We not Me: Bryan Wilson
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[00:00:00] Bryan, thank you very much for joining me on this new venture that I'm trying. This is a short form video series called We Not Me: Inclusion in Action. And what the purpose of this is to elevate the work that my friends in the field are doing because there's so many people that have dedicated their careers and their lives to improving outcomes to students. One of the great things that I get to do, being able to visit different schools everywhere is to learn about the things that people are doing.
I wanna use this as an opportunity to elevate that work and to share it with the rest of the world. I appreciate you being willing to be my first guest on this Absolutely Vlog. I'm honored. So for our friends that are watching, Bryan and I met several years ago over a shared passion for post-secondary success for individuals with disabilities.
We immediately dove right into talking about post-secondary transition. Every conversation I have with you is at least a couple hours because we get along so well with all kinds of things, special [00:01:00] education. I really admire the work that you have done in employment outcomes.
So that's what I wanna focus on today. One of the things that I admire about your work is all of the collaboration that you are able to put together to make this happen. Because post-secondary transitions pretty complex. Yes. For individuals. So I thought it was perfect for this vlog series.
We, not me, because your collaboration is so great. So when you think about what that is, how does that philosophy kind of shape the way that your district prepares students for disabilities for life after high school? I think the fun part, and I appreciate the intro and absolutely the collaboration.
It's not an option. I think too often in education, teachers are put in a position to be everything for everybody. I. There's reality is that there's so many other people that are part of that student's life and they need to be involved. So it's really team game. I've always looked at it as team game.
I think part of that is just who I am. Working with other people. To get to a common [00:02:00] goal just always feels better to me than my own individual accomplishments I think it has a greater impact and there's a greater understanding of how to move forward. And get things done as a group.
I believe genetically speaking, because I am my father's son it's what he did. He included himself in many philanthropic events and activities and every time he had the opportunity to, glue people together. 'cause that's what he was really good at and he was a PR guy and a marketing guy and a salesman
it didn't take him, but a few seconds to put a group together get a thing done hit a goal and raise money, all of a sudden you have a new program outcome or, event space that didn't exist. A week, two weeks, three months before. I grew up with that. More hands makes light work, right?
I think in the end we take all of these professionals who have all these different experiences and perspectives and we include them. The process for helping individuals who need assistance. It's not that they can't help themselves, we're not saying that [00:03:00] we hold them to a high standard, that they can do things, they just need more help.
And what does that help look like? It creates a level of confidence, I think, when you look at team. We, not me you know nothing about us without us. Choice and voice and independence. These are all things that I talk about regularly. But when you start seeing levels of confidence with the adults, seeing the positive outcomes for not just the youth, but then young adults.
Even in their twenties and thirties that's a momentum. And that carries on that, Hey, we can do this. We actually can get something done. We have low hanging fruit. And that's what I like to see because the more I see people walking away and talking about things that I'm passionate about than I feel like I did a pretty good job of connecting.
I would just say imprinting, some of those things that are really, it's just I don't wanna get too fruity or philosophical, but in the end it's all about love. Like you do things out of love for other people because that's what we do.
And you eliminate the fear that so often dictates this work. [00:04:00] People are scared of what might happen to their kid or what might happen to their student, but they're also scared that they're gonna fail, like fear is. A driving force and transition, and I bring that up regularly. What's, what are you worried about?
Let the kid do it. Yeah. Let the kid fail. Let the team fail. How are you gonna know how to get better if you don't, as a team, figure out how to get through it? That's a whole nother conversation. Yeah. Letting youth with disabilities have the opportunity to fail forward is really important.
