The importance of working while in school

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Brian Begin

You. Welcome to the Job Matchmakers podcast, where we share stories from employment consultants about supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to find employment in their communities. One person, one job at a time.

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Sherry Healey

This podcast is produced by the Minnesota Transformation Initiative, a technical assistance center focused on expanding capacity for competitive, integrated employment across Minnesota.

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Sherry Healey

We are your hosts, Sherry Healey.

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Sherry Healey

And Brian Begin, and we work at the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota.

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Sherry Healey

Thanks for joining us.

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Sherry Healey

Welcome to another episode of the Job Matchmakers podcast.

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Brian Begin

In this episode, we're talking with Jeff Gentry, the senior director of disability services at JBS Boston, which offers a variety of employment, training and education programs in the Boston area. Jeff has worked in the field of employment services for folks with disabilities for a number of years, and he has a particular passion for supporting transition age youth to get work experiences.

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Sherry Healey

Welcome, Jeff. Thanks for joining us today. You had a unique path to getting into this field. Can you tell us how you got into the work?

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Jeff Gentry

Oh, boy. Okay. Well, we’re starting here. So I think the short story is I, my best friend in fourth grade was named Gabe, and we were fast friends, and he. I knew he had a disability. And, we spent time as study buddies. And since fourth grade, I've always had friends with disabilities in my life, one way or the other.

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Jeff Gentry

So I feel like my path was kind of made by friendship. But not all of my journey is as nice and clean cut as that. I had a year at Oklahoma State University, and, was in that fraternity, and we were in a competition to collect recyclables, and we decided to hop a fence north of Oklahoma City and collect around seven thousand dollars worth of recyclables from a semi-truck.

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Jeff Gentry

And, it turned out that, my friend was right when he asked me to leave early. And I left early with him because the rest of our paternity brothers got picked up by the Edmond, Oklahoma police. Long story short, the organization that was collecting the recyclables was a shelter workshop for people with disabilities. I had no idea that that was the case at the time.

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Jeff Gentry

As is appropriate, there were no, no pictures on, on the building or anything of the sort to kind of give us a sense of what went on inside. So the state of Oklahoma, generously paved the pathway for me in this field by ordering two hundred hours of community service in the summer of nineteen ninety six. So I ended up serving out that time, with a shelter workshop that still there in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Sir Toma and just fell in love, with the work.

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Jeff Gentry

So that was my introduction. And I've had many other attorneys, including living intentionally with, adults with disabilities in Canada through La Rama. So it's been quite the journey, but, I don't love it when people tell me I'm an angel for doing the work that I do. And when they do, I often tell them about the devil that got me into this business.

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Sherry Healey

Well, that's, that that is a very unique pathway. So we're and we're grateful that it worked out as it did.

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Jeff Gentry

All the cans were returned as well. So yeah. So a longer story, but back to the,

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Brian Begin

So, Jeff, the story you're sharing today is about a young person who is still in transition school when you started working with them. Can you tell us about this job seeker?

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Jeff Gentry

I absolutely can. So this story, is, I a young man, I would say he's he's over thirty now. But when I started serving him, he was an eighteen year old. I worked with a community, provider organization that provided transition services for a high school in that underserved area south of Boston, Randolph, Massachusetts.

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Jeff Gentry

And the students between eighteen and twenty two were with us five days a week. Accessing the community, pursuing employment, fortunately, outside of their high school walls, which I don't get me started on what I think about post graduate programs in high school settings. That's a whole nother podcast, not a fact. So, so O'Neill was with us the fall of his eighteen years.

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Jeff Gentry

So he had just completed high school, and we had the ability, to, to do, a group employment, opportunity at actually, it was the Talbots company, which Talbots was a national retailer. You know, I don't model their clothing, but I think my, my wife likes them, and, he was working on a a project there over the holidays with some gift wrappings, getting paid, competitive rate.

