a partnership between workforce service providers. And maybe a connection to something like the regional center between providers can help maybe kind of ease some of these issues of marginalization, where there are more human centered approaches to service delivery versus programmatic barriers to success.
Got it. So I think we're gonna have to wrap up, I just want to add one, one personal note, and that I have an 18 year old on the spectrum, and he has just started an apprenticeship with a farm here. And just the idea of him learning what work is, you know, there's a timecard, their job tasks, all of those things are, are so badly needed as a first step. And I think if we can find more ways to create these types of internship and apprenticeship programs for this population, that's really going to set the table for how they're going to grow downstream. And I'm seeing it firsthand. Trust me, any of that. I want to thank all of the participants. There are some other questions. I'm sorry, we weren't able to get to them, but we'll do our best to answer them. One on One, Mark.
thank thank you, everyone, for the speakers and Doug. It's been a really nice, meaningful session. With that. We're gonna take a five minute break until 11 o'clock and we're very excited about our next keynote speaker, Sarah Rankin. We'll see you all soon.
Welcome back. For those of you who just joined Welcome to the Stanford neuro diversity summit. We'd like to let you know that all the sessions are recorded and transcribed. Please check out some website for YouTube videos of the previous days of the conference. But those who have registered today and have not received out zoom webinar links, please utilize our YouTube live stream on our summit website. All questions from the audience will be submitted through the q&a function at the bottom of your screen. The moderators will try to cover as many questions as possible. And after this presentation at between 12 and one, there is going to be networking sessions for those that have signed up. Please check your emails to make sure that you are getting the right directions for joining. Now it is my distinct pleasure to introduce Dr. Sarah Rankin. Dr. Rankin graduated with first class honors from King's College London earned her PhD in pharmacology also from King's College, and then postdoc training at UC San Diego and Cancer Research UK Linda. She then joined Imperial College London in 1995. And she's now a professor in leukocytes and stem cell biology in the Faculty of Medicine. Sarah is a world leader in the field of regenerative pharmacology, inventing drugs to help the body repair itself after injury. She is also involved in many interdisciplinary collaborative projects with physicists, material scientists and engineers investigating blaster, a blast injuries and cartilage repair and immune response to biomaterials. Throughout her career, she has been actively involved in public engagement and is the National Heart and Lung Institute's lead for public engagement. In this capacity, she has been the lead scientists in a number of high profile collaborative projects with artists like to heart and lung repair shop and palaces. Professor Rankin is neuro diverse, and in recent years have been working on a project to the power UK to make STEM education in schools and high education accessible for students with specific learning disorders. Professor Rankin's keynote presentation is titled, nearly diversity in STEM science, technology engineering and medicine, education and careers. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Rankin.
Light. Great. So I'm going to share my screen now. Okay, well, thank you so much for the invite, it's really a great honor for me to be here today. Most of you will not know me because I am a new person on the block if you like, because this isn't my area of expertise, but it is my lived experience. And this is really, in part where I'm coming from. So I am a professor. And hence I'm sitting here as the sort of embodiment of Oh, the the lost that word. So there you go, proof that. dyslexia and dyspraxic. Anyway, I'm moving swiftly on. So as I said, not an expert in neuro diversity and as Lee as trained as a pharmacologist. But what I have done throughout my whole career, is to be very passionate about outreach. And this is trying to encourage other young people to get into STEM careers. And originally, when I started out as one of the very few women in, in science in, in terms of in our department, there were no female professors. And so one of the things that I have been doing throughout my career is trying to inspire people by doing really interesting and inspiring outreach activities. And this was just showing you here are our sort of own bakeoff event that we did, and obviously talking to lots of girls. Now, if things have changed since then, we now have a department that has over 50% women, and we have lots of girls doing STEM subjects, maybe not as many as we want. But still, things have changed dramatically over the last sort of 25 years, certainly, that I had been at Imperial. And we have done that through our outreach programs, but also by changing things from within, and changing the