That's a matter of dignity of respect, I think. Absolutely. I love that you were able to apply your dad's work to what you do in education, and I would love to take a minute to learn more about what that actually looks like. Can you walk us through a time when some of your collaboration between school, family and the community partnerships that you've been able to develop have unlocked an unexpected employment pathway ~first?~
~Yeah. Yeah. ~Interestingly enough there's a lot of success stories that come to mind. That's why I [00:05:00] love the fact that I have so many to, pick from, 'cause I've been able to work with some really high functioning teams include with parents. But I think, yeah, if you look at our current setup in Maize I have four extremely, efficacious individuals who run all of our transition programming. They run all of our service supports for 18 to 21. And also through our community-based instruction support. So we have there's a young man right now that we worked with for years. He's been on our program for years. Little undersized, little unassuming, right? He he's got some visual impairments, but he can see and do the work. My team does a lot of cold calls. They will. Again, no fear. They'll call anybody at any time and they'll say, Hey, can we come talk to you about this?
And then they go have a conversation with the managers. We do immediate job carving when we're out there to say, Hey, I noticed this. I understand your process. And that's another thing is we understand the business side of [00:06:00] things. So like when we talk about lean or when we talk about Six Sigma, we know what they're talking about.
We know what workflow is supposed to look like. We know what the bottom lines are supposed to look like in terms of how much production gets done by anybody, and we hold all of our interns accountable to that. This is a level of expectation for the work. You don't get to do less than, this is what it's expected.
So that's what we train him on to get him to that point. So we raise the bar really high. We have a young man right now that the particular business model, it's really like Amazon for sporting goods. So it's huge warehouse of things. People order things. You go find your inventory, you get the orders ready, and we call 'em pickers.
That's the industry standard. They're called pickers. There's a lot of them now. Anyway. The quicker you get your job done, the more accurate you get your job done. The more buckets, pickers, whatever you get done, you actually get paid more. So if you're at a rate of X, you're making $1 more an hour, $2 more an hour, $3 more an hour than base.
Our intern is the highest paid employee in the [00:07:00] plant right now because of his speed and accuracy. And it's awesome because just a few years ago, there wasn't a lot of expectation of growth or employment or just regular adult outcomes. And I'm looking at this going, this kid is really killing it.
These are the things I wanna share with people because it eliminates all of their. Fear why would we do this, and this. Kid's not gonna be able to do anything. They've already established an outcome for a kid that's not real. It's all made believe.
It's in their head until you try it and prove it. There has to be truth to your evidence. Another student we worked with was very acute care. I had a meeting with the family and all stakeholders because there's foster care involved other state agencies involved and T CNS involved.
We met every week for probably 90 minutes. In transition for this young man because his behavior and acute care needs were extremely high. It went all the way up to the state level and we got approval and permissions for support within a community hospital setting that would not have otherwise happened.
So [00:08:00] while that's not employment. It's a bigger part of that kid's life being able to have dignified support because he can't help himself. And there's a lot of adults around him that help him stay safe. And I think that was a big win. That was one of the more heartfelt, like that was a lot of people doing a lot of work for a long time to make sure that kid got what.
He needed specifically where he needed to go. Mental health supports in the state of Kansas are lacking. They've been cut for years and I'm glad to see it coming back. I think we have a new hospital being billed out in Gerard. At some point least it got approved.
But those are little pieces. So when I look at employment. That is a part for some kids, but employment's not for everybody. Not everybody's gonna have a job. I also look for independence and those levels. You talk about success stories and, those collaborations.
We've intentionally collaborate with adult agencies. During the student's time with us prior to graduation. We'll contract with adult agencies to get our toe in the water most of that is to support the [00:09:00] parents. Parents 99% of the time do not believe that an adult agency is gonna support their kid in the same way the school has done for the last 15 years or 18 years, and I have to prove them wrong. An opportunity to do that is to spend time in the adult agency prior to being done with school. It makes connections with the agency, the TCMs are involved, like all these things start happening in a relatively quick fashion.
And what we've seen now is we have more families that it's not super seamless, but they sure are getting services a lot quicker once graduation happens, right now, we have half a dozen kids that have already gotten their adult dollars and they're doing the seamless transition like it's supposed to.