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Jeff Gentry

Had a coach with him, and, there were six people on the team. And when the season was over, they offered O'Neill and one other young man the opportunity to stay. Talbots and work in the distribution center. So O'Neill came from a very blue collar family. I believe his dad was a lineman for Verizon. And I can remember sitting in the team meeting at this high school with O'Neill, his dad, and a special education teacher, and this that administrator and, O'Neill saying if I take this job at Talbots, and his father said, oh, no, son, not if you are taking this job at Talbots and.

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Sherry Healey

Love it.

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Jeff Gentry

So Neal took the job at Talbots at eighteen, and, was working five days a week and, you know, worked successfully all the way up till he was twenty two and was released off our caseload. So we were checking in with him, but he didn't need, significant support. And, you know, really, my ongoing support with O'Neill was I'm an early bird sitting at my desk, at seven a.m. the morning there in Randolph and just hearing, a rap on the plate glass window as O'Neill walked from his neighborhood to the commuter rail to, go to Middleborough, Massachusetts to work.

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Jeff Gentry

And I think that's really what our goal is to help young people get aid work before high school exit so that we can help them grow and advance their careers. JVs where I work now, is a very well resourced and, robust program with lots of resources for transition age youth and adults with disabilities. But I would say this if we had to choose just one function, we would choose eight employment before high school exit, because we know that's the highest leverage work that we do.

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Jeff Gentry

And so I love to look back on working with young people like O'Neill and see them. He's still on LinkedIn and see that annual anniversary come up at Talbot's and know that he's doing well, and that we did right by him.

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Sherry Healey

Wow, that's a great story. I want to dig a little bit more into the you're talking about paid employment during transition. Many transition programs still are focused on unpaid work experiences during transition. In your view. When do you think it's the right time to be doing those, working with those unpaid work experiences versus the paid work experience?

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Jeff Gentry

Well, I'm probably going to sound like a radical, but I, I think the time to do unpaid work experiences at twelve and thirteen because in Massachusetts, by state law, the transition planning is to start as early as age fourteen. So I think that we should be working very, proactively with fourteen, fifteen and sixteen year olds to help them get their first paid employment.

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Jeff Gentry

It's often very part time. It's often in retail or, food service settings so that they can really be on track to move into more hours or maybe even career track employment or pursue educational credentials that will lead to even more career advancement as they get closer to the end of high school. So that's that's really what I think.

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Jeff Gentry

I often say, Sherry, that, the problem is not, you know, people sometimes will be like, well, disability professionals just help people with disabilities get, you know, grocery bagging jobs. You know, two things. One is grocery stores deserve a lot more respect and credit. Serving leaders and inclusive employment. Because I have a lot of respect for the depth of their commitment to the problem is not bagging groceries.

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Jeff Gentry

The problem is that young adults with disabilities are not bagging groceries at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. They're starting those jobs at twenty three, twenty four, twenty five. That's the problem. They should be there at fourteen, just like my son was. And now at seventeen, he's an assistant manager, at his grocery store. So we need to start sooner. We need help families see that, need employment is part of young adults education.

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Jeff Gentry

It's not an extracurricular. It's not an adult.

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Sherry Healey

You have this, this concept of, of work being an expectation needs to start much, much earlier. And I've heard people say things like, truly transition, start at age six because, you know, you're starting with chores at home. And, you know, just having those conversations at a very, very young age that disability or no disability work is in your future.

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Sherry Healey

And and that should just be part of that conversation. You know, all along it, it it shouldn't be. Oh, well, now we're done with school. Let's start thinking about work. We need to, you know, be thinking about career paths much earlier. So, it does kind of sound radical because it's not what's happening, but I it also seems like the right sort of expectation.

