Podcasts about rehabilitation services

The field of sports medicine isn't just for serious athletes: The Nicholas Institute for Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma (NISMAT), Northwell's sports injury clinic, has made sports medicine better, more accessible, and grounded in research. On this episode, the 20-Minute Health Talk team pays a visit to NISMAT to talk to Tak Fukunaga, DPT, sports physical therapist and NISMAT's Manager of Rehabilitation Services, and Michael Zacchilli, MD, orthopedic sports medicine surgeon at Northwell Greenwich Village Hospital to shed light on what they do to treat people at all levels of physical activity. Northwell is New York State's largest healthcare provider and private employer, with 28 hospitals, 890 outpatient facilities and more than 16,600 affiliated physicians. We're making breakthroughs in medicine at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. We're training the next generation of medical professionals at the visionary Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and the Hofstra Northwell School of Nursing and Physician Assistant Studies. Get the latest news and insights from our experts in the Northwell Newsroom: Press releases Insights Podcasts Publications Interested in a career at Northwell Health? Visit our career site and explore our many opportunities. Watch episodes of 20-Minute Health Talk on YouTube.  For information on our more than 100 medical specialties, visit Northwell.edu and follow us @NorthwellHealth on Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn.

VR doesn't just have a vacancy problem. It has a pipeline problem. What if the answer to VR's workforce shortage isn't simply filling the next vacancy? Across the country, VR agencies are competing for talent, losing experienced staff, and trying to prepare a new generation of professionals—many of whom may not even know that VR is a career option. In this episode of the Manager Minute, George Michna of Connecticut and Mario Lucero of New Mexico join Carol Pankow to talk about a different approach: intentionally building the VR workforce pipeline. Drawing from their National Rehabilitation Leadership Institute (NRLI) project, George and Mario explore how career pathways, mentorship, apprenticeships, stronger onboarding, and leadership development can help agencies move from reacting to vacancies to developing talent for the long term. They also tackle an equally important question: once we bring talented people into VR, what makes them want to stay? If your agency is thinking about recruitment, retention, succession planning, or developing its next generation of leaders, this conversation is worth a listen.   Listen Here Full Transcript {Music} George: One of the biggest values of NRLI was the opportunity to step outside of your day to day work and to engage with colleagues, people who eventually become good friends of yours that live across the country, who are dealing with many of the same challenges. Mario: We've really invested hard in our leadership team, and we're seeing the results of that now. We got out of a cap. We're really making positive progress towards meeting our performance metrics. We have a way better understanding of our data, and now we're really focusing on leadership and culture within our agency.   Intro voice: Manager minute, brought to you by the Vocational Rehabilitation Technical Assistance Center. Conversations powered by VR. One manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host, Carol Pankow. Carol: Welcome to the Manager Minute. Joining me in the studio today are George Michna, Bureau Chief for Community Living from Connecticut Bureau of Rehabilitation Services, and Mario Lucero, Field Operations Director for New Mexico General. So, George, how's it going in Connecticut? George: It's going good. Actually, the weather's finally holding it up here, so it's kind of nice to finally enjoy. Hopefully, a really nice summer. Carol: Yeah, that is awesome. I know we've all been talking a lot about the weather in Minnesota. It's hot and sultry. It was 95 yesterday so you never think of that here. And Mario was so great to have you here as well. How are things on your end in New Mexico? Mario: Thanks for having me, Carol. We're doing good here in New Mexico. Had a little bit of rain the last two weeks, which is really welcomed because we have been so dry and we have problems with forest fires here in New Mexico. So any rain that we get is welcome. So we're doing well. Carol: Well, I never think of New Mexico and forest fires. I'm sorry Mario, I just think of you as being more deserty. But I know you have trees. I know you have... Mario: We do. Carol: So today we're going to talk about a topic that's coming up across the country and it's the workforce challenges in vocational rehabilitation. And George and Mario, part of a cohort from the National Rehabilitation Leadership Institute, or NRLI, which is a leadership program that brings together emerging leaders from across the VR system to take on some of the field's biggest challenges. And as part of that experience, their group developed a project focused on career pathways as a strategy for recruitment and retention in VR. And we're going to unpack what they found and why it matters right now. So let's dig in. So let's start with each of you. How did you get into VR and what has kept you in this work? And Mario, I'm going to go to you first. Mario: Thanks, Carol. Well, for me, vocational rehabilitation is always aligned with who I am personally and professionally. I've spent my life around ministry, teaching, and helping professions. My father was both a minister and a teacher, and I think that shaped how I view people and purpose. I also live with significant physical disabilities myself, so I understand firsthand the importance of opportunity, independence, dignity, and meaningful work. VR gave me the opportunity to turn that into a lived experience and into a career where I could help others overcome barriers and pursue employment goals they may have once thought were impossible. What's kept me in this work is honestly the mission. We're not just processing cases or authorizing services. We're helping people build lives, support families, and regain confidence in themselves. You get to see real transformation in people's lives, and that's hard to walk away from once you've experienced it. Carol: I love that, Mario, Thanks for sharing that. George, how about you? George: So my pathway into vocational rehabilitation started in education. I was a special education teacher, later taught pre-service teachers. It was also a school administrator and then worked for the Connecticut State Department of Education. A lot of it has just been through those roles is that one thing that became clear that we put a lot of effort into supporting students while they're in school, but there's a disconnect. when it came to what happened after they exited school. So students would graduate, but the transition to employment or post-secondary pathways was not always strong or consistent. And I think that's really what drew me into vocational rehabilitation. It's one of the few systems that is specifically designed to bridge that gap between education and employment. And I think that what's really kept me here is both the impact and the work that we do. You see real outcomes when someone moves into employment and independence. And in my current role, I'm focused on kind of how those systems connect, both on the employment side and within community living, as well as education through a grant that we're running. So that's really kind of what's kept me engaged in the work, and just having those meaningful conversations with individuals about finding success in their lives. Carol: Yeah, I had no idea about you. George: Yeah. Carol: Being an educator, that is very cool. It's always fun to see people's stories and how they get into this sort of a career. Appreciate that. So I know you both participated in NRLI, and I just wondered if you could tell our listeners a little bit about what that experience was like. And how did that shape your thinking as a leader? And George, I'll tag you first on that. George: First and foremost. NRLI gave me the opportunity to step outside of my state and look at vocational rehabilitation from more of a national perspective. We were teamed with about, I think, 30 individuals or so as our cohort, and they represented both VR, general VR Blind and also combined agencies. And so you really get a mix of perspectives from individuals. And I think that's really powerful. And the other thing was, is that what really started finding, for example, was, is that, you know, you start looking at issues with your workforce, challenges that you might have, bringing in counselors and the like, and you start finding out that others are facing similar challenges. So you're able to have these kind of sidebar conversations throughout the time that you spent together. And you really get to learn from individuals about what other states are doing and how to kind of effectively problem solve. Mario: And NRLI was an incredible experience because it forced us to step back and think beyond just our own state systems and day to day operations. You're sitting in a room with leaders from all over the country who are dealing with many of the same challenges, but often approaching them in different ways. For me personally, it challenged me to think more strategically and systemically as a leader, instead of only asking, how do we solve today's problem? It pushed me to ask, how do we build sustainable systems for the future? One of the biggest takeaways for me was realizing that many of our workforce challenges in VR are not isolated problems, they're national trends. That realization helped reinforce the importance of collaboration, innovation and leadership development across the entire VR system. Carol: Well, I think we're definitely better together. NRLI, I love that bringing that sense of community because you can feel very isolated, you know, in your individual states and your agencies, and you learn how to do things a certain way. So you guys bring up a good point. You know, you hear other people with the same challenges, but they've tackled them differently. And so I love that kind of that transplanting of ideas that happens naturally through that cohort model. And you get, you know, you're with your group a whole year and you really get to know people. And I think that transplanting of ideas and that building that network that you can rely on later, because I'm sure you probably each have like email groups and all of that good stuff or chat groups with your folks from NRLI that you can just like, hey, we have this going on. What do you know about this? Or what are you guys doing? I think there's a lot of value in that. So I know as part of NRLI, your group focused on workforce and career pathways. How did you guys come up with that as your project? George: Well, I gotta say this, it wasn't a project that we landed on right away. The way NRLI is structured, we do have multiple weeks that we meet across the year, and we also had opportunities to connect virtually to work through how the paper would shape out. Really, in the beginning, it was a lot of brainstorming where we were sitting, you know, outside by the pool on a break. And I still remember this to this day. And we went around the group just kind of mentioning some of the hot topics that we had and what were we thinking about. And really kind of what we started coming back to was the same issue was kind of a staffing piece. And I think that's kind of where we ended up thinking about the staffing and then kind of what solutions could we bring from our various states to address that? And I guess from a point of view, it was kind of a self-discovery process of the group in realizing what to write about. Carol: Very cool. I love that organic. I know. Other groups too. They said they struggled like they might have come up with a particular topic. And then they were like, hey, we don't want to do that anymore. And they kind of move through the year and got exposed to different things. Other ideas came forward and they pivoted to something else. George: I would say that was exactly the same experience that we had, and almost feeling at some point that we had to figure out something because time was running out. Mario: I still remember that first day that you said when we sat around the pool and we were just brainstorming and we threw out like 50 million ideas. I think how we finally settled on career pathways and recruitment and retention was that we saw that this was a problem that we could realistically solve. We didn't want to bite off too much that we couldn't chew. And so we thought that maybe this was something that we could have an actual impact on. Carol: So Mario, a little more about that. You know, it's a problem you were trying to solve. Why do you think this is so important right now. Like what's going on? Give it kind of the picture of what's happening out there. Mario: Well, you know, Carol, the biggest problem we identified was that vocational rehabilitation is facing a workforce pipeline issue at a time when demand for services continues to grow. Across the country agencies are struggling with vacancies, burnout, retirements and turnover. At the same time, fewer people are entering the field intentionally because many people simply don't know that VR exists as a career pathway that creates a long term sustainability problem for the public VR system. What made this especially important to us is that workforce shortages don't just affect agencies internally, they directly impact the participants that we serve. Vacancies can lead to delayed services, increased caseload sizes, and less capacity for innovation and individualized support. So our group started asking instead of only reacting to vacancies after they happened, how do we intentionally build built pathways that introduce people to VR earlier. Developing future talent and creating opportunities for long term career growth within agencies that shift from reacting to shortages to proactively developing talent really became the foundation of our project and our paper. Carol: Nice. So what are you guys seeing right now across the states in terms of the staffing shortages and turnover? I just wondered if there's been any kind of movement where it's getting a little bit better. I just, what did you find out. George: When we looked at the work, kind of to build out the paper, we were seeing kind of a consistent piece where I think states were kind of dealing with this combination of persistent vacancies and high turnover, and that some states are, you know, obviously making a little bit of better progress in that. I think, you know, going back to looking at with Connecticut, I came to our agency on the heels of the Covid 19 pandemic. If you think about it, about five years ago, I was coming out of that rebounding. From that, we saw individuals with disabilities wanting to get back into employment. So you had this influx of people requesting services, but what you saw on the staffing side from the agency was, is that we had a lot of staff that either retired early or had kind of exited the employment of the agency. And so we were in the process of trying to refill those positions as we could. And we've done a really good job at that. But the implication of that is, is that we now shifted the agency from a mid to late career group of counselors to a workforce that's now more heavily weighted towards early mid-career staff. And that has implications for us because newer counselors often require smaller caseloads and more support to kind of ensure the quality services, as well as trying to ensure how do we prevent burnout among those staff as well? Also, what's happening is, is that we're seeing an added strain on our community rehabilitation providers in the state, and we see them as a critical part of the service delivery system. And so this now speaks to kind of the broader system that how can it then support individuals in achieving career goals? So that's kind of the perspective here in Connecticut. Carol: Here you bring up a really good point, George, you know I hadn't thought about that with the newer counselors coming in. I guess just the way you had stated it and having people earlier in their career, you are shaping then you have in a smaller caseload, which impacts then your overall capacity for serving folks. So when you have a big bulk of people in that early part, even though you have the same number of people, they can't produce the same amount of work. George: Exactly. Carol: Yeah, you always need exponentially more folks to carry that out. And it takes a while. This system is hard, like to learn and understand and really feel like you're getting good and proficient at it. So we've kind of lost those later career counselors that were also serving as mentors and such. And I know in some states people are saying like, hey, we've