They're going right into agency supports or supported employment and it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been doing our work. Yeah. I love that. When you're talking to these community partners and then going back to the IEP team, what does that look like as far as integrating it into the IEP goals?
Because I think that a lot of times [00:10:00] we get a, in theory, like I would love to have all these partnerships, but then day-to-day practice, what does that look like in the IEP for your students because I think you're focusing on quality of life for everybody. Yes. Is what. Most parents want for their kids.
Yeah. Whatever that looks like individualized for them. But how does that apply to the IEP goals? I think the fun part with it is once the students are at this stage we're just focusing on the transition plan. I know the transition plan's part of the IEP and it's one big package, but, they've already completed a lot of their academic goals. They're really completers who are doing the transition work. So being able to focus on the transition plan and really target good measurable post-secondary goals and specifically articulate what that support looks like and what agencies might provide and or pay for, right?
Because that's the ongoing requirement to put in there. It's actually freeing, for our staff who get to participate in these [00:11:00] high-end transition focused meetings. The families engage differently. There's different expectations. Because we start talking about the kid.
I think that's the thing that drives me nuts, is we start talking about the kid. And we start talking about the student and their needs and what they want. These conversations should have happened years ago to help develop the understanding and develop the even raising the bar for the parents.
'cause we raised the bar for our staff. We're raising the bar for parents to understand what is possible. Because if we start, and I hate saying this, there was a. I'll just, can I share a story real quick? Of course. I've been involved in project search for quite a while. It's been over a decade.
Can you explain a little bit more about project search? Yeah. Project Search was founded in Cincinnati at Cincinnati Children's Mercy Hospital. Erin Riehle was one of the nurses there. I think she was er, surgery nurse, and she had an idea to bring in, somebody she knew.
I could be getting the story wrong, but anyway, started a program for interns specifically interns that had intellectual and developmental disabilities. That was the initial cap, [00:12:00] although there is some flexibility in that. To come in and actually intern in the hospital prior to being down in public ed.
It became a franchise. It is global. It's in 148 different countries. I think 42 states in the United States could be a little less for most everybody, project Search is a one year capstone program for students with significant needs that would otherwise be interns in a business.
So you take 'em out of the school setting completely. Even though they're still in school. And they are interning in host business. Our host business is via Christie. A large hospital organization in the state of Kansas. Ascension via Christie,
but we actually have access here in Wichita to, dozens of different sites. We have three main hospitals, St. Teresa. St. Joe and St. Francis, and so the number of jobs is over. The top number of rotations, all of those things. Critical part I back up. Project search, you find businesses that [00:13:00] have lots of employees, but also lots of turnover.
And so there are ways I get into the county. I can look at the county metrics to see what the biggest employers are they don't necessarily show turnover rate, but I can guarantee that if you have 5,000 employees, your turnover rate's probably pretty high. We have 400 employees, it's probably not as high.
We have gotten into some businesses where there is no turnover. It's a great training site, but there's no access then no turnover. And you don't really want 'em all hired at your business site. 'cause then you run outta rotation. If everybody gets hired, then there's no space.
So any project search is our capstone program. And right now we're at 80. And that's another thing with project search. We shoot for a hundred percent, but we also know that we're gonna land somewhere between 80%, 80%, a hundred percent employment rate for every intern. Now, if you go look at national average national data for individuals with disabilities being employed, it's like 26% maybe.
I don't even know if it's that high right now. But when you look at 26% on average, and you look at 80 to a hundred percent it has the impact that we expect it to have. And that has raised the bar for [00:14:00] everybody. Once we brought in Project Search, we also brought in Project Life, which is a two year program building up high quality interns and creating independence and actually building them up.
Some students don't even make it to project search 'cause they get what they need in project life. We raised the bar like all the other schools even down to middle schools are starting to do and assess and treat their students differently because they know if they're going to benefit from. These programs these service offerings, sorry.
