By Carol Pankow, Director, Minnesota State Services for the Blind

How time flies – a year ago, when I addressed your spring convention, I had only been serving as SSB’s new Director for a few months.  Back then, I laid out for you some of the plans I had for building a better SSB.  Today I can tell you about the progress we’ve made toward meeting those goals.  I also want to give you an update on the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, or WIOA, which, as many of you know, is a major piece of federal legislation just being rolled out.  I will also leave plenty of time for your questions so that I can speak more directly to what’s important to you.

First, just to provide a snapshot of how we’re doing, here’s an overview in numbers from across SSB.

• Senior Services has served 2,901 seniors across the state.  I’ll be talking a little bit later about a new pilot project to reach more seniors.  I also want to mention that there’s been an uptick in the number of consumers with senior services who are interested in adjustment to blindness classes.  Ed Lecher says that there are four terrific, energized ladies here at BLIND, Inc. right now.  They’re doing things they wouldn’t have thought possible just a few weeks ago, like taking the bus on their own to BLIND, Inc. for class.

Our Communication Center is as busy as ever. 

• We’ve turned out 60,000 pages of braille, and transcribed nearly that many print pages in to audio.  Altogether, audio services has provided 122,000 print pages in alternate formats to consumers, about 10,000 of these as scanned e-texts.
• The Radio Talking Book has put up about 30 podcasts focusing on job and career planning and topics of interest to young adults.  In selecting material for some of those teen podcasts, Stuart Holland has drawn from NFB publications, especially some of the personal testimonies of young adults who have found their independence and personal empowerment.
• We now have 23 titles produced at the Communication Center available as a download on BARD, and that number keeps growing.
• Dial-In News has added two new publications: the Brainerd Dispatch and City Pages.
• Finally, at last count there were 216,125 log-ins to the NFB-NEWSLINE®, which we jointly administer with the NFB.

On the Workforce side, here are the numbers as of last Monday:

• 54 successful closures, with a successful closure being a customer who has found work and remained in that job for three months;
• 39 employed over 90 days and expected to close this year
• Another 45 people counting down their  90 days
• And 83 people ready for employment.

So, that’s where we are.  Here’s what we’ve been doing to improve our effectiveness for our customers.

When I addressed this gathering in the fall, Brianna Holeman had just come on as Deputy Director for operations and the communication center.  With a strong background in finance and management, Bri has already helped us streamline our work; eliminating duplications of effort, cutting the fat, and helping us focus on directing our time and energy more completely on serving our customers.

Likewise, Jon Benson has been on board as Deputy Director for Programs for about ten months.  He oversees our workforce team and Senior Services.  As will be clear, we’re making a lot of changes in both of these units, and Jon has his hands full.

Also, when I addressed the Minnesota chapter of the NFB in the fall, I told you about the six cross-agency working groups that were launched about a year ago.  At our all-staff meeting this Wednesday, the work group leads will be providing the whole staff with progress reports on their work.

Each of these work groups is focused on some aspect of the customer experience.  These work groups include:

• Assistive Tech – developing a strategy to connect customers with the right technology;
• Data – reviewing the way we collect and leverage data across the agency;
• Intake – looking at first points of contact;
• Outreach – making sure we get the word out to folks who need our services;
• Placement – ramping up our efforts to get customers in front of employers;
• And Team Model – Looking at more collaborative models for working with our customers in their job prep and job search process.

That brings us to WIOA, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act that was passed by congress last July.  Part of WIOA amends the Rehabilitation Act and creates a roadmap for states to follow in providing services to people with disabilities.  Now we’re in the phase of unfolding that roadmap to figure out just how it’s going to work.  To that end, the federal government is accepting public comments on the Act through June 15.  If you go to Regulations.gov and do a search on WIOA, you’ll find the guidelines for submitting comments, and I would certainly encourage everyone to do so, if you have an opinion on how this law should be carried out.

One of the key provisions within WIOA is an emphasis on preparing young adults between the ages of 14 and 21 for the world of work.  The law requires that agencies like ours set aside 15% of our federal grant for these consumers.  At SSB, that’s about $1.3 million of our budget.

Many of you here can remember what it was like to be a blind or visually impaired young adult launching out on your own for the first time.  While today’s young adults have a lot more going for them in terms of technology and other resources, we’re hearing from colleges that they don’t necessarily have the same skills for self-advocacy and self-reliance that earlier generations may have had.  With or without WIOA, we’re committed to working with these young adults to help them gain the kind of practical and problem-solving skills they’ll need as they enter college, work, or other training.  If more blind, DeafBlind and visually impaired Minnesotans are coming out of high school with some job experience, the ability to advocate on their own behalf, a solid grounding in technology, and a capacity for resilience, agencies like SSB will have much less work to do as they enter the workforce.

When we began a serious review of our transition services, we had about 60 customers who fit in this category.  In collaboration with the Department of Education, we identified about 85 others who could qualify for our services.  In a few short months, we’ve added about forty more to our customer base, and are reaching out to the remaining forty.

As we develop more robust services under WIOA, here are some of the things we’ve put in place or are developing:

• We have brought together a transition core team charged with helping us keep our eye on the ball.  They’re sending out regular updates to Transition Students and families, including a newsletter, they’re promoting technology and other training, and they’re creating other relevant pre-employment services.
• Right now, we’re in the process of hiring a transition coordinator to work directly with kids and the schools to get them what they need.
• We’ll be submitting an RFP for year-round group services and programs.   These services will be focused on skills building in braille, technology, living independently, career prep, and orientation and mobility. 
• We’ve set a goal of every student having a summer work or training opportunity.
• We’ll be making a special effort to reach out to high school seniors so that they have the best shot at success in college or at a job.
• Lastly, we’ll be part of a unified state plan incorporating all the workforce development programs across the state, so that we can better coordinate services.

Along with WIOA, another initiative we’re launching this year is a pilot program to involve community partners in providing resources to seniors who are losing vision.  We’re testing out this project in northwest Minnesota.  We’ve trained a group of Block nurses and staff at Centers for Independent Living to work with seniors who are at the early stages of vision loss and who are just looking for a few simple resources as they adjust.  The idea here is that our counselors will be spending less time handing out magnifiers and large-print check guides, and more time working with seniors who are ready to learn more about adding nonvisual techniques to their daily routines.  We also think that this approach will get more seniors connected earlier.  This is one solution we’re trying in order to address the growing number of seniors with vision loss.

That’s a quick overview of what’s going on at SSB.  This is work that we are in together, and my door is always open.  In 1994, Kenneth Jernigan addressed a gathering of education and vocational professionals who served blind consumers.  In that address, he talked about the dynamic relationship between consumer groups and public sector organizations.  He said: “In today’s climate of changing values and hard-fought issues, the best possible insurance policy for an agency for the blind is a strong, independent organization of blind consumers.”  Minnesota is fortunate to have organizations like this chapter of the NFB that are engaged, active, critical, and also constructive.  Before I take your questions, I want to let you know that I am grateful for our partnership.  You keep us honest, you challenge us, and you identify problems so that we can put things on the table and get them worked out.  In short, you make us better.  Thank you for your thoughtful attention, and I’ll be glad to answer your questions.