got a whole new group. You've got 90% of your people have been there five years or less. You don't have that other group that can help to support them. George: You know, it kind of then impacts your ability for supervisors to effectively mentor those staff because the added impact on them as well. So the entire system starts feeling that strain. Carol: Yeah, it's really a ripple effect for sure. So I know you guys have mentioned before that people don't always choose VR as a career. So why does that matter for recruitment? Mario: It matters because many of us in VR didn't grow up saying, I want to work in VR someday. Most people find this field accidentally through counseling programs, disability services, workforce programs, social work, education, or even personal life experiences such as myself. The challenge with that is that people don't know the profession exists. They're never going to intentionally pursue it. Other helping professions like teaching, nursing or social work. They have clear career pathways and pipelines and stronger public awareness. VR doesn't have that. So VR agencies are competing for talent in a field that many potential candidates never even heard of. That's why career pathways and apprenticeship models are so important. They create exposure. They allow students, paraprofessionals, community partners, and individuals with lived disability experience to see VR as a meaningful career option before they're already established somewhere else. I think the field has a huge opportunity here, especially because VR work is incredibly mission driven, that once people understand what we actually do and the impact we have, they'll be drawn to it, and the challenge is getting them exposed to it early enough. Carol: Well it does really fit with our new administration. I mean, maybe not so new with our president now he's, you know, in his year two, but very big emphasis on apprenticeships and career pathways. And so it lines up with the administration's thinking on that as well. George, I know you've had a little touch with this. What would it look like, kind of the career pathway and apprenticeship model in a VR agency. George: in Connecticut, we're starting to put together a formalized kind of mentorship program, if you will, where we're bringing in staff within our community, rehabilitation providers, where we can then provide a structured mentorship for them to kind of upskill their knowledge of working within kind of the VR space. The hope there is, is that they can gain experience in the areas like eligibility, plan development, employer engagement, and being able to kind of have that mentorship and feedback that's built into the process. And so our hope really is, is that kind of, you know, if you think about this as about opening the door wider at the front end, so that way we can become more intentional about how we develop staff once they're within our agency or within a provider. Again, this isn't about just simply filling positions. It's more about creating a pathway where someone can enter the field, develop the necessary skills over time, and see a future in the work. And I just want to say, you know, to your question before, if I can, I'm kind of a perfect example here because coming in from education, right? At no point in my kind of career trajectory was vocational rehabilitation presented as kind of a viable option for what I was doing. But an interesting note here is, is that within our NRLI cohort, and I was thinking about this, you know, in kind of getting ready for this podcast, there was at least three other individuals who started in special education and eventually ended up in VR. So I think there's something powerful there in terms of how we think about where we can draw upon individuals to help do the work that we're doing. Carol: Absolutely. There definitely is a natural alignment there. I know back in the day, even in Minnesota, there was a while where school districts were laying off school counselors because they didn't have the funds. And we found that the school counselors had such a interesting background in the training they had that was super transferable over into VR because they're helping students think about employment goals. You know, think about all of that and then that group of people and you're like, why didn't we think of this before and had some really lovely staff come in from that background. I love that. Yeah, it's smart to think about what we align with. Now, I know in NRLI, the fourth week is always the DC week and that can be super impactful. You get to meet the, you know, agency kind of heads from all different, you guys were at Labor and Department of Ed with the Rehab Services Administration. Did you guys have an opportunity at all to share your work and get any sort of feedback from the feds about what you were working on here with this paper? Mario: Yeah, we did. We had the opportunity to discuss our project and our paper and engage with leaders and stakeholders who are thinking about these same workforce challenges. One of the encouraging things was that the feedback we got really validated that this issue is being felt across the country. People recognize that recruitment and retention challenges are not just temporary, they're systemic issues that require long term strategies. And there was strong interest in the idea of developing intentional career pathways and apprenticeship style models because they create a more sustainable workforce pipeline instead of relying solely on traditional recruitment methods. I also think people appreciate that our approach focused not just on filling vacancies, but on developing leaders, increasing retention and creating growth opportunities within the VR agencies. That's important because recruitment and retention really go hand in hand. Bringing people in is only half the battle. You also have to create environments where people want to stay and grow, right? Carol: Yeah. Excellent point Mario, because if you bring people in and they don't stay, you just have a churn that's not going to help anything. You've got to create that inviting, welcoming, wonderful environment that people can learn and grow. Because that's what lots of our, you know, our young people coming in, they aren't coming to the state to just work for 40 years like maybe their parents had or someone else. They want a job they can grow into. Mario: And to add to that, Carol, I've been in the field of VR for almost 19 years now. I can remember going back to the early 2000, when a lot of the people in VR had a master's in VR, and there were plenty of people within the field offices to mentor new counselors coming in. But ever since the mid 20 tens, you know, WIOA came out, that's really dwindled. And we have people with less and less experience and really nobody to mentor. And as George mentioned, really heavily, depending on the program managers to be those mentors and trainers, It's just too hard because they're also having to drop below their 3000-foot level, down to the 1500 zero foot level to take on case load work, you know? Carol: Right. Mario: And he's not able to provide that mentorship as well as we maybe once did in VR in previous generations. Carol: Yeah, we got to look at this in a whole different way. So speaking of looking at this, looking ahead, what's one change you guys hope to see in the VR workforce because of this work? And George, I'm going to throw it to you first. George: It's like the million dollar question right? Carol: Yes. Drum roll. George: Drum roll. (laughter) George: I think the biggest thing I would like to see is a shift in how we think about building the vocational rehabilitation workforce. And what I mean by that is, is that a lot of energy goes into reacting to vacancies and trying to fill positions quickly. And I think what we really need to do, kind of what Mario was mentioning earlier is, is that, you know, building something that looks a little bit more intentional that we have these clear pathways into the field. We have strong mentorships, better onboarding, and real opportunities for growth over time. And I also think that I'm really hoping that we are able to continue strengthening the professional identity of VR. This is incredibly meaningful work for anyone that does this. It truly sits at the crossroads of education, workforce development, disability services, employment, and a host of other things. But what's kind of unfortunate is, is that a lot of individuals are just not aware about the field or the impact that it can have. So it's kind of an interesting paradox, and I would love to see individuals more intentionally choose VR as a career because of how powerful the mission is. I think Mario had mentioned that before about a mission, and I think that that kind of holds true there. If I had a wish, I guess that's what it would be. Carol: I love it. Mario, how about you? Mario: Well, if I could say ditto, I would. But what George and I have said today is that our paper and our project, we wanted to be more intentional about workforce development within the VR system. We'd love to see students, interns, apprentices, and professionals from all related fields become aware of VR much earlier in their careers. We also hope that agencies continue building cultures that invest in mentorship, leadership development, and professional growth so employees can see long term futures within the system. But ultimately, we hope this work helps strengthen the stability of the VR workforce because when agencies are fully staffed, supported and developing future leaders, participants receive better services and better outcomes. And at the end of the day, that's what we're really all about, right? Carol: Absolutely. I think it'd be super cool if somebody came up and did this and came up with that. Like the registered apprenticeship for this, for the VR program, if someone took that on and, and did the thing because it would set the way for the rest of the country. And who knows, you could end up getting some credentials there, Mario and George, You know that you could report on your common performance measures and all of that. I think it would be pretty incredible. Okay. I'm going to throw you guys one last question. I wanted just to circle back to NRLI. I know we have lots of listeners and people are on the fence about whether, you know, to do something or make that investment because it is an investment of time and money for that year. In doing that kind of training, do you have any kind of little parting comment or little plug you could do for NRLI? And George, I'm going to throw out to you first. George: To me again. Oh boy. All right Mario, you can't say ditto. Okay. Without a question, 100% hands down. I would recommend it. I can't even talk enough about it. It was an amazing experience. You're absolutely correct, Carol, it is a lot of work. There certainly are some time constraints, me being on the East Coast, for example, having to go out to San Diego three times a year and then DC also, you know, just kind of the impact on terms of like how you can do your normal job, right? And as well as kind of your personal and family commitments. But I think we said this earlier was, is that one of the biggest values, if you will, of NRLI, was the opportunity to step outside of your day to day work and to engage with colleagues and actually people who eventually kind of become good friends of yours that live across the country, who are dealing with many of the same challenges. We have text groups, we kind of have friended each other on social media. And, you know, we're kind of, you know, shooting questions back and forth to each other to this day. And I think that speaks a lot to what NRLI can give to an individual. So it's certainly about value and relationships and this national network of individuals that are still kind of keeping in touch with. And I think probably the saddest part of the entire experience, if anyone wanted to ask, was that last day when we were all leaving DC and kind of realizing that we're not really going to have an opportunity to see each other. Carol: Yeah, well said George, well said. Mario, you get our last word, but it can't be. Ditto. George: Yeah. Mario: All right. You know what I would have to say is, if I'm speaking to the directors of VR agencies, and especially those that are kind of on the fence of sending staff from their agency to NRLI, What I would definitely say is it's a commitment and it's a long term commitment. And what I mean by that is you can't just send a few once and think that that's enough value added to your agency. You've got to commit over a long time horizon to send staff each year. And you know, Carol, you worked with New Mexico VR through the VRTAC. I'm sure that you've seen our leadership team within New Mexico really grow and develop over the last few years. And that's because the New Mexico VR agency has sent cohorts to the last, I would say at least six, maybe even seven cohorts. And so we've really invested hard in our leadership team in New Mexico. And we're seeing the results of that now. We got out of a cap, we're really making positive progress towards meeting our performance metrics. We have a way better understanding of our data. And now we're really focusing on leadership and culture within our agency. And we're really hoping that going forward, New Mexico VR will be a real place that people want to work at and stay. Carol: Yeah, it really is an investment in your people. I've seen it all over the country and my own, my work with you all, I've seen it, seen the deck chairs move. People have been in interline. They've moved up in their career in New Mexico VR, like I've seen folks in new positions. And it's really been lovely, lovely to see. And I've been appreciative of the management they're investing in VR and we are just so our listeners know why I'm plugging NRLI. It is part of our VRTAC grant and so we do support NRLI. A number of us on the TAC also serve as instructors throughout the various sessions, in addition to there's a faculty for NRLI. So I appreciate you both. I think you did a great job on your paper. If people want to see your paper, they can go to VRTAC.org and go to our top nav NRLI. There's a whole section on NRLI. And you can see the cohort's paper right there. So thank you both. I hope you have a great day. Thanks for joining me. Mario: Thanks, Carol. George: Thank you, Carol. {Music} Outro Voice: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time. One minute at a time. Brought to you by the VRTAC. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Today's guest is Dr. Benafsha Yaqoobi, an attorney and civic society and human rights activist. Before the Taliban's return to power in 2021, she worked as an attorney for the elimination of violence against women and as a Commissioner at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. She currently serves as a prosecutor on the team bringing Afghanistan's case before the People's Tribunal for the Women of Afghanistan. In this episode, Alon and Benafsha discuss the plight of people with disabilities in Afghanistan, particularly women and girls, the work that the Rahyab Initiative does in support of people with disabilities in Afghanistan, and the impact of the Taliban's takeover on Afghanistan as well as its impact on receiving external support. Full bio Dr. Benafsha Yaqoobi is a civic society and human rights activist, and currently serves as a prosecutor on the team bringing Afghanistan's case before the People's Tribunal for the Women of Afghanistan in 2025. She is the founder and director of The Rahyab Initiative in the UK and previously established the Organization of Rahyab for Rehabilitation Services for the Blind (ORRSB) in Afghanistan. Before the Taliban's return to power in 2021, Dr. Yaqoobi worked as an attorney for the elimination of violence against women and later as a Commissioner at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. She has consistently used national and international platforms to advocate for the inclusion of Afghan women in peacebuilding processes, with particular focus on women with disabilities. Dr. Yaqoobi holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Lovely Professional University in India, with her dissertation examining democratic governance and women's political rights in Afghanistan (2001–2021). She also earned two master's degrees in Political Science and International Relations from Kabul-based universities. She is currently pursuing doctoral research in sociology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her contributions have been recognized internationally. In 2024, she was awarded the U.S. State Department's International Women of Courage Award, and in 2022 she received the Marca Bristo Fellowship from Human Rights Watch. In 2021, she was named among the BBC's 100 most influential women. Dr. Yaqoobi's work is guided by a commitment to equality, justice, and the full participation of Afghan women in shaping their country's future.