That they have to be able to do X and it's had a huge impact. Project search is an impressive program. I'm on the Employment First Oversight Commission for Kansas. I was appointed by Governor Kelly a couple years ago to that position.
Our job is to look at employment outcomes for. Individuals with disabilities across the state. Kansas was one of the first to implement that law, which means that individuals with disabilities are offered employment that is competitive wages. Similar to their non-disabled peers and integrated within the community.
So they're not [00:15:00] working primarily with people with disabilities. And even though Kansas was one of the first to adopt that law, they're among the last to fully implement it. And I think some of our state level stakeholders are really serious about improving that and really moving forward, ~which I.~
~It's great. It's only been 14 years. ~One of our recommendations was to expand the availability of project search throughout Kansas because of the incredible success rate that the students experience, employment gives people with disabilities financial freedom and that includes that quality of life significantly.
I remind folks that we spend. Our adult lives trading our time for money for things. That is really the root of all of it in our community. We trade time for money for things. If you can't trade your time for money, how do you get through the system? How do you do what you need to do?
You have to rely on everybody else to take care of you, and that's not the goal. The levels of independence are there. People can be trained and learn and do a job and be part of something bigger than themselves regardless of disability. I've seen it when I had the [00:16:00] opportunity to visit Cincinnati and see where project search started.
I saw individuals that had significant disability, like non-ambulatory, had augmentative communication devices, everything that you could think of that someone needed assistance just to engage and communicate. They also were working, they were in the hospital working autonomously because they were trained, they went through and processed and trained.
It's all doable. And a whole lot of fearless people just took it all, said, we're gonna make this happen. What I'm hearing as you're talking is that there is so much education that takes place outside of the school building, that those partnerships are so important. Do you have any lessons that you've learned over time about the best ways to form these relationships with businesses and to show them the capabilities and the high expectations that you have for people with disabilities?
Yeah, much like private business. You have to have somebody willing to make connections. You have to have a team actively seeking new and better opportunities for either their employees or in our case, our [00:17:00] students and our interns.
I say interns interchangeably because once they start moving into our 18 to 21 service model, they're all interns you have to be targeted in who you're calling and why. Wichita is a manufacturing hub. Most people think of us as the air capital, but guess what?
There's only a handful of actual plane builders. They all require 400, 500 different vendors to provide them parts to build their planes, and that's who we're after. That manufacturing is. High end so we do have rotations with Textron Aviation. We do have rotations with Martin Interconnect, which is an awesome family, awesome business to work with.
They make some very complicated wiring harnesses, for secondary vehicles. Like ambulances, fire trucks. Big work. Trucks, boats, different things like that. And it is big business. You wouldn't know these exist.
That's the fun part with this work is you start to dig in and talk to people and find out that there is, All of these different jobs out there that you would've never known, as [00:18:00] an educator, I'm a lifelong educator. I have no idea what's going. I talk to my buddies who have their own businesses and they explain what they do.
I'm like, wow, that's a thing. You have to go out and look and, I talk about partnerships with business, the Golden Goose is just experience and reference. You start to know people and then you start using those people to connect and network. I had an opportunity to work with this cool guy named Jon who works up in Kansas City area, and he needed help with a project search.
He didn't know, like he wanted to work. So the first thing I did was called people that I'd already worked with who were in the same line of business as people he wanted to get with. So that ability to affiliate yourself and network and actually connect with people, that was what opened the door. We made a few calls, had a few meetings, and all of a sudden we're on the road.
Making things happen. Matter of fact, just yesterday. I had one of my. Transition team call and they're like, Hey, we're having struggles we're trying to set up a rotation for summer school. 'cause we do a summer intensive with some of our older kids. I said let me make a call.
I made a call, I made an email, and [00:19:00] within two hours, rotation was already set up. It's networking. You just can't be scared. You can't have fear you just call people.
