AXSChat Podcast

AXSChat Podcast with Kathy West-Evans from the U.S. NET at the Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation.

January 15, 2023 Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh, Neil Milliken talk with Kathy West-Evans
AXSChat Podcast
AXSChat Podcast with Kathy West-Evans from the U.S. NET at the Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation.
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Show Notes Transcript

Kathy West-Evans is a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor (CRC) who is fluent in American Sign Language. She has her MA in Public Administration and a Bachelor of Science. Kathy started in the field of rehabilitation in 1978. She has worked in a community agency, for the Washington State Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, at the federal level with the Rehabilitation Services Administration and now leads the National Employment Team (NET) at CSAVR (Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation). The NET is a cross state team of VR business specialists working through a dual customer approach to develop strategies with business to employ and retain the talents of individuals with disabilities across the company or organization. Kathy was also part of the team that developed the Talent Acquisition Portal (TAP) in response to businesses who wanted to easily access the talent pool of candidates with disabilities and individuals who were interested in accessing career opportunities with companies across the country.

Kathy is a past member and Chair of the Veterans Advisory Council on Rehabilitation and a former Commissioner on the Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification. In addition to impacting and drafting legislation focused on VR’s work with business, she is a frequent speaker and has co-authored articles focused on working with business to employ the talents of people with disabilities.

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This is a draft transcript produced live at the event and corrected for spelling and basic errors. It is not a commercial transcript. and will need to be checked if you wish to publish it.

AXSCHAT:

Kathy West-Evans

NEIL:

Hello and welcome to Axschat. I'm delighted that we are joined today by Kathy West Evans. Kathy is the Director of Business Relations for CSAVR, which is the Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation. And she is in charge of the national employment team. So, in the UK we might compare this with what we would call occupational health and workplace adjustments and accommodations to a certain extent. So, welcome Kathy, it's great to have you on the show. Can you are tell us a little bit about yourself, a little about CSAVR and the work that you do?

KATHY:

Okay. We are a member membership organisation, CSAVR is the membership organisation of the public vocational rehabilitation agencies in the US. So, we have programmes in every state, the territories and the district of Colombia and our focus is working with individuals with disabilities to put them on a career track and keep them working so they can live independently. And really to work with, whether it's a young person looking at starting their career, moving out of high school into post-secondary education, apprenticeship whatever fits for them or if it's somebody that acquires a disability during their career. Understanding that disability happens at any time in that employment lifecycle. So, our team works directly with business because when we sat down with our business partners and said, how do we do this differently, really asking them to be part of a solution, they shared a lot of really good information with us, like build trust, build relationships and Debra and I have talked a lot about the fact that they'll tell us, we just don't know and we are afraid to ask. So, how do we work with...?

DEBRA:

Yes.

KATHY:

Right, right. And have them tell us what they need and understand their business so that we can build a plan with them just like we are building a plan with the individual. And then bringing those two together, that dual customer approach.

DEBRA:

I'm going to step in rudely here, Neil because I know you were just about to say something but one thing that I would just like to point out to the audience is that, as a reminder, I used to be on the board of USBLN, which is now called Disability N. I was on that board for six years and what that organisation does in the United States is, it is a very powerful business to business organisation in the States, focused on disability inclusion and finally talking a lot more over the last few years about accessibility. Frances West and I nagged them quite a bit about that. But the one thing that they did was they started working with what we call our voc rehabilitation and Kathy was one of our major leaders in the United States on that. And one thing we were finding was that our employers were confused with how to work with the, you know our tax paying paid for services that we had and so, a lot of the business built up around that. But it's really an issue that we see in all countries. We have resources, governmental paid resources but often we don't see. It doesn't appear they are being used in a way that is adding as much value to the employers or the businesses and to society. And we all know these things. This is not just a US problem, but I just wanted to point out that Kathy has years of that experience, trying to bring those two groups together and it's very difficult to do because none of our governments are perfect certainly. But I just wanted to point that out to you because Kathy now is playing a different role and for many, many years she played a large leadership role in what we consider our voc rehab groups. I wanted to point that out for Kathy too. Go ahead, Neil.