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia. Today is Thursday, June 18, 2026. #1 – From WVEDA - Hernshaw Farms expands with WVEDA support Hernshaw Farms is growing its operations with assistance from the West Virginia Economic Development Authority. The expansion of the Kanawha County mushroom farm will help the business increase production capacity while supporting local agriculture and economic development. State leaders say investments like these strengthen rural communities, create opportunities for growth, and help West Virginia businesses build for the future. Read more: https://eda.wv.gov/the-wveda-helps-hernshaw-farms-expand-its-operations/ #2 – From WVDRS - DRS success stories inspire opportunity The West Virginia Division of Rehabilitation Services helps residents achieve employment and independence goals through individualized support and workforce programs. Recent success stories highlight individuals who have overcome challenges, gained valuable skills, and secured meaningful employment opportunities. Officials say these programs help strengthen communities while empowering West Virginians to reach their full potential. Read more: https://wvdrs.org/updates-and-information/success-stories/ #3 – From WV EXPLORER - Free summer fun awaits across WV West Virginia offers plenty of opportunities for affordable summer adventure, and many of them are completely free. A feature from WV Explorer highlights scenic overlooks, hiking trails, waterfalls, historic sites, festivals, and outdoor destinations that can be enjoyed without spending a dime. Tourism leaders say these experiences help residents and visitors explore the beauty of Almost Heaven while making lasting memories. Read more: https://wvexplorer.com/free-things-to-do-west-virginia-summer/ Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty, and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo. That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.

In this special Complex Care Journal Club podcast episode, co-hosts Drs. Emily Goodwin, Kristie Malik, and Kathleen Huth interview presenters of posters and oral abstracts relevant to the care of children with medical complexity at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) 2026 annual meeting, as well as at a pre-PAS event focused on home- and community-based care and training in complex care. Speakers describe their key findings, messages for care teams including patients and families, and opportunities to translate their findings into practice.‌ SPEAKERS Flor Arellano, MPH Clinical Research Coordinator, University of California, Los Angeles Jennifer Arnold, MD, MSc Medical Director, Skeletal Health, Boston Children's Hospital Ryan Brewster, MD Neonatal- Perinatal Medicine Fellow, Stanford University School of Medicine Meg Comeau, MHA Senior Project Director, Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health, Boston University School of Social Work John Greenwood, PT Executive Director for Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Services, Boston Children's Hospital Elaine Lin, MD Complex Care Pediatrician, Boston Children's Hospital Michelle Macy, MD, MS Professor of Pediatrics, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Scientific Director, Community, Population Health, and Outcomes, Research and Evaluation Center, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago Ashley Nmoh, BA Medical Student, Duke University School of Medicine Jennifer Peralta, MD, MSHPN Assistant Clinical Professor, University of California, Los Angeles Nora Renthal, MD, PhD Assistant Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology, Boston Children's Hospital Erin Ward, MEd Patient Engagement Consultant, Complex Care Service, Boston Children's Hospital HOSTS Emily J. Goodwin, MD Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics, University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine Pediatrician, General Academic Pediatrics Beacon Program, Children's Mercy Kansas City Kristina Malik, MD Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Colorado School of Medicine Medical Director, KidStreet Pediatrician, Special Care Clinic, Children's Hospital Colorado Kathleen Huth, MD, MMSc Pediatrician, Complex Care Service, Division of General Pediatrics, Boston Children's Hospital Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School DATE Initial publication date: May 11, 2026. ARTICLES REFERENCED - Brewster RC, Kats DJ, Elborki M, Chilukuri N, Ray M, Shaar N, Hron J, Khan A. Clinical Outcomes of Postedited Artificial Intelligence Translation for Discharge Instructions. Hosp Pediatr. 2026 Apr 10:e2025008986. doi: 10.1542/hpeds.2025-008986. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 41956490. - FamilyCIRCLE. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Department of Pediatrics. Accessed May 4, 2026. https://familycircle.pediatrics.wisc.edu/ - Pediatric Academic Societies. Online program guide. Accessed May 4, 2026. https://2026.pas-meeting.org/ - Pediatric Academic Societies. Who we are. Accessed May 4, 2026. https://www.pas-meeting.org/about/ - Pediatric Academic Societies. Academic Pediatric Association (APA) awards. Accessed May 4, 2026. https://www.pas-meeting.org/2026-awards-apa/‌ TRANSCRIPT https://cdn.bfldr.com/D6LGWP8S/as/k7qqm93qqpqgb5k3jw4f3w2t/PAS_2026_conference_transcript_5-8-26‌ Clinicians across healthcare professions, advocates, researchers, and patients/families are all encouraged to engage and provide feedback! You can recommend an article for discussion using this form: https://forms.gle/Bdxb86Sw5qq1uFhW6. CITATION Goodwin EJ, Malik K, Arellano F, Arnold J, Brewster R, Comeau M, Greenwood J, Lin E, Macy M, Nmoh A, Peralta J, Renthal N, Ward E, Huth K. Practice-Changing Research in Complex Care at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2026 Annual Meeting. 05/2026. OPENPediatrics. Online Podcast. https://soundcloud.com/openpediatrics/practice-changing-research-in-complex-care-pediatric-academic-societies-2026.

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia. Today is Thursday, April 16, 2026. #1 – From WV ENERGY - Energy rebate programs help WV residents save money West Virginia residents now have access to Home Energy Rebate Programs designed to lower utility costs and improve home efficiency. The programs include rebates for upgrades like insulation, heat pumps, and energy-efficient appliances. Households can receive assistance based on income and projected energy savings, with some qualifying for significant cost coverage. Officials say the initiative takes a whole-home approach — helping families improve comfort, reduce energy use, and lower monthly bills. Learn more: https://energywv.org/funding-opportunities/home-energy-rebate-programs/ #2 – From WVDRS - Division of Rehabilitation Services supports workforce success The West Virginia Division of Rehabilitation Services provides resources to help individuals prepare for, find, and maintain employment. Programs include job training, career counseling, and support services designed to connect West Virginians with meaningful work opportunities. The agency plays a key role in strengthening the workforce by helping individuals overcome barriers and build long-term career paths. Read more: https://wvdrs.org/ #3 – From WV BUSINESSLINK - Outdoor business accelerator supports regional growth Advantage Valley has launched the FASTER WV Outdoor Business Accelerator, aimed at helping entrepreneurs grow businesses tied to West Virginia's outdoor economy. The program provides mentorship, training, and access to resources for companies focused on recreation, tourism, and outdoor products. Leaders say the initiative builds on the state's natural assets while supporting small business growth and regional economic development. Read more: https://wvbusinesslink.com/2026/04/06/advantage-valley-launches-faster-wv-outdoor-business-accelerator-to-grow-regions-outdoor-economy/ Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty, and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo. That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.  