You're gonna be told no. And then you're gonna get told yes. Then you pick up a text on aviation or an epic sports these are all folks we work with locally. Ascension via Christi's, a huge business partner. Most people don't know this, but Ascension via Christi actually contracts with lots of other companies.
Okay? So when you think about all their properties. There's property management, so you have to have mowers, painters, electricians. They don't hire all those people. They contract. Now all of a sudden, now we're in the contract business. So we work with our contract providers if we want to get in.
We have somebody who's really good at, lawn maintenance and we want to get a rotation in. And trust me, lawn maintenance is big business. There's guys that make six figures a year just doing lawn maintenance. That's something we try to support and help. To your point, I think you went back in terms of how to build the relationships and it's tricky and 'cause we're school people like that's the funny part is that's what I hear people saying.
But we have to partner, we have to reach out, we have to spend time outside of our walls. Which I love the fact that my supervisors [00:20:00] understand that about me and understand that's part of the work. This is why like talking with you and give you, because I do network and have the opportunity to train and support people outside of our.
District, so to speak. And then I invite the people back. I invite my bosses to talk to their bosses so they can make those connections. And then we find it's a small world and people know each other already, and I'm like, okay, here we go. Here's to a fruitful partnership. And everybody that we've connected with they're always gonna be partners.
Once they're involved with any of our service models, whether it's through our community based instructor, Project Life Project Search, or Transnet they don't ever want the interns to go away. It's the best thing that's ever happened to them.
They love it, their staff loves it. In some cases, like the young man I told you, who is the highest paid in that business, he raised the bar for all the other employees. And now those staff. Are playing off of that. So they don't want this partnership to end. It's too good and it it meets their mission.
I press mission and vision with these businesses. If you have a mission vision and you post it and use it say, Hey, [00:21:00] this is the whole reason why you shouldn't partner with this. They can't say no they can, but then they're not following their own mission and vision. One of the things that I'll never forget, I took away from every business you walk into, you should be able to see somebody like yourself.
Now, granted, if you look at me, I'm a white male. I see lots of white males working. But if I am a young African American female with Down Syndrome, am I gonna see somebody like myself in any business I walk into? And the answer is probably not. That's frustrating.
You should be able to see someone like yourself. And I think that's where we have a lot of work to do. So it sounds like you have spent a lot of time building trust with a number of people and that trust element is foundational for your work. I love this question.
Looking five years ahead, what single systemic change policy, mindset, or resource would have the biggest impact on post-secondary outcomes for students with disabilities? And this can be like, if we're talking about success for students with disabilities, let's talk about it in terms of a high quality of life.
Looking at. All students with disabilities. Yeah. You did [00:22:00] say single systemic change. I don't believe there's a magic bullet. I don't think there's one thing that could change. I think because it is a team game and because certain entities and corporations and groups have to work together.
If you look at, policy and resources. Are there things at the state or federal level that they could do differently that would have an impact on anybody with a disability? Look for work? Yes. I can't say that there's one thing locally, at the state level, when you look at rehabilitation services and you look about rehab and you look at all the things, they've tried to be innovative the last decade, and I think some programs have gone well, but I also know that they have different policies in other states.
Why? Because I've been in other states and I've asked questions, and I find out that, some of the rehabilitation service policies in other states allow them to engage and work with and spend money on students prior to their graduation. Not in Kansas. At least not much. Yeah. We have pre-employment transition services, which is great if you can get it.
But [00:23:00] it's haves and have nots in the state of Kansas. When you look at Rural and Urban Services and supports, it's a real thing. But at the same time the transition council that I chair, we talked about that a lot because in the end. Most people, if they live in a rural area, have to come to the city for stuff,
so we have connected everybody within a 10 county region, the goal is to make sure they understand the services, if you don't have any area, please come here. Take the short 30 minute drive, come here, make it work. Don't be scared, it's a good thing. Let's try it.
But then again, there's reasons why people wanna stay in rural areas because. This is what it is and this is what I need. I think there's things that the schools could do differently. Not that they're doing anything wrong, but if we look at how to focus on, students that have significant needs.