NEIL:

Thank you Debra. I think that absolutely we see similar issues in every country. Businesses don't really necessarily know how to engage with government on topics around disability, rehabilitation, return to work, the infrastructures around that. Often, they are very, very complex and to be frank, in certain instances businesses take a view. It is not that they are not disability confident. I think there are two issues actually, one is the confidence around disability and some businesses don't know where to engage and how to engage and are afraid of disability. Others are actually relatively competent and confident but the engagement with government is challenging and problematic and also cumbersome and it's that cumbersomeness, if you like, that then creates a financial challenge because actually what ends up happening is that businesses end up taking the issue well, it actually costs us less to do this ourselves and that sound like great, good for the taxpayer business is going to do it anyway, but I suspect that what happens is that the company is not getting the full benefit and the country is not getting the full benefit because the money is there for a purpose and we want to involve more people with disability. So, I think that that bridging role is super important. So, can you tell us a little bit more about the work that you're doing to bridge between business and individuals and government to make it easier for people to go through that process?

KATHY:

Absolutely. That's an excellent point, Neil. So, like I said, businesses you know, will tell us, we just don't know, and we are afraid to ask. I think the key thing is getting to what the biggest barrier for individuals with disabilities is and that's that attitudinal barrier, right? And businesses, when we ask them, we started by asking when we formed the national employment team or the NET, how do we do a better job with you? You understand the careers and we need that information to do a great career plan with a person, but we are all in this together. We need the workforce, we need the talent, let's look at this differently. They said, oh right yeah, you’re government and you're here to help us. So, and we all had a good laugh about that. But they also didn't know where to find us. They said, you know, you have got to build the relationship and you can't do that by leading with a lawsuit. Right, I'm not saying anything that's surprising anyone. You have got to do it by asking and really being a partner. And really you know, what we are looking at is how do you build that relationship? How do you build the trust? Because accessibility, in a company and really enabling talent really comes at a lot of different levels within an organisation. So, when you build the relationship, how do you build the strategy with the company, where you can build your resources to benefit them. And you can open career opportunities for individuals because, one of my favourite quotes is from Stephen Keavy,‘You're beginning with the end in mind.’ You can't really build a good plan with a person unless you understand what that career looks like. The second thing they told us is, we don't know where to find you, we have all these great acronyms, remember I said we have 78 different agencies, they all have different names. So, we formed a national employment team as a collaborative. So, a company anywhere in the country can reach out to the national employment team and we can bring our team of specialist around behind that company and build a plan across their footprint. So, you're not reinventing the wheel in every location. You're building a plan and we can leverage the experts on our team whether it's an assistive technology specialist. An OT, a person who is going to go in and look at the accessibility of a website or a facility. You know, accessibility has a lot of different meetings. How do we bring those resources to the business to help them set them up for success while we are also setting up individuals up for success and then making the connection; does that help, Neil?

NEIL:

Oh, yeah.

DEBRA:

Okay.

ANTONIO:

So, when your team is working with businesses and considering that sometimes considering that organisations are constantly changing, how do you make sure when you engage with them, you are able to make a sustainable framework that lasts? It is not just hiring a person, fixing the path for that person. But how can you establish something for the years to come?

KATHY:

That's a great question, Antonio. So, when we are building that relationship, we build it at several levels within a company. So yes, people do leave, and people leave on our team, and we have the responsibility to keep those relationships going. So, really building that trust and building a strategy and coming to listen to the business not coming in to tell them how to do it but to listen to what their need is so that you're building those relationships at multiple levels. If someone changes then you still have a relationship. So, you are there really to support them across the spectrum of their business not just their HR team. Does that answer your question, Antonio?

ANTONIO:

In part, yes. But I would like to see how we could go further. Are you supporting them to create a framework and polish it that can somehow, some organisations they are multiple locations, how are you able to support them to create company policy to start to make this as part of their day-to-day activities?

KATHY:

Yes, great question. So, first we have to change our systems. It's really a systems change from within and that's what we have driven through the national employment team and our membership organisation. And, in the last reauthorisation of our federal legislation, we included a whole section on working with business and we asked business to help us write that. So, we engaged them right at that core level and building a plan with a company, every plan looks slightly different but yes, we do have a framework that we approach it with, and we have built tools to help support it. So, we have a talent acquisition portal. A centralised portal of candidates that are ready to go to work where we can connect individuals with a company directly. Right now, we have about 32,000 candidates in that portal and at any one time, we are streaming between four hundred and five hundred thousand jobs. So, we are building out strategies that can last no matter, you know, at one day we'll all have to retire but how do we keep this working and developing and continuing to grow?

ANTONIO:

So, you mentioned that you have a website that has people that are looking for a job. So, if someone, if a young grad with a disability, how can that person engage with you and what can that person expect from you?