In this episode of Core Conversations with Natalie Baggio, Scott Nolte, Director of Rehabilitation Services at Corewell Health, discusses how rehabilitation care is becoming more accessible across Southwest Michigan. With new and expanded clinic locations, patients can more easily access the care they need—close to home. From treatment for common back, shoulder, and knee pain to advanced therapies and aquatic rehabilitation, Scott shares how expanded services and future growth are helping patients get started sooner and stay connected to care. Learn how accessing high-quality rehabilitation services at Corewell Health may be easier than you think.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Core Conversations with Natalie Baggio, Scott Nolte, Director of Rehabilitation Services at Corewell Health, discusses how rehabilitation care is becoming more accessible across Southwest Michigan. With new and expanded clinic locations, patients can more easily access the care they need—close to home. From treatment for common back, shoulder, and knee pain to advanced therapies and aquatic rehabilitation, Scott shares how expanded services and future growth are helping patients get started sooner and stay connected to care. Learn how accessing high-quality rehabilitation services at Corewell Health may be easier than you think.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Core Conversations with Natalie Baggio, Scott Nolte, Director of Rehabilitation Services at Corewell Health, discusses how rehabilitation care is becoming more accessible across Southwest Michigan. With new and expanded clinic locations, patients can more easily access the care they need—close to home. From treatment for common back, shoulder, and knee pain to advanced therapies and aquatic rehabilitation, Scott shares how expanded services and future growth are helping patients get started sooner and stay connected to care. Learn how accessing high-quality rehabilitation services at Corewell Health may be easier than you think.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Core Conversations with Natalie Baggio, Scott Nolte, Director of Rehabilitation Services at Corewell Health, discusses how rehabilitation care is becoming more accessible across Southwest Michigan. With new and expanded clinic locations, patients can more easily access the care they need—close to home. From treatment for common back, shoulder, and knee pain to advanced therapies and aquatic rehabilitation, Scott shares how expanded services and future growth are helping patients get started sooner and stay connected to care. Learn how accessing high-quality rehabilitation services at Corewell Health may be easier than you think.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of The Mark White Show, I have April B. Turner, State Head Injury Coordinator with the Alabama Department of Rehabilitation Services, to talk about traumatic brain injury and its impact on individuals, families, and communities across Alabama. With over 24 years of experience, April shares insight into the full spectrum of TBI, from mild concussions to life-altering injuries. She explains how brain injuries can affect behavior, memory, and emotional health, and why many cases go unrecognized or untreated. We also discuss the Alabama TBI Navigation System, the statewide TBI Helpline, and the programs designed to help people find support, resources, and a path forward after injury. From students and athletes to veterans and first responders, this conversation highlights the importance of awareness, early intervention, and ongoing care. If you or someone you know may be dealing with a brain injury, this episode offers valuable information and real help. For more information or support, contact the Alabama TBI Helpline at 888-879-4706 or visit the Alabama Department of Rehabilitation Services. Real stories. Real people. Real impact. News That Unites!™️

On this Make a Difference Minute, I have April Turner, State Head Injury Coordinator with the Alabama Department of Rehabilitation Services, sharing a powerful and needed message for individuals and families across Alabama. Traumatic brain injury is often unseen, but its impact is real and far-reaching. April brings clarity to what so many people struggle to understand, reminding us that brain injuries affect not only the individual, but entire families who are trying to adjust, support, and move forward together. With more than two decades of experience, April shares a message rooted in both truth and compassion. There is hope. There are resources available. And there are people ready to walk alongside those navigating life after a brain injury. From simple accommodations at home to statewide support systems, help may be closer than people realize. If you or someone you know needs support, the Alabama TBI Helpline is available at 888-879-4706. This MADM is brought to you by Athens Bible School, proudly supporting stories and the people who make our communities strong. Real stories. Real people. Real impact. News That Unites!™️

Dante Q. Allen was appointed by Governor Newsom to his new role of Deputy Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation Services on April 18, 2025 and sworn in by Director Kim Rutledge on May 5, 2025 Congratulations Danté!The U.S. Senate approved the nomination of Danté Quintin Allen to lead the U.S. Department of Education's Rehabilitative Services Administration (RSA). Until his confirmation, Allen had been serving as executive director for CalABLE, California's ABLE Act savings and investment program for people with disabilities. Under his five-year leadership, CalABLE was the fastest growing ABLE Act program in the country. Prior to leading CalABLE, Allen was a communications leader for organizations including Kaiser Permanente and the California Department of Public Health's Office of Health Equity. A fulltime wheelchair user, Allen is a well-known advocate for disability rights and equity. Upon his confirmation, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona remarked, “I look forward to working together with Mr. Allen to provide individuals with disabilities and all students with equitable access to the education and training they need to find good-paying jobs; achieve economic security; and lead healthy, independent lives.”© 2026 Building Abundant Success!!© 2026 All Rights ReservedJoin Me on ~ iHeart Media @ https://tinyurl.com/iHeartBASJoin me on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/yxuy23baAmazon Music ~ https://tinyurl.com/AmzBASAudacy:  https://tinyurl.com/BASAud

 Disability Employment MonthDante Q. Allen was appointed by Governor Newsom to his new role of Deputy Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation Services on April 18, 2025 and sworn in by Director Kim Rutledge on May 5, 2025 Congratulations Danté!The U.S. Senate approved the nomination of Danté Quintin Allen to lead the U.S. Department of Education's Rehabilitative Services Administration (RSA). Until his confirmation, Allen had been serving as executive director for CalABLE, California's ABLE Act savings and investment program for people with disabilities. Under his five-year leadership, CalABLE was the fastest growing ABLE Act program in the country. Prior to leading CalABLE, Allen was a communications leader for organizations including Kaiser Permanente and the California Department of Public Health's Office of Health Equity. A fulltime wheelchair user, Allen is a well-known advocate for disability rights and equity. Upon his confirmation, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona remarked, “I look forward to working together with Mr. Allen to provide individuals with disabilities and all students with equitable access to the education and training they need to find good-paying jobs; achieve economic security; and lead healthy, independent lives.”© 2025 Building Abundant Success!!© 2025 All Rights ReservedJoin Me on ~ iHeart Media @ https://tinyurl.com/iHeartBASJoin me on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/yxuy23baAmazon Music ~ https://tinyurl.com/AmzBASAudacy:  https://tinyurl.com/BASAud

Analysis on upcoming TSD Conference education, National Association for Pupil Transportation election results, the Federal Brake for Kids Act and the Federal Communications Commission revoking E-Rate eligibility of school bus Wi-Fi. Jeff Cassell, president of the School Bus Safety Company, discusses the need for safety leadership training, removing risk and reducing accidents in student transportation. Glenna Wright-Gallo, vice president of policy at neurotechnology software company Everway, has worked at the state government level and served as the assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services. At the TSD Conference this November, she brings her perspective as a person with a disability on educating and empowering individuals with disabilities. Read more about safety and special needs. Episode sponsors: Transfinder, School Bus Safety Co. & RIDE. 

Show Notes  In this episode of Acute Conversations, we welcome Dr. Nicole Neveau, PT, DPT, NCS — Director of Rehabilitation Services at SSM Health St. Louis University Hospital and our newest co-host. Nicole shares her path into acute care, from unfolding paper charts as a new grad to leading a team of more than 100 therapists. She reflects on lessons learned in trauma and neuro ICUs, the importance of mentorship, and why she sees therapists as consultants who guide recovery through evidence, collaboration, and patient stories. Alongside host Dr. Leo Arguelles, Nicole also previews the upcoming 2026 Bridge the Gap Conference in Chicago and what it means for connecting research with practice. Today's Guests: Nicole Neveau, PT, DPT, NCS

Vocational assessments can shape spousal support and earning-capacity debates. Rhonda and Dan unpack what credible reports look like, how to prepare, and how to challenge numbers that don't match reality. What you'll learn in this episode: ✨ Purpose & scope: Employability, realistic job options, training needs, and reasonable earnings. ✨ Data that matters: Social Security earnings, medical narratives, education, work history, and daily commitments.  ✨ Prep moves: What to bring, how to show up, and how to keep the interview factual and respectful.  ✨ Quality standards: Current labor data, paid databases, and transparent methodology—not a Google job search.  ✨ Retraining reality: Timelines (PT vs. FT), tuition costs, entry pay, and wage progression. ✨ After the report: Red flags to spot and when to seek a second opinion. 

In this episode, Caleb Ashmore, PT, DPT, Orthopedic Rehabilitation Services Supervisor at Harris Health, shares how his team is evolving orthopedic care through evidence-based approaches, telehealth, and novel research. He also discusses the importance of meeting patients where they are—socially and economically—to deliver accessible, whole-person care in a safety-net system.

In this episode, Caleb Ashmore, PT, DPT, Orthopedic Rehabilitation Services Supervisor at Harris Health, shares how his team is evolving orthopedic care through evidence-based approaches, telehealth, and novel research. He also discusses the importance of meeting patients where they are—socially and economically—to deliver accessible, whole-person care in a safety-net system.

In this episode, Caleb Ashmore, PT, DPT, Orthopedic Rehabilitation Services Supervisor at Harris Health, shares how his team is evolving orthopedic care through evidence-based approaches, telehealth, and novel research. He also discusses the importance of meeting patients where they are—socially and economically—to deliver accessible, whole-person care in a safety-net system.

Happy ADA 35Dante Q. Allen was appointed by Governor Newsom to his new role of Deputy Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation Services on April 18, 2025 and sworn in by Director Kim Rutledge on May 5, 2025 Congratulations Danté!The U.S. Senate approved the nomination of Danté Quintin Allen to lead the U.S. Department of Education's Rehabilitative Services Administration (RSA). Until his confirmation, Allen had been serving as executive director for CalABLE, California's ABLE Act savings and investment program for people with disabilities. Under his five-year leadership, CalABLE was the fastest growing ABLE Act program in the country. Prior to leading CalABLE, Allen was a communications leader for organizations including Kaiser Permanente and the California Department of Public Health's Office of Health Equity. A fulltime wheelchair user, Allen is a well-known advocate for disability rights and equity. Upon his confirmation, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona remarked, “I look forward to working together with Mr. Allen to provide individuals with disabilities and all students with equitable access to the education and training they need to find good-paying jobs; achieve economic security; and lead healthy, independent lives.”©2025 Building Abundant Success!!©2025 All Rights ReservedJoin Me on ~ iHeart Media @ https://tinyurl.com/iHeartBASJoin me on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/yxuy23baAmazon Music ~ https://tinyurl.com/AmzBASAudacy:  https://tinyurl.com/BASAud

In today's Double Tap, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece tackle Meta Ray-Bans' missing AI features, the ongoing iPhone SE 4 speculation, and whether the new Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds are true AirPods Pro killers.Plus, we discuss the real state of accessibility training in 2025—do we need national centers for blind tech training? And listener Mike shares his frustrations about people misunderstanding white canes in public.Don't miss this episode filled with tech news, accessibility insights, and plenty of Double Tap banter!

Meet the compassionate leader behind the work of STARS Meet Claudia Chavez, executive director of Scottsdale Training and Rehabilitation Services, or STARS. Claudia's journey with STARS began in 2011 and over the years, she has held various roles, most recently serving as the director of operations. Her dedication and passion have been instrumental in enhancing the lives of people with developmental disabilities. Join us as we delve into her inspiring journey and her vision for the future of STARS, highlighting her commitment to serving others and making a lasting impact to our community.  