culture of the workplace, and making it more more inviting for young women. And so I've been through this process once. And now when I'm thinking about that, in terms of neuro diversity, I'm trying to do the same sort of process. But this time, I know what I need to do. And so I'm hoping that I can sort of really accelerate that change. And also, I am really confident that a lot of the changes that we need to make are not as dramatic as they were when we were trying to get women into science. So we don't have to, for example, build a nursery. So one of the things that I am known for is my creativity. And I bring that to all aspects of my work, whether it be the research, or the outreach, and these are some of the outreach projects that I have worked on. And they don't look probably to you very sciency. But there's is science underneath that. And so this is what we do, we sort of attract people into interesting looking events and projects. And then we talked to them about science and stem cells, etc. So neuro diversity and science. If I show you this picture, you can see lots of sorts of old, famous, famous, famous people who it's generally believed that these guys were all neuro diverse. A lot of them were indeed autistic. And that's great. But the problem is,
we don't have so many of those people. Those are sort of role models today. So we had Steve Jobs we had Steven Hawkins, who were both known to be dyslexic, and we know that they had huge impact in their fields of science and stem. We also know some other people. If we look today And we think, okay, if I'm looking for dyslexic scientists or scientists with ADHD or that or that are autistic, I can find a few people on the internet. But it's very difficult. And this is my first issue that I have, that there are relatively few neuro diverse stem role models. And when we were talking about getting girls into STEM, the way we did it was we went as women into schools. And as young, you know, when we were when I was in my 20s, I was going into schools and trying to encourage more girls to get into science. And so we need those younger role models to be trying to entice neuro diverse students into science, because there's this saying, if you can't see it, you can't be it. So I have, there's the there are a lot of problems. And there are very few neuro diverse stem role models. That's my first issue. And there's also this issue that we know, as you, you're all very well, that many students fail in school. And I'm not going to read this out. And if you haven't got the time to be able to read the whole thing now do look it up. Because this is john Gordon's, one of his school reports back from 1949. And if you imagine in 1964, he was actually in California doing research. And it's that research that led him to get the Nobel Prize. And so he was pretty much you know, his teachers told him, he was never going to be a scientist. Similar thing with this person. This is Dame Sally Davis, who was our chief medical officer in the UK, she didn't get past her 11 Plus, she couldn't get into Grammar School in the UK. But she clearly went on and succeeded. It is a very common thing you all be aware of, you know, school is not a good place for neurodiverse people. And so these neuro diverse students we know are not thriving in schools that they might be surviving. Some of them aren't surviving, ADHD, ADHD, pupils very often get excluded. autistic students very often bullied end up being home educated. So and then the other students, people like myself, high ability students, maybe with dyslexia, dyspraxia, some sort of combination of neuro diversity. They're not, they're underperforming. And this is because the teaching is inaccessible for us, we're not being taught in the way we need to be taught. And the assessments are a nightmare. So I could go on forever in a day about problems at school, but I realized that this is going to be the subject of further debate later today. But I think these are things that we all recognize. And we do have issues in the UK, because our science teachers aren't taught about neuro diversity. And so they don't, they're not even aware that they should be teaching these students in a different way. But I think my main problem with what's going on in schools is this. And it's the fact that we are trying to not only teach those students in, you know, a way that isn't great for them. But we are also not assessing their strengths. And we've heard a lot of talk in this conference about what the strength of those students are. And