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Brian Begin

Yeah. And I appreciate what, O'Neill's the the role that O'Neill's family played in setting those expectations as well. I, worked nine and a half years for a service provider, employment and day support service provider here in the Twin Cities metro before I came to ICI and we worked a lot with transition age youth. And one of the challenges that, my staff and I would run into is these youngsters, I call them youngsters because they're younger than me, but they are in transition.

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Jeff Gentry

They love their they love that. That's a fair.

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Brian Begin

Yes. I of course, of course. As folks are preparing for adulthood, they're excited to work. And we would often run into barriers from the parents or guardians or just like, oh my gosh, my, you know, adult son or daughter can't, can't possibly be working with minimal job coaching supports like, that's, that's just like not not in the cards.

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Brian Begin

And it seemed to me, just like what you, you see, Jeff, is that transition school is almost doing a disservice because we're not preparing people younger. I didn't start out, where I am today in my career. I started off in entry level positions, and those positions were crucial for me to make those mistakes. So that I could, like, figure out how I'm, as a person, expected to, like, show up in the world.

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Brian Begin

You know, how I'm supposed to be able to get along with coworkers and customers and supervisors and whatnot. And if I didn't start that journey until twenty two, well, sure, I'd be behind the curve as well, you know? And another thing too, that we would encounter is folks, leaving in the tail end to Transition School, leaving Transition School and wanting an above entry level position, but with no work experience.

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Brian Begin

And it's like that just as just like, not how it works, you know, you gotta you gotta pay your dues. At least I, I'm not smart enough to figure out a way to not do that. So.

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Jeff Gentry

Yeah. No, I think that that's really, that's really well said. Right. You think about the great privilege that we have and the resources that we have. I mean, for now, anyway, to help young adults with disabilities stay in high school till they're twenty one or twenty two. And it's like, I think sometimes maybe that gives us kind of a, false comfort that we can put off vocation.

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Jeff Gentry

But really, what we're putting off his career advancement, if people are starting late, they're not going to have as robust a career, most likely. So, yes, celebrate and, fight like crazy to keep extending supports to high school, but also be responsible and get your kid a job when they're fourteen or fifteen. And I don't think that's a disability comment, by the way.

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Jeff Gentry

I think that's, youth development comment. I've been in the field for eighteen years. I can tell you both of my children went to work at fourteen, one at, grocery store, one at an assisted living, serving food. In fact, I was six weeks late helping my son, who's now seventeen, getting ready to enter college. I was six weeks late getting him to the grocery store to apply for work, and we were sitting on the beach in Massachusetts five weeks after his birthday.

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Jeff Gentry

And he said, when are we going to go to the grocery store? You said, I have to get a job. And I said, you know, we'll get to it and we'll we'll get to it. It's just, you know, we've had so much going on, you know, as I'm drinking a beer on the beach, you know, I have a credit card.

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Jeff Gentry

Can you get, dad, my son turned to me and he said, dad, is that what you would say to me if I was your client? Oh, okay. No. Wow. Oh, that was I was like, yeah, yeah, well played. I was like, yeah, yeah. I was like, get out, get out. Your dress shirt as we go into tomorrow.

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Jeff Gentry

Yeah. And we did. But I just, through story and you definitely got held to account there.

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Brian Begin

And so, Jeff, did you, in terms of working with O'Neill, did you do much of a discovery process with this person or, did they have a pretty good sense of their strengths and sort of, what sector they'd be interested in working in?

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Jeff Gentry

Without O'Neill, we didn't do a lot of discovery because really early on, we locked down that opportunity for him to do that paid opportunity. Talbot's so, I mean, I think the. Yeah, he kind of walked into that opportunity and really found that he enjoyed the work. So in a sense, like, you know, like group employment at minimum wage or higher, like integrated in that employer setting, I think can really be, a path of discovery.

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Jeff Gentry

And he just decided that he loved that, and, and he stayed and was invited to stay.

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Brian Begin

I'm interested. In the transportation piece. So here in Minnesota, most of our population is in the seven county metro area. When you get go into greater Minnesota, the transportation really becomes a barrier. Public transportation gets gets pretty thin. Not only that, it's common to run into folks who have fear about using public transportation.