Scoot and Ian Hoch continue their live broadcast from the Children's Hospital New Orleans for the “LIGHT UP THE SEASON” RADIOTHON! This hour, Scoot and Ian speak with: Grace Turner, Former Traumatic Brain Injury patient, Lakesha Murray, Director of Rehabilitation Services, and Michael and Claire Quintana, parents of Myles Quintana.

Send us a textWho knew there was such thing as Financial Social Work? It makes sense because people have an emotional tie to money. As Queen A says in this episode: "90% of all spending is emotional and 10% is logical". In this episode we chat with Ashlin Price who is  a sought-after speaker and financial literacy consultant who specializes in providing financial literacy, addressing behaviors related to finances, and professional development. Ashlin possesses a master's degree in social work from the University of Maryland Baltimore and a bachelor's degree in Rehabilitation Services from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.Check out the episode to learn more about Queen A, Financial Social Work and so much more. Thank you for listening!!→ DON'T MISS THE NEXT EPISODE OF THE QUEENS OF SOCIAL WORK PODCAST! Follow us on your preferred podcast platform (Apple, Spotify, etc.) and share your thoughts in a review.→ WE VALUE YOUR INPUT. Take our 1-question survey and shape future episodes.→ DONATE TODAY and be a part of positive change for social workers of color.→ LOOKING FOR MORE INSPIRATION? Follow us on Instagram @queensofsocialwork→ UNLOCK EXCLUSIVE RESOURCES. Visit our website and join our email list to receive your FREE Travel Social Work Guide.

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia.   Today is Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2024. The West Virginia identity tech hub drives local innovation…learn about the diverse array of employment opportunities in #YesWV…and WVU's School of Dentistry launches a major expansion…on today's daily304. #1 – From WV BUSINESSLINK –  West Virginia is undergoing a remarkable shift toward innovation and technological advancement, with local entrepreneurs at the forefront of driving economic growth.  The West Virginia Digital Identity Tech Hub plays a pivotal role in this transformation, focusing on how digital identity technologies can support and empower local businesses. By connecting with the broader West Virginia entrepreneurship ecosystem, WVDITH fosters collaboration, innovation, and the growth of homegrown businesses across the state. Learn more about how WVDITH strengthens the entrepreneurial ecosystem through access to digital tools and resources, partnerships with local incubators and accelerators, and more. Read more: https://wvbusinesslink.com/2024/10/31/supporting-local-entrepreneurs-and-businesses-how-the-west-virginia-digital-identity-tech-hub-wvdith-is-empowering-local-innovation/   #2 – From WV COMMERCE – West Virginia offers employment opportunities in several growing industries throughout the state.  One of those industries is the professional, scientific and technical services sector, which comprises establishments that specialize in performing professional, scientific and technical activities for others.  Peyton Ballard is a former West Virginia Division of Rehabilitation Services consumer who works in the field as a manager of entrepreneurship. Watch the video as he discusses employment opportunities in #YesWV. Watch now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v35Ph9l4qv0   #3 – From WV PRESS – Construction is set to start in the new year on an extensive West Virginia University School of Dentistry expansion and renovation project being supported, in part, by a $12.6 million award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  The multiphase project encompasses approximately 50,000 square feet in the Health Sciences Center on the Morgantown Campus. The first phase will focus on modernizing and integrating the Pediatric Dentistry and Orthodontics clinics, Faculty Group Practice and Dr. W. Robert Biddington Center for Dental Innovation back into the Health Sciences Center from their current location at Suncrest Towne Centre. Phase two will focus on areas that include a surgical suite, specialty clinics and administrative and academic offices. The state's only dental school, WVU offers a Doctor of Dental Surgery, a Bachelor of Science in Dental Hygiene and advanced education programs that help address workforce shortages in West Virginia and across the country.  Read more: https://wvpress.org/wvpa-sharing/wvu-awarded-12-6m-for-renovations-to-enhance-dental-education-patient-care-in-west-virginia/?utm_source=newsletter   Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo.  That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.  

On today's episode, I share my queen conversation with Veronica Bunch, Ms. Black West Virginia USA 2024. She is originally from Beckley West Virginia, is a graduate of West Virginia State University with a Bachelor of Science in Social Work and a Masters in Arts at Marshall University in School and Mental Health Counseling. She is currently employed for 16 years with the State of West Virginia working with students with disabilities as a Senior Rehabilitation Counselor with the West Virginia Division of Rehabilitation Services. She empowers young people to meet their work expectations and build confidence in daily living. In addition, she travels to the state to provide resources to under-served populations, targeting minorities, as an active member of the Minority Outreach Committee with the agency.Her mission has been to empower others through the stages of transition, continue educating on programs, and foster ideas to promote being your best self. The knowledge of growing through transparency, and doing so selflessly perpetuates growth and freedom in others. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/alesha-shaw/support

In this episode of the See Life Different podcast, host Zaakirah returns from a hiatus to focus on empowering Black, Indigenous women of color and individuals with disabilities. Zaakirah shares updates about her life changes, including a move from Oklahoma and her involvement in NPR Oklahoma. The episode coincides with Disability Employment Awareness Month and World Blindness Awareness Month. Special guest, Valyncia M. Wilson, a program manager from Oklahoma's Department of Rehabilitation Services (OKDRS), discusses resources for individuals with disabilities, including employment support and Social Security benefits. Zaakirah emphasizes storytelling, cultural heritage, and personal experiences as a journalist and advocate, aiming to inspire and educate listeners on overcoming adversity and embracing diverse identities. 00:00 Welcome to See Life Different Podcast 00:43 Podcast Hiatus and Updates 01:06 Disability Employment Awareness Month 01:28 Repurposing Radio Show and Podcast Episodes 02:28 Life Changes and New Focus 03:35 Limited Series and NPR Correspondent 05:32 Empowering Through Storytelling 12:21 Guest Introduction: Valyncia M. Wilson 13:55 Valyncia's Passion and Advocacy 15:24 Resources for Job Seekers with Disabilities 18:16 Transition Services for Youth 19:25 Social Security Disability Benefits 21:05 Valyncia's Legacy and Contact Information   Empowering Women of Color and Disability Advocacy on the See Life Different Podcast. Connect on Social: facebook.com/seelifedifferent instagram.com/seelifedifferentpod https://twitter.com/seelifediffPod Links Mentioned: https://www.zaakirahnayyar.com Oklahoma Department of Rehabilitation Services: https://www.okdrs.gov   Focus Black Oklahoma, an affiliate of NPR Oklahoma where Zaakirah is a correspondent: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfcNRP1vQg5VxAjP0nTokZTxT9E5i4ito&si=XBGodqYdOapcrWuz

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia.   Today is Monday, July 15, 2024. It's a zoo out there, so why not escape to an actual zoological facility where you can view native wildlife in a shaded woodland environment...Capture some amazing Instagram moments during a stay at a cozy state park cabin…and the Division of Rehabilitation Services helps those with disabilities find employment…on today's daily304.   #1 – From WVDNR – Lions and otters and bears, oh my! You'll see that and more along the wooded walkway at the West Virginia State Wildlife Center in Upshur County. The Wildlife Center is a modern zoological facility displaying native and introduced state wildlife. Operated by the Wildlife Resources Section of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, the center is dedicated to presenting visitors a realistic and factual understanding of our state's wildlife.  Woodland wildlife can be viewed along a wheelchair-accessible interpretative trail traveling 1.25 miles through a mature hardwood forest. Facilities also include a gift shop and picnic area. Admission is only $4 for ages 16 to adult, $2 for kids ages 6 to 15, and free to kids 5 and under. Read more: https://wvdnr.gov/outdoor-recreation/west-virginia-wildlife-center/   #2 – From WV STATE PARKS – West Virginia State Park cabins offer the perfect blend of nature and modern amenities. With over 300 cabins to choose from, you can escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life and reconnect with nature while taking the best, most grid-worthy Instagram photos.  Whether you want a quiet getaway for two or a family vacation, we have the perfect cabin for you, from fully equipped, spacious vacation cabins at Twin Falls and Cacapon Resorts to the rustic pioneer cabins at Kumbrabow and Seneca state forests.  Some cabins are designated pet friendly so you can bring your four-legged friend along on your family getaway. Visit wvstateparks.com to learn more and book your cozy cabin getaway today! Read more: https://wvstateparks.com/these-summer-cabin-stays-in-west-virginia-are-instagram-worthy/   #3 – From WVDRS – The West Virginia Division of Rehabilitation Services (DRS) helps high school students and adults with disabilities set work goals and develop career plans. The agency assists individuals, ages 14 and up, to overcome barriers so they can obtain or maintain employment.  DRS rehabilitation professionals also aid West Virginia's businesses and employers by being the leading employment resource to include or to retain people with disabilities in their workforce. Visit wvdrs.org to learn more about how DRS can help you attain your work goals.  Learn more: https://wvdrs.org/about/   Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo.  That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.  

Director of Rehabilitation Services at Sturdy Memorial, Keri Dickinson, joins us today to talk about better patient care, creating better efficiencies and workflows for referrals from providers, and how to establish better relationships with patients.How Kari measures successBetter management systemsExplanation of the clinical ladderMaking the process smoother for transition of care from inpatient to outpatient Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Infertility – involuntary childlessness – affects millions of people, especially women, globally. In Ethiopia, it causes significant distress and burden on women, but there is limited research on rehabilitation services available to them. Understanding the psychological, social, and financial challenges for women living with infertility in Ethiopia is important. For upcoming interviews check out the […]

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia.   Today is Tuesday, April 23, 2024. The Division of Rehabilitation Services has a new website to help connect its services to those seeking a path to work and live independently … click in the show notes and learn more about how DRS helps people achieve their goals … AND … today, we connect you with tools to help those with disabilities start planning for the future with Pathways to the Future resources… (I'll tell ya -- those folks at DRS are doing so much good and helping so many people - I really like sharing all they do) … And now - for the rest of the story on today's daily304 …  #1 – From WV DRS – The West Virginia Division of Rehabilitative Services provides vocational services to help individuals with disabilities prepare for, obtain, retain or advance in employment. Vocational rehabilitation counselors help consumers assess interests and abilities, explore career options and develop plans to reach their unique employment goals. Learn more: https://wvdrs.org/   #2 – From WV COMMERCE – Since middle school, Ashley Higginbotham's dream had been working with and caring for children. Now, she is a care teacher at Sacred Heart Early Learning Center in Charleston. Ashley connected with the West Virginia Division of Rehabilitation Services (DRS) for assistance in preparing for employment while in high school.  Ashley Higginbotham was selected as an Ability Works Award Winner in 2022.  Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNatylhHObs   #3 – From PATHWAYS WV –  Your future begins now -- and at pathwayswv.org -- you'll find resources, tools and connections to people to help students with disabilities, through the journey from youth to adulthood.  Learn more: https://www.pathwayswv.org/   Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo.  That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.  