That are gonna require a team that are gonna require more support around independence and employment maybe giving them a little shift in what that expectation looks like. Raise the bar in a way that gives them [00:24:00] opportunity to be outside of the school and access other things outside of the school and actually to your point, fail forward outside of the school setting.
By the time they get into high school, there's a lot of 'em. They're frustrated with school because school for them is Like you're asking me to do stuff and I don't feel like I can do it. Even for students that IEP is well written. Accommodations are there. It's still all hard.
Nobody ever promises it won't be hard. And I think that's what most students and adults get caught up in, that it's gonna be hard. So I think there's some things that, and even just small shifts, but I think the. Focus on self-determination and supported decision making within a school setting.
Those are things that need to be discussed. We use life course tools. If you can start doing some of that early on in elementary school, getting some of those pieces done and established and then.
I think there are some, I don't wanna get too deep into what schools could do differently. 'cause I think schools are owning a lot of this right now. The fact that we, I feel like schools end up being a one-stop shop for everything. It's just how to message that and how to educate the parents.
They think in the end there's still too much of a gap, in my [00:25:00] opinion, between the parent unit and the school unit. Even though they might talk regularly and they might engage regularly and participate in school, we're still not talking about the core stuff. But that's hard to talk about.
And it might make me cry and it hurts and it's hard. Yeah. But that's what you gotta do. Yeah. I don't know to answer your question, but I don't know that there's like within five years, I just wish that the whole special ed general ed thing was just Ed. Everybody was just provided the school offering and there wasn't special ed ~and there wasn't.~
~And ~I think some of that exists just for financial support and budgets and how things are created. So that's a bigger hope for me. But anybody looks like me, I should be able to see in my community working, playing meeting their dreams and all of that stuff without any fear.
I still don't understand that part of it. It's all just fear based. So what I'm hearing you say is that it's really important to build strong, cohesive systems of support while also focusing on dignity and autonomy for people with disabilities and really looking at a student-centered approach.
Yeah, that was a great paraphrase so last question. If another district [00:26:00] wanted to emulate the work that you've been doing with building all of these partnerships in order to improve employment outcomes and quality of life outcomes, what would you say would be the first step for them to move forward in building some of these collaborations?
First step. So that's, yeah. See you got me going all the way back. What would that look like? So it really is vision. Develop a vision, share it, resource for it, budget and then hire If you hire well, you're gonna be able to get where you need to go. Take every opportunity you can to engage your team and community. I think one of the things that I don't take for granted, but I'm really grateful for that I've had lots of experience in this line of work,
I think a lot about just sustaining and improving and how to get better. So I try to go back and think of a time when there was startup and there's a lot of little details. There's a lot of little pe people that have to work together to consistently meet. I think that's something that's missing.
I know I'm working on that with our. Transition council. I chair the transition council for South Central Kansas. We started that up three years ago. Can you talk [00:27:00] a little about the transition councils? What they do, what the purposes? Yeah. Yeah. So the transition councils not everybody has a transition council, which is one of our goals is to help local regional teams set up transition councils.
Transition councils are little. Bastions of hope where you have professionals from all levels, you have educators, you have supervisors, you have business owners you have parents, you have students or self advocates. All involved in coming together maybe once a month, maybe once a quarter, and basically talking about unmet needs in the area for individuals with disabilities or it's wraparound employment or services.
And it really gives a voice to all parties and a driving opportunity to connect with. Whoever it needs to be. If it's local politicians if it's a matter of getting ahold of vocational rehab or if it's a matter of getting ahold of a state agency you can do that. Also, again districts can [00:28:00] have, this is one thing I'm blessed with here in Maize is we have a very strong special ed advisory council.
So we have 20 plus individuals that come together once a quarter. For Mays and Renwick schools parents teachers, business providers administrators from all districts. And we talk about basically the unmet needs. We talk about special ed funding. We educate them and they then can go educate others and we put ourselves in positions to be at different community events.