indeed, you know, when we are doing the sort of exams that we are doing in the UK, certainly, we are still back in the dark ages, where we are except we are assessing primarily ability to recall. So in science objects in particular ability to recall, you know, equations and lots of sort of information, you know, all the human anatomy, why do we need to be able to recall it, when we've all got one of these, you know, it's not that important anymore. We are not assessing a student's ability to be creative and innovative. And when I showed you all those amazing scientists, that's what they did. They were inventors. So one of the things we know is neuro diverse. Students are performing in STEM subjects. So in science subjects at GCSE which in the UK, these are taken at age six Steen, and I won't go into this details. But this was a huge study covering over a longitudinal study of over 1000 students. And what it clearly showed was that students that had a specific learning difference, but what understatement it. So these are students that, you know, there isn't even the funding to get them a statement because they're not deemed bad enough. They don't have a learning disability. They they are high ability students, but they have a neuro diversity. These students have, there's a massive gap in attainment gap in how they are achieving. And so this is a real issue. So, the other thing is that teachers are not really encouraging these students to do STEM subjects. And in fact, my son who's dyslexic was told he couldn't do triple science, you know, they advised him not to do science because it was, you know, too hard. And because they're naturally creative, they are being sort of channeled into these creative industries. And we know that, you know, there are amazing people, amazingly creative people that are successful, you know, these are all dyslexic people that have been incredibly successful in the arts. And that's great. Likewise, we know about these sort of dyslexic people that are, you know, successful as, as architects. But we also know that there are a lot of peace students that leave school, and this is, again comes back to this, the fact that school can be very problematic. And students can get very disenchanted excetera, if I'm putting it politely, and so they will leave school, but then they will go on to do amazing things, and they will be successful as entrepreneurs. Now one of the things with in the science community, and when we're teaching seminar day, certainly at Imperial, we're very much into entrepreneurship, young people genuinely are very much into entrepreneurship, and inventing things and being an entrepreneur go hand in hand. And so this is one of the reasons why I'm desperate to get more neurodiverse people into science. So neuro diverse, people are being encouraged into the creative, interesting, some of them leaving education. And for all these reasons, I've mentioned and have been mentioned before, in this conference, neuro diverse students can leave school, lacking self efficacy, and lacking that sort of confidence that they could be good at things particularly good at stem.
And the result is that we have relatively no numbers of neuro diverse students studying stem STEM subjects in higher education. And if I just look at Imperial, we have less than 8% students looking at all types of disability, this is the number of students that we have at an ad Imperial. Whereas if we go around the corner to our colleagues at the Royal College of Art, they have 29% of their students that are dyslexic. And they're very proud of that, because they know they have managed to capture all these creative students and creative minds. And I'm jealous of them, because we need them at Imperial, we need these creative, inventive students. Because if we don't have them, you know, if you look at all the inventions that these people are produced, you know, we've gone from, you know, the electric light bulb planes, you know, computers, PCs, Microsoft, Macintosh, and everything you can think of, you know, even you know, think about Cavendish, no, he invented chemistry and physics, you know, just two minor things in his lifetime. And then we got Louis paster over here, and we're living in the time of COVID. You know, this is the guy that invented vaccination, we cannot afford to let neuro diverse students that are interested or have a passion for science, not be entered into not be sort of feel that they have a place within higher education to study science. And so we need to think about what those barriers are, and try and really sort of knock them down. And I'm really confident that You know, we think about, you know, all the strengths that people have been talking about. And if I think about, you know, all these great scientists, you know, why is it the neuro diverse people can be really good scientists and amazing scientists, some of them? Well, because of creativity, innovation, you know, big picture thinking ability to link disparate ideas. And one of the things you noticed at the beginning, and Lawrence was mentioning, I do a lot of interdisciplinary work, I find it very easy to work, whether it's with artists, or with physicists, or material scientists, that comes very naturally. And I think this sort of also this silanization of the subjects is something that we really have to get away from, if we want to move forward and be much more creative and disruptive with tech, with technologies. And so there are lots of really important core skills that neurodiverse people have, you know, thinking about ADHD, that ability to hyperfocus and complete tasks. And then with autism, you know, that the attention to detail, pattern recognition, these are and also the sense of really wanting to to go for the truth and being really trustworthy. I mean, these are really critical and important characteristics for scientists.