KATHY:

Okay. So, as I said our system is set up to serve individuals with disabilities at any time in their life with a goal of a career, employment and continuing to move along that career path, even though they may be impacted by disability. So, on the talent acquisition portal or TAP, we have not only brought our candidates on from our system and the public VR system at any one time is serving between eight hundred thousand to a million people. So, these people are at different parts of their career journeys. So, not already to go to work but the goal is, as they are ready to go to work, bringing them into this platform. We have partnered with our veteran's organisation and brought them on as partners. We have partnered with our social security organisation, brought them in as partners. We have community partners, like the Helen Kelleher Centre that Debra is very familiar with, where we are bringing them on as partners, so they bring their candidates in as well. So, continuing to grow a partnership around the candidate side so that it is viable and sustainable for the business side as well as for the individuals.

DEBRA:

Kathy, I have a question that I know it's a hard question that none of us know how to solve this but what I see happening in our voc rehab in the United States, is that the people that go to our voc rehab, now I know this is shifting, but this was something that I talked a lot about, I'm in Virginia and a lot of people with disabilities don't even realise that voc rehab is there to support us. So, I've a daughter, everyone knows, a lot of people know I've a daughter with Down Syndrome and so, she of course I went right to our voc rehab to support her but part of the problem with finding us, using that term finding us, is that we don't even sometimes realise we are part of the community ourselves but that's a whole other issue. But one thing, I don't know if it's still true, but one thing our employers, our businesses worry about is for example the 32,000 people in there, are they people that are qualified to do their work. And I'm saying that often with voc rehab, you don't have, you aren't servicing the people that are out there that really could use the services and so, another problem we have is, I know that the Valuable 500 is of course very, very committed to making sure that you know, we help them include people with disabilities. But, when they reached out early on to try to find some job banks, they were finding job banks were inaccessible. There were very few resumes in there. And that was not something, you didn't want to take that to the businesses and say well, here you go here's an inaccessible website and there are 11 resumes in there. Hope that helps you Neil, how many positions you have open right now in ATOS? So, I know that's just part of being government and figuring it all out, but that is, do you see that some of that is changing so that the businesses can be more comfortable working with the resources that taxpayers are paying for? Are we shifting towards that? It feels like we are, but are we shifting towards that?

KATHY:

We absolutely are. So, with the talent acquisition portal. We built that system. Because like you Debra, we found that we would go out to job banks or posting services and they were not accessible. So, we reached out and engaged a partner, a disability owned company and said, help us do this. And so, they have coded it. We co own it. As we need to make changes in accessibility, we can do it and as we need to make shifts for business need, we do it. Like virtual career fares. We host virtual career fares. So, not too long ago, one of our business partners, we set up for a two-hour virtual career fare and I think they hired on the spot 12 people, on the spot. Then after that they continued to hire people, but they got to know the candidates and their skill sets. And we set those candidates up for success by enabling them to talk about their skill sets and really focusing on their talent. So yes, Debra, you're absolutely right, we need to make shifts. I know our team because we are the membership organisation, we are talking a lot about visibility is and what that means. How do we get the word out about the mission? What partners do we need to bring to the table to help grow that talent pool, so that it is beneficial to business customers but also to those individuals? How do we help them create that vision of moving into a career and not graduating from high school on to disability benefits?

DEBRA:

Right. And also, how do we encourage society to want to identify that we are people with disabilities. I know that there are different ways that we are looking at this. But once again, I think it's important for us to start identifying. But Americans have said to me, yeah I hear you Debra, but how are you going to guarantee I'm not going to be taken advantage of, disenfranchised and my reply back to them was, you're Americans, you know at some point, we are going to have to be brave and we're going to have to really step up and own our identities and be proud of our identities. Neil, I know that you have a question, let me turn it over to you.

NEIL:

Okay, actually goes in nicely in terms of identity because off air we were talking before Kathy, you said you are troublemaker. Well, you know, good trouble. I'm fully with you on this, had a few scrapes myself but I think that everybody has a back story in how they got into working in this field. So, it would be really great to hear about your back story and what motivated you to work in the field of voc rehab and why do you have this passion for getting disabled people into meaningful employment? Didn't start out of nothing I assume.

