By Carol Pankow, Director of MN State Services for the Blind

(Editor’s Note: Carol Pankow has served for the past four years as director of Minnesota State Services for the Blind. Following is the presentation she made at this year’s state convention in Rochester.)

A while back, Dan Wenzel told me a small story about one of those everyday successes that takes place at BLIND, Inc. It was just the simple story of a student at a fast food restaurant who figured out how to carry his tray from counter to table while using a long white cane. It’s not at all remarkable, but it was something that this student had never done before, and it was one of those small confidence boosters that had a big impact.

It’s one of those things that most people here in this room don’t even think twice about. At the same time, it is something that can be intimidating if you’re not used to being independent as a blind person, or if you’re just starting out learning how to do things nonvisually.

But, think for a minute what it means to carry a tray to a table while using a white cane. It doesn’t just open up the possibility of eating a lot more fast food. I don’t know who this student was, or what they went on to do after BLIND, Inc., but let’s just play out a few scenarios.

Let’s say this BLIND, Inc. student goes on to college. There, they will be able to navigate through the cafeteria, or go with friends to McDonalds. Let’s say they’re invited to a social gathering with a buffet line, or a party where everyone is standing and holding small plates. Let’s say they go on to get a job, and they go out for lunch with colleagues and there’s a salad bar. Let’s say they’re on a date with someone they want to impress, and they go out on a picnic. Little things like carrying your own tray can make a big difference.

It all adds up. Learning braille, how to catch the bus, safely cross a busy road, giving a PowerPoint presentation, working a room, finding your way to a new address, reading the newspaper.

None of those things are directly related to getting a job, just like you don’t need to know how to carry a tray to get a job, but they are the building blocks of confidence, independence, and competence that make a person a good hire.

And, even though we at SSB have a big focus on employment, it’s not all about the job. It’s just that having work that you like, and getting a paycheck makes it all the more possible that you can live the life you want, the way you want to live it. I think that ultimately, what SSB is about, is not how many people get jobs, or even how many braille pages we emboss or books we produce, or seniors we serve, but it’s about being the kind of place where blind, visually impaired and DeafBlind Minnesotans can get hooked up with resources for empowerment.

As you may know, October 1 is the start of the federal fiscal year, so it’s our New Year. This is why I brought champagne for everyone.

Ok, I’m just kidding about that.

Usually, this would be the time that I would give you the numbers round up. In brief, in fiscal year 2016 we had about 141 successful employment closures, and served about 3,750 seniors. But, I want to use most of my time to talk about empowerment, and what we’ve been doing over the past year and hope to do in the year ahead in order to be known as the kind of place where you can go and get what you need in order to live your life your own way.

I have a whiteboard in my office that lists the many, many projects we are working on, but at the top of that board I have written “Exceptional Customer Service” and at the bottom of that board I have written “Sense of Urgency.”  This has been on my heart and part of what has driven us that past year to fine-tune what we do to make it more relevant and user friendly for our customers.

A process that has bugged me particularly is the intake for customers who want to get a job. We have people start only to quit a few months later, or people have lots of misunderstandings from the beginning because they didn’t understand what a VR program is and what it isn’t.  We’ve re-tooled our intake process so that folks have a better idea about exactly what we can and cannot do when they become a customer of ours in our Workforce Unit. We’re doing more work up front, so that the process of becoming a customer is smoother, more consistent, and clear to our customers.  This is so important to us that we reorganized the counselors and have Meredith Larson working with the entire intake process.  She is providing informational training two times per month and is also managing our waiting list.  And speaking of the waiting list, we currently have zero people waiting as we opened it up to let everyone in this past month.  With the amount of people leaving successfully we have some room for those people.

All staff have been personally trained by myself in customer service with a presentation and materials I have developed over my career in state government.  I know most people think you can’t get customer service in state government but I want to prove that theory wrong.