And I think we've heard previously, they also all these skills are aligned with what people can consider 21st century career skills. And so that's very much. And we've, I'm sure, people have mentioned this before, how everybody, you know, that's neuro diverse, has this spiky profile. And this could be me. So yeah, you know, I have a problem reading, I read slowly. This isn't a problem for me as a scientist, because actually, I want to read the detail. And sometimes you know that so reading slowly, is actually a good thing, time management and those sort of things. Yes, they are challenging. But there are ways as we all know, of dealing with that. And technologies are really helping us there with that with new apps, etc. So we're moving now, we're actually in the fourth revolution, we've all heard about the fourth revolution. This is artificial intelligence, intelligence. And this is where it gets really interesting for me, because what I've realized stop in talking to businesses, that are really sort of picking up on this whole thing about neuro diversity, and lots of those have been mentioned already. But businesses are really thinking, Okay, you know, artificial intelligence is what's going to replace straight line thinkers. So what we need actually, is some now sort of the more complex nonlinear thinkers, and we need these people because we have all this technologies. And we now need people to come and innovate with it, and be creative. And so this is why there are a lot of STEM businesses that really want to recruit these these complex nonlinear thinkers. So it's not just, you know, having the autistic students, but it's also having people that are dyslexic or have ADHD, or or dyspraxia. And these are just businesses that I've worked with, in particular that happen interest in that, and we know many of this, and classically, the one gch cue, I mean, we all know about Alan Turing being autistic and yeah, his fantastic contribution to to science and everything, and GC HQ. Now, their recruitment process is such that they have recruited, you know, and in their workforce, they have 25% of their employees are dyslexic, because they are amazing problem solvers. So this is the message that I really want to get to young people, that if you are neuro diverse, then you do have a future in STEM, and it's now now could be your time, you know, you could be incredibly creative and a scientist and have entrepreneurship skills. And these companies are looking for you. And there's lots of organizations, not for profits, etc, that can work with you to help link you up with those jobs.
So this term neuro diversity, I guess, for me, as a scientist, I have a little bit of an issue because it's bio diversity neuro diversity neuro, you know, covers if you talk about bio diversity, you're covering everything like why is neuro diversity, the one that I like and I think it was an American one is this twice exceptional term or the two e term. And I guess I like to do e because that seems a bit scientific to me. So someone who has high ability with a learning difference is thought to be to E. Hence, that's why I called my project to empower. Many of these people are very effective in masking, then your adversity, I actually wasn't diagnosed until my late 40s. And actually after that, this is when I've done the research and I've really sort of got an understanding of, of my personal sort of strengths and weaknesses. And I realized, yeah, how much did I mask company years, in fact that now you know, most of my sort of family and colleagues don't actually believe that I'm, you're like, oh, watch it on it. But anyway, lots of these people are undiagnosed at some point in their in higher education or work. So to empower project was developed to really start to celebrate neuro diversity in the context of STEM subjects, and to make stem really accessible for these students to add them in time education, to enable neuro diverse students to fulfill their potential in their STEM subjects. So this first started off with very lucky to collaborate with Dr. Susan Smith, who had expertise in teaching twice exceptional students. And she came over to the UK and worked with some fantastic teachers that I had been working with over many years. And I'm sure these are really key for us in universities to be able to do great outreach, we really need these committed, and teachers that go above and beyond. And these two have been amazing comedy and bargaining had been amazing and in helping with this project. And what we did was we started to develop some bespoke workshops for students. So as I said, I've done outreach, I've done all these sort of workshops. So we thought, Okay, how do we take something that we would normally do for a whole group of unit mix students, and now make it bespoke for autistic students or make it bespoke for students with dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, and so we worked. And in fact, at this time, I was very, you know, strange how things happen, isn't it? And Sienna actually contacted me Sienna casselton, who's going to be speaking later in the conference. And at that time, she was interested in in doing a sort of STEM project. Anyway, we talked and I was telling her about this project. And so she got involved. And she was great, because it was great having an autistic person to help design the environments, and to make sure that every level of detail with thought about in terms of how to make the students feel really comfortable and, and safe. And so for example, with the autistic students, we have the red and the green badges that they could wear if they did or didn't want to be taught to. And just very things, you can see the room here we have all the blind stand we've taken, we've taken the chameleon and all the things that are normally in our outreach teaching lab out of there. So we have minimal distractions, no everything that we could do, we did.