KATHY:

Right, good question, Neil. As I think I shared with you all earlier, I was born with a hearing loss, and when I went to, when I started school, you know, when the teacher would move to write on the Blackboard, the white board I would have to lean over to the student next to me and ask, what is she saying. So, I was labelled as a behaviour problem. They didn't realise I had a hearing loss. My mom was the one that picked that up. She noticed I was moving my lips when she was talking to me. I taught myself to lip-read as best I could. It's not really ever fully effective. She was able to get me into an ENT and they were able to diagnose the hearing loss. And I've had surgery on both my ears, and I still live with the impact of that. So, I did my undergraduate work in paediatric audiology. I have a science degree in paediatric audiology because I knew I couldn't be the only student facing this and during my time at the University of Washington, I met a woman who was a CODA, a child of a deaf adult. Her parents were both deaf and she was building the programme here in the State of Washington and I always attribute this to her. Mildred Johnson, she said why do we continue to think we have to try to fix people and why can't we just accept them where they are at. And for me that really resonated and it changed my career path into looking at vocational rehabilitation, looking at career building, meeting people where they are at and helping set them up for success, instead of limiting them because they have a diagnosis and not making assumptions based on the diagnosis. So, does that help Niel and yes, I was labelled a behaviour problem and I take great pride in that. I'm going to push for change because I've lived with people with disabilities. They're my family members. They are us.

NEIL:

Yeah.

Kathy:

And if anyone hasn't noticed, this is one of the communities you can join at any time in your life, so welcome to it and let's move forward together.

NEIL:

Okay. So, following on from that, one of the things that is sort of implicit in vocational rehab is almost saying right we are rehabilitating you, that kind of implies that you have fallen out of the workforce, what about the people that have never been in the workplace in the first place? So, are you also, you said you're already working with young people and young adults to, you know to help them get into the workforce. So, what are the sort of strategies to give people business relevant skills. That's one of the challenges actually that businesses find, is not provision of assistive tech, it is actually not really even making websites accessible. People know how do that. Some of the challenges start way earlier, in the systemic challenges in education in that people with disability fall out of education and don't end up with the skills. And then, no matter how many accommodations or adjustments you make, if the person doesn't have the skills to do the job, they are not going to get it. So, what is your organisation and the US government doing to help with that skills building process, so that we do have a pipeline of qualified individuals that we want to employ? Because we do want to employ them.

KATHY:

Yes, yes. That again is a great question and we do have a dedicated piece in our legislation that focuses on working with young people. So, it's working with high schools, and I think eventually we are going to push it down earlier, right because thinking about how do you set a young person up with the expectation to have a career? Right? If you know, if my mom wasn't as pushy as she was to find the answer, where would I be? How do we empower parents to really take a look at yes, that's the diagnosis but my child can still have a career. How do we change that mindset and set young people up for success? And I think that's got to start before high school and we are trying to kind of push down into that system to help them have that vision. So that parents and students have that vision too and yes, you're absolutely right, Neil we have got to build this with business. And that's why we've built the partnerships with business. We are living in a changing business market. We have opportunities like we have never seen. Including business-based learning. So, how do we start creating summer work experience for these students, right? That vision.

DEBRA:

Right. And it's a complicated, it's a very complicated system. And I want to be fair, my daughter is 35 years old. So, she has been out of the education system. We go until, we get support in the United States until you turn 22 years old, just to give everybody. So, it's been years. But I remember we started talking about this Kathy, in middle school and I actually was taken aback by the response that I was getting and whenever and when I got Sarah involved with the system, what happened was, Sarah was already working because I had gone out and we had gotten her a little job and she was working at Wendy's in a marketable position and she had done it all into the summer and all year but, she went to be assessed by the experts and the experts told us that Sarah was not capable of holding down a full time job, a full time marketable job and I was like very confused because she was actually working full time and had been, you know even though she was going to school. I mean not full time but, so there is still a lot of confusion and Antonio, just in the little chat window had put a comment that he wants to talk about career paths and I remember when my daughter, we went to this one place to help us that the government helps us pay for and they were teaching people to be woodworkers and they were teaching people to do jobs that I don't think existed at the time certainly. I mean you can be a woodworker but I'm not sure where you can go build furniture, you know what I mean. So, there is so much of all of that in the system and it causes so much confusion and so, I'm just going to start on Antonio's question which is from here, you know how do we start addressing the career paths? And Antonio, I can go on mute if you want to finish that question and give it to Kathy all at once and she is going to solve all of the problems, woohoo!

ANTONIO:

No, my point is very simple, how can people receive training and education that leads to a job not just instead of being trained and educated just to keep them busy being trained and educated. So, that's basically where I want to go because even, I work in social services in Portugal a few years ago and sometimes the training that was being given to some groups of people they had a purpose of keeping them busy. There was no future. So and that's something that always concerned me. Because we are creating expectations. People are spending time learning. People are really putting the effort but then we disappoint them by not, in that process, we end up disappointing them for their future.