Some other places impacted by my sense of urgency is in our BEP program.  We are not satisfied with the status quo or laying low when dealing with entities such as the VA or even other state agencies that are not operating in the best interests of our operators. We have been standing up and standing firm on a number of issues.

As you may know, another big push for us this last year has been in the area of Pre-Employment Transition Services. Pre-Employment Transition, in government speak, refers to kids between the age of 14 and 21 who are still in school. Pre-Employment Transition services include specific activities to help young adults make a successful transition to the post-high school world, whether that be college or vocational school, or work. You know, and I know, that sometimes that transition can be really rough. There are still blind kids who grow up without learning the skills for independence and advocacy that they’re going to need as an adult. Well-intentioned family members might do quite a bit of care-taking, not letting their blind kid develop their own skills.

For a long time, there have been various summer programs, like the PREP program at BLIND Inc., that teach skills for independence. While these programs are great, there’s been a real gap in programming for students during the rest of the year. For the first time, SSB has been able to support programs for students year-round, so that those new skills are being regularly reinforced and built on. The TEAMS Program at BLIND, Inc., is one excellent example of this.

We’ve also been focusing on helping students get real-world work experience. You can have all the self-confidence and independent living skills in the world, but if you don’t have something to put on your resume, it will be hard for an employer to take a chance on you.

Just a few weeks ago we hired Tou Yang as a Work Opportunities Navigator who will work exclusively with our students. Working with Sheila [Koenig], our Transition team, and the rest of our employment staff, Tou’s job will be to connect students with summer and part time jobs, paid and unpaid internships, job shadowing opportunities, and anything else that brings together kids and work. This year, SSB has been fortunate enough to have student interns working in three of our departments. We hope that we’ve provided them with an opportunity to hone some job skills, and we’re certain that they’ve been a tremendous asset to us. If you’ve ever spoken with Lisan Hasnane for more than two minutes, you already know that he has more poise, confidence and professionalism than most people two or three times his age.

Again, even though our focus is on employment, we know that what matters here is giving blind, visually impaired and DeafBlind young adults a real shot at a bright future, so they can live the lives they want.

At the other end of the age spectrum, we’ve also been working hard to make sure that our services are meeting the needs of seniors. I’ve talked before about the Aging Eyes Initiative, which is our program to train people across the state who are already working with seniors to provide a first level of support to seniors who are in the early stages of losing vision.

What this means practically, is that our counselors aren’t driving across three counties to hand out magnifiers to folks who just want to have something to help them see better. Our counselors can spend more time helping folks adjust to relying on nonvisual techniques for getting things done.

More important, thanks to the NFB of Minnesota, and especially to several dedicated and determined NFB members, the Minnesota legislature approved funding to increase our ability to provide more extensive training for blind and low vision seniors. Here’s what this means for us right now: beginning in October, we’ll be sending seniors for 10 weeks of twice weekly training at BLIND, Inc. In the last year, we’ve sent four or five small groups of seniors for training to BLIND, Inc. These have been once a week for 8 weeks. Because of the training grant money, we’ve gone from being able to offer seniors 1x week experience to having classes 2x per week for 10 weeks.

This means more time to get confident in the kitchen, more time to get over fears of using a long white cane or of traveling, more experience building those travel skills, more exposure to braille and how it might be useful to know, more time around blind people who are confident, capable, and successful.

The BLIND, Inc. training is just one of the options we can now make available to seniors, but it’s one we’re especially proud of, and one that we think will make a real tangible difference to seniors. We’ve also added a second fulltime Assistive Tech trainer. This means that in addition to contracting with others across the state, we have two staff people whose job is to work exclusively with seniors to learn accessible technology. We know this is going to be increasingly important for seniors and the hard work from the NFB of Minnesota to increase state funds for training for seniors means we can provide a lot more in-depth and practical support for training. I personally, along with Ed [Lecher] and our senior services team, am deeply grateful for all the work you did on shepherding this funding request through the legislature.