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Brian Begin

You know how how can we guarantee safety and whatnot? You talked about O'Neill using public transportation in the form of a commuter rail. What did you run into any barriers with either or O'Neill or his family? Maybe being a little apprehensive about it? And, what kind of training, if anything, or support did you provide, to to get O'Neill comfortable with, with navigating the public transportation on their own.

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Jeff Gentry

So that's that's a great question. In that instance, like, he was, his work group, his group employment with Talbots, they actually took the commuter rail as a group for his, I think, eight weeks where they were doing that project. And so we had employment specialists was the terminology that we have with that company that went with him.

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Jeff Gentry

And another a small group of individuals from Randolph to Middleboro, Massachusetts. So they had a lot of reps taking the commuter rail. And, we actually had a coach who lived in Middleborough and would use the van to ferry them the one point two miles, from the station to work, which would have been, you know, a problem in and of itself if he would have come into that job, most likely without relationships, once he was working independently.

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Jeff Gentry

But fortunately, he was such a good worker, and, he built such a good rapport. Yeah. One of his colleagues agreed to, pick him up and take him from the the, commuter rail stop to work. So for years, that's that's what he and another young man, they hired two of them. The other young man, Anthony, stayed there for five years.

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Jeff Gentry

I mean, he he didn't do five minutes of competitive employment either with them, but they had they had a colleague who was happy to pick them up and take them that one point two miles. So, you know, transportation. You know, I think it's best if people just acknowledge that it is going to be a challenge, but that, you know, it's soluble, like, you know, in most cases you can find a solution or solve, for it.

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Jeff Gentry

And granted, we live in a very metro area, but Middleborough is not Metro. Randolph is, is fairly suburban, and it's kind of like the inner city suburb, here in Boston as people are priced out of Boston. Let's talk to Randolph. But, but yeah, he had a lot of training, and he was ready for for that.

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Sherry Healey

I love that, natural support that happened there with a colleague at Talbots that was willing to take that extra step, you know, to to provide that support. That's something that I think, is, is a unique solution. That and sometimes those solutions just they present themselves, without you even necessarily looking for them. Or sometimes when you ask, you're pleasantly surprised that the people are willing to, you know, to take that extra step to support this individual's employment.

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Sherry Healey

So can you talk about some, you know, just a little bit about natural supports and, and what you've seen in that area?

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Jeff Gentry

Well, I it's a good question. I think the key word you use there is ass. Right. And I'm kind of a lapsed evangelical minister. That's a whole nother podcast. But, the one scripture I do quoted people quite often is from the New Testament book, a change you do not have because you do not ask. It's very true with natural sports, very true of fundraising.

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Jeff Gentry

By the way, and with job development, you have to ask and if you're not making enough asks, then you're silly to expect to find solutions. So I think we have to ask, I think we also I often tell my coaches, you need to walk into an employer knowing that you have allies and advocates everywhere, like, especially in my career, kind of the awareness or the the wave of autism awareness has happened, like in my career timeline.

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Jeff Gentry

So I started in this field January 6th, two thousand seven. So that's really happened. Along with that, you know, everybody has become much more aware that they have, friends, family members, who are neurodiverse, even like normal looking white guys with raging ADHD like me or, you know, neurodiverse right now. So there are people who inclusion is not just like, it's not a burden, it's it's a commitment that they've already made.

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Jeff Gentry

And you just need to you need to find them. But they're there. Right. So I just one of my things that, you know, I always get really suspicious when I'm, when I'm hanging out with job developers. So, Brian, we talked earlier about app association and people supporting employment. First, if I'm hanging out with job developers and they start talking to me about how employers are the problem in inclusive employment, I that is not been my experience at all.