For both the transition councils and the special ed advisory council. If you don't have those, it's worth looking into and trying to figure out how to start it up. I had the opportunity to work with and the team at KU to get our transition council up and running. I was part of a transition council back in the nineties and early two thousands.
New Frontiers Transition Council. Shout out to Tom Uni if he ever hears this. I learned everything I need to know from Tom. I took over for him when he retired, but Tom was essential in a lot of the work that I learned to do. He was already involved in this. He ended [00:29:00] up in ministry for individuals with disabilities through the Catholic diocese.
He ran that for a while. I think he ended up moving up to Kansas City, tom, single-handedly made the New Frontiers Transition Council happen. That's what it takes we keep having people come back every month and it's a passion. Like I said, hire, create a vision, share it, and then figure out how to resource for it.
'cause I have supervisors right now who see what we can do and they're gonna fund it. If they can't fund it, I go find money. Like I'm not afraid to ask. We talk about project search, project life, they're not free.
There's licensing that comes with that. But I had 75% of the licensing covered and paid for. The district didn't have to do it. We had grants and found foundation money and you just have to ask. That was part of me being on nonprofit boards for agencies around disability.
And if you're ever on a board, you can't be scared to go up and ask somebody for $10,000 or a hundred thousand dollars. And if they say no how about $5? Okay let's do that. So it's that same mentality, but they can always call me too. You have to [00:30:00] network. I know at least statewide.
I probably help start up, half a dozen, maybe 10 different programs for other, I don't ask for money. They ask for help. I go help 'em, and we get it going and then kids benefit and families benefit and our state benefits and everybody's better for it. So yeah. That's a passion that you have
to help. I love that. Is there anything else that you'd like to share before we are. Finished. I appreciate everything that you have shared about everything that you're doing with post-secondary outcomes. And I know there's a lot of other things that you're doing as well that are inclusive practices that maybe we can talk about.
I promise this would only be 15, 20 minutes, but you've talked about improving employee retention, which I think is wonderful maybe we'll circle back and reconnect. Is there anything else that you would like to share? I think in the end we have to move away from all of these decisions that are fear-based, people are scared about something.
They're worried about something. Then most of the time it's not real. It's all made up in their head about what could go wrong we worry about things and you're okay to worry once it's real. If something happened because [00:31:00] you tried it and you want to try to avoid that again, then that's real.
But for never to try to never put it out there, never have an opportunity to fail. You hear all of the experts failing is the best tool of learning how to get stuff done. Being open
and having great temperance, I think, being able to support people wherever they at and make sure that there's choice and voice and all of that. And then
that, that supported decision making is huge because I think that is one thing that we don't talk about much. We used to just, it's almost like Kleenex. I don't know how to explain it, but it's when you say IV Kleenex, you're not asking for facial tissue, you're asking for a name brand.
I know years ago working with one of our state groups supported with lots of fun people. Somebody referenced guardianship. I just I don't know what got into me that day, but I said, can we quit? Can we quit using that term, please? That is a name brand. And every time you say guardianship, you're actually starting on the wrong end of that process because guardianship takes away and strips away all ability for an individual to make their own choices about [00:32:00] anything.
And I think it's about that time we really started referencing support and decision making. Give people back their identity, give people back their ability to make choices for themselves regardless of who they are. That's a big part of it. That's where the love comes, right?
That's where I'm at with that. Just give it back. I think most of it's we're scared that something bad's gonna happen, so we don't let it happen. We just take away all control, I think that's the wrong approach and the wrong message. What if something goes wrong without considering, but what if it works?
Yeah. And you've kinda shifted to that working with people to get them to consider, but what if it works? Yep. How be if it worked? And it sounds like you've had tremendous success with that. I hope so. I think we have. Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to visit with me today.
Absolutely. It was a pleasure. [00:33:00]