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia.   Today is April 10, 2024  The West Virginia Department of Commerce charts course for economic growth and energy innovation. New owner, new strategies drive Water Stone Outdoors. WV School of Osteopathic Medicine  assistant dean turns tragic events into opportunity to serve others - and now for the rest of the story…on today's daily304. #1 – From WV NEWS –  The team at the West Virginia Department of Commerce — which includes the Division of Forestry, the Division of Labor, the Division of Natural Resources, Geological & Economic Survey, the Office of Miners' Health, Safety and Training, WorkForce West Virginia and the Division of Rehabilitation Services — has had numerous recent notable achievements.  Among those achievements? Partnering with the job marketplace company Jobcase to launch a West Virginia-focused job database. Implementing the West Virginia Build Act. And designating Summersville Lake as the 36th state park, the first new park in 30 years. Check out this interview with Secretary of Commerce James Bailey to read about more accomplishments and learn what's in store for 2024.  Read more: https://www.wvnews.comn/ews/wvnews/west-virginia-department-of-commerce-charts-course-for-economic-growth-energy-innovation/article_af1771ca-dfb9-11ee-9e8c-73c59b9c9924.html   #2 – From THE DAILY OUTDOOR RETAILER – Holly Fussell recently celebrated the two-year anniversary of buying Water Stone Outdoors in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Water Stone saw 25% growth in revenue from 2022 to 2023, which runs counter to the ongoing narrative in the outdoor industry that has struggled with inventory overhang and other macroeconomic challenges. Fussell attributes that success to internal and external factors. Internally, she said she's built a strong team and updated the store's systems, including its POS program. Externally, nearby New River Gorge was designated as a national park and preserve in 2020, and that has helped bring in customers who are either tourists visiting the area or locals who need supplies to explore the park, Fussell said. The store has always been focused on climbing, but Water Stone is now offering a wider variety of products as well as an expanded coffee shop and a beer garden. “We spent a fair amount of money transforming the back of the shop into a hangout spot,” Fussell said. One of the strategies there is to attract people to the store with lower price point opportunities like beverages. Read more: https://thedaily.outdoorretailer.com/news/brands-and-retailers/new-owner-new-strategies-drive-growth-for-water-stone-outdoors/ #3 – From WV GAZETTE-MAIL – Learn how a WVSOM dean turned tragedy into a learning opportunity on the  West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine's statewide campus, where third- and fourth-year medical students complete clinical rotations.  Michael Peterson found his real-world experience gave him a head start in the sciences. Where most students learn theory before practical applications, this part of Peterson's education took place in reverse. Emergency medicine is important and this gentleman is a leader. Read more: https://www.wvgazettemail.com/dailymailwv/daily_mail_features/wvsom-assistant-dean-turns-tragic-events-into-opportunity-to-serve-others/article_4d3a45a7-0402-5f11-bae6-426eb584530d.html   Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo.  That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.  