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Jeff Gentry

And I think maybe, maybe that is a lazy excuse. Sorry, but maybe also it's that we are not doing a good job of surfacing people who are already committed to inclusion and building relationships with them. On the employer side.

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Sherry Healey

So along those lines, you approach this employer or use this relationship with this particular employer started as an enclave or a group employment situation. Tell us a little bit about how you had that conversation with Talbots to transition from a group employment situation to a competitive, integrated employment situation.

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Jeff Gentry

Great question. I think let me begin at the beginning. There's always an ask. So I was, a part of it's, a project called the Accessible Icon Project. And two thousand nine to two thousand twelve. So it was the reframing of the accessibility logo. And so the more active logo, a dear friend of mine, Sarah Hendren, who is a parent advocate, created that.

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Jeff Gentry

And, we got to know one another and it caught fire like it was a graffiti, like art project. It was not meant to be, you know, a new logo. It wasn't. It wasn't us trying to light as good the disability community, you know, put it that way. But, people loved it. And long story short, it was the distribution center director at Talbots who said, we want this on all of our accessible slots at the front of our warehouse in Middleborough, Massachusetts, where you do it.

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Jeff Gentry

And I said, sure, if your employees come out and paint with my transition aids youth and give them a comprehensive employment tour and talk to them about employment after, we're happy to come.

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Sherry Healey

Wow, what a great idea.

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Jeff Gentry

So it just kind of happened, right. And that was that project in and of itself. We tried to never paint the icon without it being an inclusive kind of encounter. So we did that and, David Melillo at the time is a general manager. So we have this seasonal job and we have a hard time keeping people in it.

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Jeff Gentry

Could we maybe work on this together? It was this a lot of work, right. And the staff, to their credit, my staff was incredible. They were commuting. It was, I think thirty five miles one way, right, to get people there. And so they did it. And fortunately I did have two staff who lived in that town. So we were able to make it work.

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Jeff Gentry

But very early on we were saying, we are, you know, thank you so much for the temporary work, that of wage and the little things that Talbots did, which I, I thought really signaled, you know, the way they value people with disabilities, such as they put our young people through orientation just like they were put through any other seasonal worker, which is we didn't have to tell them that.

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Jeff Gentry

Right. They again, allies everywhere. But from the beginning we told them like we for the young adults who really can work, at a pace that is productive for you and young adults who have an interest in staying here, we would love to see them placed here long term. And they were very open to that. That hiring means it was a warehouse.

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Jeff Gentry

You know, I'm in the midst of the cranberry bogs, of Middleborough, Massachusetts. So it's not like, you know, they didn't have needs. So you can set the foundation for it early. You know, you have the data. If they do to Talbots, they measure everything on, you know, the productivity of the workers. And it was pretty straightforward from there.

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Sherry Healey

Okay. So one final question. We ask all of our guests, what do you want people in your community to know about employment for people with disabilities?

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Jeff Gentry

Employment for people with disabilities is the way we're going to meet our hiring needs in Massachusetts, with an aging workforce and significant hiring demands in all sectors, people with disabilities need to be a part of our staffing solution, and young adults with disabilities should be growing into meaningful careers early on in their high school years, so that we can have really, a disability community which is maximizing, their employment opportunities and living soul meaning meaningful lives.

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Jeff Gentry

As citizens of our local cities and towns, something like that.

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Brian Begin

Thank you, Jeff, for joining us today and sharing some of your experiences doing the work. And thank you, listeners for tuning in to this episode. We hope you join us next time to hear another compelling story of one person finding one job in the community.

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Sherry Healey

Thank you for joining us for the Job Matchmakers podcast, funded by the Minnesota Department of Human Services. This podcast is a partnership between the University of Minnesota's Institute on Community Integration and UMass Boston's Institute for Community Inclusion.

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Brian Begin

For more information on the Minnesota Transformation Initiative, visit our website. Linked in the show notes. We're glad you joined us, and we'll see you next time.