We’re also working hard to get the message out to seniors that losing vision doesn’t mean losing independence. In the past, we’ve partnered with the NFB of Minnesota to put on Possibilities Fairs in the Twin Cities area. These fairs are designed to show seniors and their families all the resources available to face vision loss with confidence and competence. Next spring, we’re again partnering with the NFB of Minnesota to bring a Possibilities Fair to the Mankato area.

Finally, we have been working on a way to become relevant to a whole new generation of people that like accessing articles and information in a different way. One year ago, we started producing podcasts through two different ways. Stuart [Holland] and our RTB team have been taking content from the Radio Talking Book’s Career Corner, along with finding other helpful articles, and packaging them into short, quick podcasts, so we can get our content out to more people who might find it helpful.

We’ve also been partnering with Jeff Thompson and BlindAbilities, and they’ve produced a ton of original content, including interviews, tech tips, daily living how-tos, and content that’s relevant for teens and college students. I’m going to play a couple of quick clips from these BlindAbilities podcasts. Jeff did a series of interviews at the Career Expo we put on for students last year. At the Expo, Sheila had invited blind folks in various careers to come and talk with students about their work and how they got where they are. Jeff produced several podcasts with live interviews from the expo with some of these folks.

Here’s the opening of the BlindAbilities podcast featuring Bobby Binns.

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And, just to give you a sense of the breadth of content, here’s a snip from another podcast on doing your laundry at college. We had 300 downloads the first day it posted. The listenership for these podcasts has been steadily growing. In July, for instance, when we had content up from national conventions, we had 9,400 downloads. Over the last year or so, we’ve had about 76,000 downloads. A quarter of those downloads have come from overseas, including the UK, Canada, Australia, China, India, and Malaysia. 25% of our US listeners are in Minnesota, which says to me that we’re reaching our customers too.

That’s just some of what’s gone on across SSB in the fiscal year that just ended. Getting a jump on the year ahead, our management team met in a day-long retreat in order to set priorities for the year ahead.

Here are a few of the highlights from that meeting:

We continue to look at staffing – planning for more retirements, and onboarding new staff. Over the last six months, we’ve brought on a lot of new folks, and I’m extremely proud of the staff we have right now. 4 of the last 8 hires have been blind or visually impaired individuals. We’ve also been working to increase the racial diversity of our staff. Thinking ahead, we want to continue to build a staff that not only reflects the customers we serve, but also comes on board with a solid understanding of our values and our commitment to empowerment.

At our meeting we also had a frank discussion about serious problems with accessibility within state government. In the last year, there have been a couple of significant rollouts of systems that are either not accessible, just barely accessible, or not user friendly. We’ve pushed consistently and ferociously for building in good accessibility from the very start of a new launch, and we’ve complained equally loudly when accessibility has been dropped. We know that unfortunately, we don’t have control over what other departments do or don’t do, but we’re determined to get to the root of this and turn it around.

We’re also committed to raising visibility in the year ahead. Again, we need to make sure that every Minnesotan who could use our services knows about our services. We don’t want to miss anybody, or have someone slip through the cracks, whether it’s a student, a senior, or anyone in between. A major priority for us in the coming year will be to actively promote SSB across the state, so that we’re not the best kept secret in state government.

Before I take your questions, I want to say a few words about the partnership between State Services for the Blind, BLIND, Inc., and the NFB of Minnesota. We’re three different entities with different focus areas and different strengths. Nonetheless, I see our work as a partnership. Like any partnership it will have its tough spots and its rewards. As I look back over this last year, I’ve been proud of the way our partnership has expanded and flourished. New SSB staff members have been at BLIND, Inc. for an emersion in Adjustment to Blindness training, BLIND, Inc. has provided us with excellent options for the students in our transition program, for our seniors and other customers. I have worked alongside many of you in the various committees and working groups of our council, and I’ve been grateful for both the critiques and the compliments you’ve passed along.

You have my word that I will continue to do my part to strengthen our partnership so that blind Minnesotans can live the lives they want, in the way they want to live them.