Today, we're thrilled to have Lynn Frith, Education Consultant from the Bureau of Rehabilitation Services at Connecticut General, in the studio. Discover how CTPIE, fueled by the RSA SWITCIE DIF Grant, is revolutionizing disability employment by shifting individuals from subminimum wage to competitive integrated jobs. With a focus on family input and multi-agency collaboration, CTPIE is at the forefront of innovating employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities.   Listen Here   Full Transcript:   {Music}   Lynn: We ended up branding the SWITCIE Grant here in Connecticut as CTPIE. The Connecticut Pathways to Integrated Employment.   Most importantly, individuals and family members, they have a strong voice in every step of the way that we are taking here in Connecticut.   I love what I do, and I was very in tune with this population. I care a lot about this population. I have always believed competitive integrated employment is the way to go and individuals have that right to be able to work.   Intro Voice: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: Well welcome to the manager minute. Joining me in the studio today is Lynn Frith, education consultant with the Bureau of Rehabilitation Services in the Aging and Disability Services Department. So for short, that means you're with Connecticut General. So Lynn, how are things going in Connecticut?   Lynn: Well, first of all, thank you, Carol, for inviting me to this podcast. I'm really looking forward to our conversation this morning. Connecticut, we're busy, we're jumping, we're moving in grooving.   Carol: I love it. Yep. You're working with Dave and Kathy and all those guys. I'm like, you are all small but mighty. I love what's going on there. Lynn, just so our listeners know, I've had the good fortune to meet and work with you through some of our other technical assistance work that I do with Connecticut General. And in fact, for full disclosure to our listeners, Lynn and I were chatting the other day about something completely different and this topic of the DIF came up and you were bubbling over with excitement and I'm like, oh my gosh, we have to do a podcast. So for our listeners, I featured several of the Disability Innovation Fund Career Advancement Project grants, and now I'm switching over because each year there's been a different focus. I'm switching over to talk about the DIF subminimum wage to competitive integrated employment projects, or it's called SWITCIE for short. So I know we love our acronyms. RSA's focus for this round is they want to increase the opportunity for those SWITCIE program participants, students and youth with disabilities seeking subminimum wage employment and potential VR program applicants or VR eligible individuals with disabilities who are employed or contemplating employment at sub minimum wage to obtain competitive integrated employment. And so to achieve that purpose, the projects that were funded under this grants going to create innovative models, and they're hoping to have folks identify strategies for addressing those challenges associated with access to competitive integrated employment. Things like transportation and supports provide integrated services that support competitive integrated employment, support integration into the community, and identify and coordinate those wraparound services. So this is super exciting. I know Connecticut's always on the cutting edge of cool things. So let's dig into your approach.  Now Lynn, why don't you start out telling our listeners a little bit about your journey into VR, I know folks are always interested, like, how do people come? And I know you have a cool path as well.   Lynn: Well, Carol, It is an interesting story in my opinion. I started dating who is now my current husband back in college, and his parents were both deaf and he refused to interpret any of my conversations with his parents. And he said, you want to date me? You need to learn ASL American Sign Language. So once I graduated with my bachelor's degree, I then took sign language interpreting courses, and I ended up learning the language. I fell in love with the language, and I got my first job at the American School for the Deaf out of college, working in doing placement. And the American School for the Deaf at that time was a vocational community rehabilitation provider for the Bureau of Rehabilitation Services. So once a position at Connecticut, BRS became available for a rehabilitation counselor for the deaf. My co-workers encouraged me to apply. And here we go. 20, almost 24 years later, I've been with Connecticut BRS.   Carol: That is so cool. I love this story. Everybody finds their way and just unusual, umm, places. And I think that is awesome. Can you give us a little bit of an overview as well about Connecticut General, like how many staff are in the agency and how many customers do you generally serve?   Lynn: So we have around 150 staff currently. Just like many other states, we are struggling with getting staff on board and maintaining staff. So that is a current priority for us. And right now we're serving approximately 5500 consumers each year.   Carol: Wow, that sounds good. I know Connecticut too, you know, I was thinking a lot of those East Coast states, you're small, but you are small but mighty and serving a good group of folks with a small group of people. I want to also get a sense of how many people in Connecticut are really kind of covered under that 14C certificate.   Lynn: That number is a little bit harder to be able to get an accurate number on. From what we can tell. And how I came to this number is tracking that annual career counseling and information referral. And we have about 850 individuals still receiving subminimum wage in Connecticut.   Carol: Wow. It's still a pretty significant number of folks. I know Minnesota, where I'm from, had been working on this for a long time, but I think we still have folks more in the thousands. So I'm really glad you guys are tackling this project. So let's talk about your proposal. Can you give us an overview of that grant proposal you all submitted? And I think you guys have a really cute name.   Lynn: So I'll share the name first. Because it tends to get a little bit tongue twisty. We ended up branding the SWITCIE grant here in Connecticut as CTPIE, so that would stand for the Connecticut Pathways to Integrated Employment, and we applied for the SWITCIE grant and were awarded it back in September of 2022. Our planning year began on October 1st of 2022 and we hit the ground running. We developed a partner workgroup, and that workgroup consists of all of our other state agencies who we partner with, as well as the workforce investment boards within the state school systems, community rehabilitation providers. We have some 14C key employers who sit on the partner workgroup, most importantly individuals and family members. They have a strong voice in every step of the way that we are taking here in Connecticut.   Carol: So what are you guys hoping to accomplish with your grant?   Lynn: As you know, this is a demonstration model grant, and we took that first planning year. And from our partner workgroup we then developed four subgroups. Those four subgroups were the pathways and business partners, individualized supports, messaging and outreach, training and TA. And we asked our partner workgroup members to refer members of their agencies, departments, their staff to be able to work with us on those subgroups and those individuals who served. And we met like twice a month for approximately nine months. So they really were committed to this project. They helped us develop, okay, what services should be looking for and how do we get there? We have strong commitments from employers in the state of Connecticut who recognize that hiring individuals with significant developmental and disabilities is the way they want to go. The messaging and outreach group that led us to, okay, we really need to brand what our SWITCIE grant is. So that's how we came up with CTPIE. We came up with a logo. They helped us develop a website. It helps us in terms of our outreach to individuals, outreach to school systems, and how we go about recruiting individuals for CTPIE. Our goal for CTPIE is, and these are the numbers that we stated in our application for our youth, we're hoping to get 356 individuals enrolled in CTPIE so they can be youth who are still in school, receiving special education services, or have recently exited from special education up to and including their 24th year, and they have to be contemplating Subminimum wage for the very first time. So you'll see that that's our larger bucket of individuals that we're hoping to serve under this grant. Our second population that we're looking at serving is 114 individuals who are adults who are currently earning subminimum wage. And that is a little bit more of a tricky population for us to get enrolled in CTPIE. These are individuals that have been in Subminimum wage for probably some period of time. They have developed friendships there. They love their work. They're used to working at that location. They know what's expected of them. Family members, they're viewing this as my loved one has a safe place to go to 35 hours a week. They have the transportation built in, so that's a higher mountain for us to climb, to be able to encourage those individuals to say, hey, come on over to CTPIE and try out competitive integrated employment.   Carol: So how do you address that challenge with the group? And I know that group really well. I used to work in a day training center in Minnesota years ago, and I understand that family deep. They form bonds with the staff and their loved one does, you know, and it's really hard to break through that. So what are you trying to do to kind of help bridge this?   Lynn: So we're very fortunate here in the state of Connecticut. We contracted with the University of Maryland, and they are able to assist us with providing training and technical assistance. So one of the ways that we're outreaching to this population is by contacting 14C key employers who are currently in the process of sunsetting their 14C certificate. We felt that we wanted to really reach out to those employers first because they've already made this decision. So now what? Let's help them transform. Let's help those individuals decide, okay, what's next after this subminimum wage closes, what are the opportunities available to me? And honestly, we have determined has been our best approach. So we've spent most of our time right there. We're still early on in the grant to be enrolling individuals. We just started enrolling folks as of October 1st of 2023. Currently, we only have two adults, but we aren't giving up.   Carol: Well, you got to start somewhere. You know, you start with one and then the second one. But I think you're smart in your approach, especially with the 14C providers that are looking at sunsetting that. Because that's a hurdle too. You know, you can kind of have a little bit of resistance in the backdrop going on, even though maybe face forward, they seem like they're on board with you. They may not be as much as you think. So that is really good. What other challenges have you faced to date? Because I know every grantee that I've talked to talks about that first year, like there's always a ton of challenges and things going on and I'm sure you guys were no different. What kind of challenges have you guys faced this first year?   Lynn: Well, we are having more success with the youth population. We have enrolled 29 youth, and really what we're hoping with that population is to as we move forward, a number of them are already in plan. They're receiving benefits counseling. We're in the process of still developing the specific CTPIE services. We're hoping to develop financial literacy. We're almost ready to go to contract for that.  Family and peer mentoring. Those are the two categories that have presented as our biggest struggles right now, and that is for that youth population as well as the adult population. And we're hoping, right now we're in the process of developing, So all of the individuals who are enrolled in CTPIE, we're going to start reaching out to their family members to get them together, let's get together, What's been successful about CTPIE? We want to develop a grassroots group for them to be able to walk through struggles with other family members. How did you get the funding? What does your DDS budget look like? Here's the VOC rehab and here's what VOC Rehab can do for you. And how can we get these two agencies to be able to work together? We are very fortunate in the state of Connecticut that we have excellent partnerships with our Developmental Disability Services Agency and our state Department of Education, and all three agencies are working very well together to be able to serve this population within this grant.   Carol: I think you couldn't do it if you didn't have that relationship with those other agencies, because all of that funding is so intricately interwoven. And so if you're not all kind of hand in glove working together, it will make it so much harder. So you're taking a great approach with that. I know you also are taking a really cool approach with the counselors that you have dedicated to this project. Talk about that training you're all going through. I really was intrigued by this.   Lynn: So as you mentioned, Connecticut is small but mighty. We have three regions. So we have our north, south and western regions, and we have one CTPIE counselor in each of the regions who will be working with CTPIE consumers. We also have a project coordinator, myself, who is the director of the grant, and we have a vocational rehabilitation supervisor that supervises the CTPIE counselors. We have all gone through Charting the Life course. We have become ambassadors. This, I felt was very important for all of us to be able to go through this training so that we are speaking the same language as our DDS agency. This language will then translate over to the consumers that we're meeting with and the family members. It's very important for us that they feel that sense of identity in terms of, okay, no matter which agency I'm going to, we're going to be talking about the same things. They're going to recognize me as an individual with a significant disability, and we're going to be working on the same things. And that's going to be to promote competitive integrated employment.   Carol: I love that. I think that was super, super smart. And I know we've talked a bit about your, you know, building and leveraging all of these different relationships that you have, which is great. And I think it maybe is almost a little easier in a smaller state as well to build that stronger coalition. How did you build that relationship and get connected with the state special ed directors? Because I know you did some work around that. That has been real helpful to the project. How did you go about that?   Lynn: Well, I have been very fortunate in my career here with the Bureau of Rehabilitation Services, and I've had different focus areas as a staff person working in central office, and I became pretty good friends with one of the contacts in the state Department of Education. She has my position under the Bureau of Special Education. So her and I, as soon as we got the SWITCIE grant, we started talking about, okay, how can we get this information out to the schools? How can we encourage students and families to enroll in CTPIE? And honestly, she's like, Lynn, whatever you need. I'm here to be able to assist you. One of the approaches that we have is that, and I know sending out letters is not the best way to communicate with folks, but we wanted to make sure that folks were getting at least the basic information of CTPIE. So part of our marketing was to develop using the letterhead and the logo, to be able to send out letters to all of the students who are exiting, who are eligible for DDS, that are exiting in June of 2024. So I made sure that my contact at the state Department of Education had those template letters. We emailed them to all of the special ed directors, so they had a copy of the letters that were being sent to students, and those letters were mailed out at the beginning of September. So we emailed the information out to the special ed directors the third and fourth week of August. So as they were starting their school year, they would get this information. And our hope was because the special ed teachers are the trusted source for the students and the families, once they got this letter at home, they'd be like, huh, what's this? Who's reaching out to me? So the special education teachers would be able to say, great opportunity. We got this as well. And we strongly encourage you to enroll in CTPIE. We also emailed the link to our website and I'll do a little shameless plug here. It is CTPIE.org, and I encourage all of the listeners to be able to click on our link and look at a little bit more about what we're doing here in the state. We also had the ability to work with our marketing company to do some videos. So we did a video specifically for special educators and family members, and we also had one of our DDS, Self-advocates. He did a video encouraging individuals with IDD and their family members to try out competitive integrated employment.   Carol: I liked that I had a chance to go out to your website, so I did watch all the videos and saw how you had structured that site to kind of target different audiences that were going to be impacted by this project. I thought that was really good. So in your work with this marketing team, I know folks nationwide, they're trying different ways. I know you said sending letters, do you have strategies developed, like to use different means of communication technology, whatever. As you're working through this project, what are you guys thinking about?   Lynn: So after we sent the letters to the special educators, we actually did get a number of emails back saying, hey, we want to know more, which was absolutely fabulous. The state of Connecticut, they also do a back to school event in September, and we were invited to set up a table at that event. And when they did their opening remarks, they also did a slide on the PowerPoint to all of the educators in the room about CTPIE with just some bullet points, explaining who we are, what we do, and the fact that we had a table outside. So we had a lot of foot traffic from the schools that attended the back to school event. And so a lot of questions were raised. We were able to take time to be able to walk special educators through who we are and what we do. We also get lists from the Department of Developmental Services for all the students who are exiting each school year, and those lists., it contains the information about where these students attend school. So we're able to reach out to those schools and say, hey, I'm the CTPIE counselor, and I would love to be able to get together with you to speak more about CTPIE. We would love to be able to do an individual and parent night if that would work for your students. So it was a lot easier getting that connection to our schools, the special educators.   Carol: That is good. I was going to ask about that. If the CTPIE counselors were going out to the schools, because I know that boots on the ground is always super important, if you can get at the local teachers and really get them excited and get the administration in all of that on board, you have an easier time to get something set up like a parent night and student night type of thing. That is really awesome.   Lynn: The other huge benefit that we had for our student youth population is for Pre-ETS. In the state of Connecticut, we have branded that Level Up. So our Level Up staff met with our CTPIE counselors and was able to do that introduction to those special education teachers out in the schools. So we really leveraged our Level Up connections. We work with wonderful schools here in the state of Connecticut. We have great relationships with our Level Up staff and that really, really assisted us. And, you know, being able to make that entry into the schools specifically for CTPIE, we also encourage our Level Up students who have that diagnosis of IDD to enroll in CTPIE. And then if we have a student who's coming to us to enroll in CTPIE, if they're not enrolled in Level Up, then we make that introduction to our Level Up staff so they can access our Pre-ETS services.   Carol: That's really cool. I like how that's all coordinating together. I still firmly believe that Pre-ETS is kind of the gift that keeps on giving. I know it really threw the country for a loop when we're switching from our primary focus on adults to these young people. But I think, oh my gosh, this investment in students younger is going to make such a difference in the whole trajectory of what happens in VR. And I think we're getting to a point where we're going to be able to start doing some of those longitudinal studies. So the investments that VR has made with staff and time and efforts in getting. All of that training and exposure and connectedness with the schools. Look at like how you can leverage here. That is perfect. That is really cool. So what advice Lynn would you give, you know, other people, I'm sure a new DIF will come up this year. Again, I know money was returned and there's excess funds sitting there, and I'm sure RSA is working on that as we speak. And we get calls a lot at the TA center. You know, people will be like, oh, I don't know, should I apply for a DIF or not or what? What advice do you have for folks that are maybe on the fence or thinking about, should I do it or not, what would you tell them?   Lynn: I love what I do and I had the opportunity of really working on section 511, so I was very in tune with this population. I care a lot about this population. I have always believed competitive, integrated employment is the way to go and individuals have that right to be able to work. So when this DIF came and it was announced, I was definitely interested in it. I work with a great bunch of staff here in Connecticut that share the same vision, have the same passion as I do, and I think that's the key. That's been the key for me at least. I also have a very, very supportive management team behind me. You know, Dave Doukus, Kathy Marchione, I report directly to both of them and they have been fabulous. They are very supportive for the things that maybe I haven't had that much experience within my role as a consultant with the Bureau working on contracts, probably not my most favorite thing, but I have a team behind me that's able to assist me and teach me. So it's a lot of patience having staff that are passionate about the project and just being able to have that infrastructure, those are the things that I would recommend and if anybody has, you know, if you're thinking about it, questions or concerns. Want to know a little bit more about my experience in Connecticut? Please don't hesitate. Reach out. Give me a call.   Carol: Excellent. Could you give our listeners your email address? Would you mind?   Lynn: Sure. My last name is a little bit of a tongue twister, so I'll go slow here. It's Lynn l y n n dot Frith F as in Frank, r i t h at ct.gov.   Carol: Excellent. Well, I'm really excited about what you're doing there, and I'm looking forward to following up with you later on down the road as you're starting to get, you know, more experience and more people are in and having those really good outcomes happening. But good for you guys. Thanks for taking time today. I really appreciate it, Lynn. Hope you have a great day.   Lynn: Thanks, Carol, for having me. I hope you have a great day as well.   {Music} Outro Voice: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Rock talks to Chicago Bears' Director of Rehabilitation Services, Tristen Asken, all about their success at injury and concussion reduction. Be sure to click subscribe and tell your tribe. TIME STAMPS 1:00 Tristen Asken's career path 8:30 Moving out of the private sector into the NFL 10:30 Tristen's primary responsibilities 11:30 Working with long term injuries 14:20 Blending disciplines with injured players 16:20 A drop in lower extremity injuries last season 17:30 What has changed to reduce injuries? 23:00 GPS data extraction 25:00 Same injuries, different positional players 30:00 Stimulating proprioceptors throughout the rehab to RTP spectrum 32:30 Better preparation to the season 35:00 Approaching non-contact injuries differently 37:15 Developing a movement appraisal system 42:00 Concussions and the Guardian Cap 45:00 Professional challenges in the coming season 47:00 How Tristen is educating himself 48:30 Favorite Chicago foods GET TO KNOW TRISTEN ASKEN LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tristen-asken-491833214/ CHICAGO BEARS: https://www.chicagobears.com/ GET TO KNOW ROCKY SNYDER MEET: Visit the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Rocky's online headquarters⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ READ: Grab a copy of his new "Return to Center" book: ReturntoCtr.com INSTA: Instagram fan, check him out at https://www.instagram.com/rocky_snyder/ FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rocky.snyder.77 LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rocky-snyder-cscs-cafs-nsca-cpt-a77a091/ TRAIN WITH ROCKY WORKOUT: Want to meet Rocky and get a private workout: https://rockysfitnesscenter.com/ INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/rockysfitnesssc/ FACEBOOK: Facebook.com/RockysFitnessCenter.com