And then we got the professors in to teach the students so here we have our professor in in pure mathematics, who is teaching these autistic students. And so when you have a professor teaching a student, they can stretch them, stretch them, stretch them. And it's just amazing to see. The other thing this is a colleague of mine Sunday, who I've worked with for many years doing outreach, we do them particularly for the bane students. This This was a civil engineering workshop. And this one I love because we had the dyslexic students here and we thought, right, let's see if they're entrepreneurs. So rather than just given them a design, with balsa wood and glue and glue guns, what we decided to do was we made a menu, and we said to the students, okay, so you're going to get $200 each, and this is you can use this $200 to buy information on what the sort of ideal bridge structure is, or you can use it to buy the glue guns, the glue, the balsa wood, etc. And they were in small groups. And what happened which was an absolute delight for me was that one These groups of students saw. And they thought, right, they used all their money to buy the glue guns. So they then suddenly had a monopoly on the glue guns. And that meant that every other group had to then come to them to buy, to be able to use the glue guns for so many minutes. And at the end of that activity, you had some students that had built these beautiful bridges. But then you had this group that hadn't even bothered building the bridge, but they had money sort of stuck all over them. And they were so excited by the fact that they've won because they've made the most money. And they're, we'd sort of managed to uncover, you know, our entrepreneurs. And we're really excited. So what I'm doing is working with people now and developing different workshops. So we've got astrophysics workshop and other ones. One of the things we found was that this, these students traveled a long way to come to our workshops. And some of them had never been to London before. But they were so excited about coming to Imperial, and to do a workshop. And the parents were just so excited. So I didn't mention we ran alongside the workshop for the students, we ran parallel workshop for the parents. And it was a great way for parents to network. And the comments we've got back from students and parents for doing those workshops, we're just way exceeded anything that we've had for any other workshops that I've ever done. So it was really, really rewarding. And so at the moment, we're working, we've got funding from Royal Academy of Engineering, we're working with the National computing Museum at Bletchley Park, and we are developing another workshop was going to be face to face. But you know, times are such that we are now developing this remotely, we're really excited. We're going to be running this on the 12th of December. Yeah, it's, it's going to be a lot of Yeah, it's called the Enigma to empower workshop. So this is going to be just for autistic students. So we're really looking forward to that. One of the other things we started and we sadly, had to, to sort of abandon was a project we had with much younger pupils from
in Camden in London, and we started working with them. And they were a complete delight. I mean, we had these students in years, five, six, so they're sort of age 1010, or 11. And we would extracting DNA from strawberries and everything. And yet the questions that they came out with were just amazing. I mean, just off top of my head, you know, do aliens have DNA? You know, so incredible. So, one of the one when we were doing one of these workshops, one of the parents was asking me, Well, what do you do at Imperial, you know, what do you do to accommodate for the students? And how do you treat them and how, you know, dad, and I suddenly, you know, that really sort of took me aback. And I thought, yeah, I'm there. But I haven't really thought that and I went back, and obviously, because I'm, you know, Professor, I've got my research, but I also do a lot of teaching, and I have my own Master's in genes, drugs and stem cells. And so I'm looking at the masters. And then I'm going to talk to people in the education unit and people in the disability service and saying, Okay, guys, we, you know, we need to be doing something. Luckily, we had developed this inclusive teaching strategy a few years back at Imperial. And so we were able to apply for some internal funding to actually start a project, which is about making teaching inclusive, that Imperial, for these students with specific learning differences. And so one of the things we're doing is going around giving a lot of talks, raising awareness, to other academics about the differences because most academics are completely unaware, even though probably a lot of them are neuro diverse, but just have never had a diagnosis. We provide that, excuse me, imperil, has invested in a lot of free assistive technologies. And I think this is the key about being inclusive and universal design. We invested in the assistive technology such that we could get that to all staff and all students, and then we give training on it. And for students, we advertise that training as study efficiency training. And if you imagine some of these Students that are using that we have a lot of international students. So when we're offering, you know, spell x or something like Grammarly, you know, that's great for international students just as much as it is for the dyslexic students. So we're not really, you know, we want to make this available for everybody. And we've obviously making our teaching materials as accessible, giving them in different formats and things like that. But the main thing is getting back to assessment. Because as you might have gathered, I've got this bit of a bugbear about exams. So I did something quite radical last year, and took the exams out of my Master's Course. And this caused a lot of problems, you know, with with other people sort of involved in running the masters. But anyway, you know, we do have problems, you know, exams and extended essays are a major problem for students, if they're, for example, dyslexic is Brexit. And so what we did was replace the exams with multiple authentic assessments. And one of those was grant writing, obviously, data analysis, we did public engagement as an activity, we did, you know, creating a graphical abstract of a, of a, of a research article, because that's something you have to be able to do now. So if you read a research article, you have to write an executive summary. And you also have to be able to write a graphical, a graph, create a graphical abstract. So we are changing the way we assessing It was super successful. Last year, the students loved it, they felt like they came out with with better skills, they were obviously didn't have the stress. And because we were in COVID, year, it was great, because we didn't have to, we weren't running around trying to, you know, see how we could do exams remotely, etc.