KATHY:

Great point, Antonio. And I think I mentioned early on, one of my favourite quotes from Stephen Keavy, begin with the end in mind. So engaging business to understand what viable careers look like. And how you get on a career track is so important and bringing that information back to young people, back to parents, back to educators. And at that, you know, working with young people, people with disabilities at any point in their life, remembering to look at the talent, the skillsets what do they value in work. What is important to them and how does it fit? So, you know people work for different reasons. It's not just money. Understanding what they need and how it fits with the real world of work.

DEBRA:

Right, right. And I think you're right in that this is something that we all have to learn how to do. I know, obviously I'm a parent and obviously I'm an individual with lived experiences myself. But the reality is, we as parents and we as mentors that are guiding young people, we can pay attention to what they are interested in. For example, my daughter loves technology. It's a gigantic fight we have with each other. She is actually sometimes better on technology than me which has caused me some real nightmares. So, I think we can pay better attention. This cannot be all of your job to solve, Kathy but it also can't be brands like ATOS, all of their job either. We have to solve, as a society and there are all these moving parts. And so, I often, I've so many parents that will come to me and say what do I do? Pay attention, what are they interested in? And by the way, introduce them to a bunch of stuff so, they can see what they are interested in. Are they lending themselves to art? I think of Antonio's daughter, she doesn't have a disability, but she is into sports and into this and so, expose them to a lot of different things and pay attention and when you see them sparking on something that they are intrigued by. Educate yourself to see what kind of jobs. I'm going to say something really sarcastic here, in that, I remember my son, who is 34, was playing games all the time and I'm like, okay, you got to get a real career, you can't get a job playing games. Oh, okay, well there are jobs like that. But at the time I didn't know it. So, I think also some of this is about society understanding this is not just Neil's job. Neil, you better hire us. This is not just your job Kathy. This is not just my job as a parent, as a consultant, this is, society has to really rethink these things and stop thinking that certain members of society are broken because of some ridiculous stuff. I just wanted to give you that because it is a major work in process but anyway, we appreciate you being there doing all this.

KATHY:

Yeah, well, we are in this together. And this is not just the US, as a world we are really taking a look at, you know, how do we look at the skillsets and the talents of a diverse workforce. I think, in my career, and this year will be 45 years working on this mission. So, with a DEI&A, I really think that the first time in my whole career that I've seen disability included as part of that discussion, we are really being invited to be at the table, have a voice at the table, we are seeing individuals with disabilities, with their employee resource groups or their business resource groups, having a voice within a company. How do we empower them? How do we work together to change this perspective that disability is somehow because there is a medical label, somehow someone can't? How do we look at what they can? And how do we work together?

DEBRA:

Totally agree. And I think also, Kathy how do we, and once again, I love you put that A in there, DEIA, the A must be in there. So, thank you for that.

KATHY:

I'm going to challenge that because I'm challenging companies to put the A before the I. Are you truly inclusive if you're not accessible?

DEBRA:

Well, and that's fine too. But I mean, I think they are all important, but we weren't seeing anybody include the A in these discussions. I remember, I love SHERM, SHERM is really working on this, I remember a few years ago sitting in a workshop and they were saying, what are all the diversity groups and I just sat there and waited, I just wanted to see how long it was going to take and they got through 15 of them and then they started to close it and I'm like, really and I raised my hand and I said, disability and everybody is like oh, that's right. But anyway, but we are learning.

KATHY:

It's not an afterthought. But we were helped because President Biden released on executive order on DEI&A and the expectations with federal agencies, so modelled the way, right?

DEBRA:

Great and the UN did too. So, back to you Neil. Sorry.

NEIL:

So, I think it's great to have these landmark bits of legislation and the, not just legislation but the guidance notes that have been issued as well. So, the significant shifts in many countries, in Europe, UK, US and that's really positive. I think that we still need to address what our dear friend, Kate Nash calls the soft bigotry of expectations around disability because we have got to help people understand that they can do this, give them the confidence that they can do this and then employers need the confidence to know that these confident and competent individuals can do the job for them. So, there is a whole piece, you know and lots of people have roles to play in this, but it is a complex system that we need to change. So, when people say, I'm working on this or I'm working on that, I'm always a bit nervous. I think it's great that what you're talking about is making systems change because actually we live in a complex system and if we don't acknowledge that there is this interconnectedness around these systems then we are likely to fall flat somewhat. So, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you today. I need to thank MyClearText for keeping us captioned and also Amazon who are supporting us for 2023. So, thank you very much to everyone.

KATHY:

Great. Amazon is a great partner.

NEIL:

Thank you.

KATHY:

There you go. Thank you.