So as I say, assistive technologies, there's something, these are the ones some, a few of the ones that we are investing mindview. You know, this just shows you I mean, this is just one of my students and their projects. But you know, this is the way my my brain works. It's sort of, you know, everything is networked. And I don't see things in a linear way. And so I, you know, one of the, the science research projects, I get the students to create mind view mind maps, or any sort of Mind Map, because then they have the experience. And it makes because one of the barriers for this is students not making the time to learn the software, even though the software can be really easy to use. I mean, I can use it so easy for anyone. And so once we've got them over that, and we've got them all sort of using mind maps, they can then choose No, this isn't for me, or this really helps me. And the great thing for any of you that haven't worked with a mind map is that you create it like this, but then a single button, it will transform into your Word document. So the other thing that I've been doing sort of that has evolved as part of this project, I've been talking about it in other universities, to research institutes to learn societies and to some stem businesses. And what I've been doing, it's about raising the issue of neuro diversity in the STEM workplace. And this is about thinking about the employer experience. So, you know, because at a university, we have employers and employees the same as anywhere else. So it's thinking, Okay, it's not just thinking about, okay, we have to consider this when we're educating students, you have to consider this because, you know, some of your academics are neuro diverse, some of your admin staff and neuro diverse. So how do we all get along? And so, you know, this is a, you know, in that, in that way, we're thinking about it in the context of a workplace. And so one of the things is, is getting, and helping some of these some of these stem industries to develop their networks, their staff networks, and this is one thing that we've done at Imperial. And because, you know, I'm one of those people, I can't just be satisfied. We're doing anything by halves. So, because I now have collaborators as I work across all the sort of local institutes, so within the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music, and the VNA, my favorite Museum in London. So, we have, I have collaborators within those Institute's that are all neuro diverse Surprise, surprise. And so what we have done is to set up a staff and student network and for allies as well. And so we have just started this and we had planned to do some face to face really fun activities. But obviously we were restricted now with lockdown. So we are having a series of networking events. And our next one, our next one will be on Wednesday in a couple of days. So, yeah, this is very exciting. And I'm really looking forward to some of the collaborative projects that are going to come out of this. And one, for example, one of the things that we are hoping the reason we have a staff and a student network is we will hope that we will help be the role models for those students. But we want to learn from those students. So at the moment, they're great, we'll be able to ask those students about remote working and what works for them and what doesn't, and how we how we need to modify things for them. We can also have really interesting conversations with our colleagues at the Royal College of Art, in terms of how they assess creativity. I mean, one of the things that they do, which I am trying to sort of push Imperial towards is that they use multiple ways of assessing something. So for example, at the end of term, if they you don't have to just write a written dissertation, you could put it in the form of a video, or you could create a an oral presentation. So I think the idea of being able to have you assessments that match your strengths is really the way forward.
And so we all accept that, you know, we have challenges if you know, so undoubtedly, you know, and the word that I forgot right at the beginning that obviously came to me halfway through this speech was imposter syndrome. So I was thinking, yes, I am a professor and I'm sitting here sort of as the embodiment of imposter syndrome. So sorry.
Oh, I've frozen now. So I'm just going to continue. Sorry, Lawrence, can you tell me if you can hear me or somebody speak because I can, we can hear you. You can you can hear me, but
you can't see me. But I'm really I'm just about to wrap up. Now I just had the final slide was just sort of showing really how this outreach projects so some people, and especially scientists tend in the UK tend to be a bit sniffy about the sort of value of doing outreach. I think it's incredibly important. I really want to try and get you know, all these neuro diverse young people I want, you know, encouraged them into STEM, I think the future can be stem for them. And, and yes, just to show how that this has led to many more collaborative projects and interesting avenues for me to explore. And I'm also really interested in in doing some real research about the sort of lived experience of, of neuro diverse scientists. So yeah, I just end there. But if you are a neuro diverse scientist, please connect with me.