Vision Rehabilitation is an essential service to newly blind or partially sighted people, and those whose sight has changed. It is a service that is provided by local councils and can help with things like technology, daily mobility and independent living skills. But new Freedom of Information data from the RNIB has highlighted that many local councils aren't providing this vital service in a timely manner. Resulting in thousands of blind and partially sighted people without the help that they are entitled to by law. We hear from you about how the delays are impacting daily life and independence. The RNIB's David Aldwinkle provides details of the findings. Andy Fisher is a vision rehabilitation specialist and has worked within the public and private sectors and Simon Labbett is the Chair of the Rehabilitation Workers Professional Network and an active rehabilitation officer in a local council - they both help us assess the issues and the potential solutions.Presenter: Peter White Producer: Beth Hemmings Production Coordinator: Liz Poole Website image description: Peter White sits smiling in the centre of the image and he is wearing a dark green jumper. Above Peter's head is the BBC logo (three separate white squares house each of the three letters). Bottom centre and overlaying the image are the words "In Touch" and the Radio 4 logo (the word Radio in a bold white font, with the number 4 inside a white circle). The background is a bright mid-blue with two rectangles angled diagonally to the right. Both are behind Peter, one is a darker blue and the other is a lighter blue.

Dr. Elizabeth (Liz) Lechford is a multi-faceted professional with expertise spanning mentoring, coaching, clinical work, research, and the arts. With over 17 years of experience, Dr. Liz is celebrated for her contributions to health and movement, particularly through the lens of emotional wellness. Holding a Ph.D. in Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Services, she has successfully guided thousands in demystifying the body's functioning while encouraging them to realize their potential. Dr. Liz's work delves deeply into body intelligence, aiding individuals in understanding the interconnections of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and sensual health. Her ongoing research focuses on relationships' impact on the nervous system and her unique transformational movement practice, known as Body Church, based in Santa Barbara.Episode Summary:In an enlightening episode of the Transforming Mind to Transform Your Life radio, podcast, and television show, host Myrna Young converses with Dr. Liz Lechford about an often-overlooked perspective on sex — its potential as a healing modality. The conversation opens the audience's eyes to new dimensions of relationships, happiness, and personal growth.Dr. Liz brings to light the concept of our "erotically innocent" nature and how the traditional view of sexuality may ignore profound elements of healing and emotional release. The episode intricately weaves the themes of vulnerability, relationship dynamics, and the nervous system's response to emotional trauma. Dr. Liz outlines her philosophy and the life-changing approach she uses — Body Church, a breath movement technique to train the nervous system and foster more fulfilling intimate connections.Key Takeaways:Sex can serve as a profound healing modality when approached with vulnerability and emotional transparency.Emotional reactions in relationships often stem from past experiences, including unresolved childhood events.The nervous system retains memories of trauma, which can impact relationships and sexual experiences.It's possible to rewrite the nervous system's response by embodying different energies, such as the "giving" masculine or "receiving" feminine.Body Church is a dynamic movement practice that helps individuals from diverse backgrounds connect, empathize, and heal through psychosomatic play.Ready to improve your health or business? Look no further than our amazing sponsors! Support them and support Transform Your Mind podcast!Shopify - This Year take your business to the next level with a Shopify online store. Whether you are Selling a little or a lot Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching.Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at SHOPIFY.COM/transform, ALL LOWSee this video on The Transform Your Mind YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@MyhelpsUs/videosTo see a transcripts of this audio as well as links to all the advertisers on the show page https://blog.myhelps.us/Follow Transform Your Mind on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/myrnamyoung/Follow Transform Your mind on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063738390977Please leave a rating and review on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/transform-your-mind/id1144973094

Tracy talks about her amazing daughter Keely who became a quadriplegic at the age of 12. We also discuss ways that people can show up.Determined 2 Heal is an organization that has help to provide amazing experiences for Keely. www.determined2heal.orgThe Medicaid Waiver Program and DORS (Division of Rehabilitation Services) have also provided help to the family.

In this episode of the Family Pet Podcast, we talk to Dr. David Levine and Ashley Wheeler LVMT to discuss rehabilitation for pets. They explain the purpose of rehab, which includes reinforcing post-operative surgeries and maximizing function in cases of arthritis or neurological conditions. The guests also highlight the importance of assessment and individualized treatment plans. They discuss various rehab techniques such as underwater treadmills and balance tools. Additionally, they provide tips for preventing the need for rehab, including maintaining a healthy weight and incorporating regular exercise. The episode concludes with fun facts about otters and the evolution of ear sizes in animals.TakeawaysRehabilitation for pets aims to reinforce post-operative surgeries and maximize function in cases of arthritis or neurological conditions.Assessment is crucial in determining the progress of rehab and making necessary adjustments to the treatment plan.Various techniques, such as underwater treadmills and balance tools, are used in pet rehabilitation.Preventing the need for rehab can be achieved by maintaining a healthy weight and incorporating regular exercise.Fun facts: Otters hold hands when they sleep, and the size of an animal's ears can vary based on its habitat.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Personal Experiences02:19 Rehabilitation for Pets05:23 The Purpose of Rehab07:04 Comparison to Human Occupational Therapy08:20 Rehabilitation Techniques10:00 Prescribing Rehab Exercises13:00 Duration of Treatment14:12 Homework for Pet Parents15:24 Assessing Improvement17:16 Canine vs. Feline Rehabilitation20:20 Exercise for Cats23:02 Advancements in Animal Physical Therapy25:58 Preventing the Need for Rehab28:12 The Importance of Activity29:21 Fun Facts31:51 Closing Remarks

The annual OSF Saint Clare Medical Center Tree of Lights campaign is underway. You can buy a light at OSF Saint Clare Medical Center and the proceeds will be used to help purchase new equipment for the Rehabilitation Services at OSF Saint Clare Medical Center. We spoke with Samantha Rux, Cathy Foes, Deb Curley and Jim Scarpaci on Wake Up Tri-Counties on Monday about the history of Tree Lights, the chance to honor people who have passed on via the Tree of Lights, and how your donations via the Tree of Light will help people in rehabilitation from various forms of injuries. 

Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation Services has a new leader and he comes all the way from Texas. Division Administrator, Dr. James Williams, joins the Mission: Employable podcast to talk about how he plans to lead the department over the next few years. Find out what he has in store for Iowa's Vocational Rehabilitation Services, and how his experience in special education and vocational rehabilitation in Texas has prepared him to lead the division in Iowa and especially after the statewide realignment under Iowa Workforce Development. 

On today's episode, Sharon and Lori introduce you to a remarkable woman - Cheryl Snow, Program Manager for Oklahoma Dept. of Rehabilitation Services. Cheryl holds several degrees, has home schooled her daughters, been involved in many local organizations, and all while having varying degrees of major vision loss. She loves to tell how God has empowered her life, the lives of her family, and those she serves in her career. Her story will certainly inspire you! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-3/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-3/support

We're just weeks away from Phoenix World Burn Congress 2023! To help attendees prepare for the event, we welcomed Megan Tinney, Phoenix WBC event manager, and Gina Russo, a key volunteer dedicated to ensuring that our first-time attendees are welcomed and supported at the conference, to the podcast!About Gina RussoGina Russo was born and raised in Cranston, Rhode Island. She is a mother to two amazing sons and has worked at the local hospital for 32 years, In 2003, her and her fiancé attended a concert at the Station Nightclub in West Warwick that turned into a deadly blaze, killing 100 including her fiancé Alfred. Gina survived the accident with 3rd and 4th degree burns to 40% of her body - and she only learned about Alfred's death after coming out of a medically induced coma 12 weeks later. In 2009, she self-published a book titled "From The Ashes." It was written for a therapeutic reason but wanted to share her story with others. She is proud to share that the book went on to sell for 3,500+ copies and opened up a world of public speaking about living and surviving such a tragic event.  Today, she is a Phoenix SOAR Peer Supporter and loves giving back and helping new survivors navigate their new life and get back to living. She has been married to her husband, Steven, for 15 years and loves her life as a burn survivor and what it has opened up for her. She is grateful for the opportunity to meet so many amazing person and the opportunity to help others. About Megan TinneyMegan Tinney is responsible for developing, managing, and planning Phoenix World Burn Congress. As the Program Manager of Community Engagement, Megan expands community outreach, engagement opportunities, and virtual offerings. She began her career as a Physical Therapist at Shriners Hospital for Children, Galveston after earning her Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Shenandoah University.Megan was first introduced to Phoenix Society at the 2009 Phoenix WBC before assisting with the conference next year in Galveston. Since 2010, Megan has held many roles within Phoenix WBC, including serving as the Event Coordinator Assistant for the past three years. In addition to her work with Phoenix Society, Megan also served as the Manager of Rehabilitation Services at Shriners Hospital for Children, Galveston and has worked in a variety of healthcare settings. About Phoenix World Burn Congress Phoenix World Burn Congress (WBC) is a program of Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors, the leading national nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people impacted by a burn injury.Phoenix WBC began in 1985, developed by burn survivors, for burn survivors, to identify and understand the issues that impact the daily lives of those associated with burn trauma. Today, Phoenix WBC is the world's largest gathering of survivors, their families, burn care professionals and the fire service industry.This life-changing biennial event connects attendees with support resources, educational programming, workshops, and, most importantly, each other. It is through these shared experiences that healing begins, because we have learned that nothing heals survivors like connection with other survivors.Register today: https://pwbc2023.eventbrite.com/ Resources from the Show Register for Phoenix World Burn Congress 2023Download our Phoenix WBC Planning GuideView the full Phoenix WBC ScheduleFollow us on FacebookJoin our Phoenix Society Facebook GroupPhoenix Society ResourcesAbout MedStar HealthMedStar Health is a health system dedicated to caring for people in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region, while advancing the practice of medicine through education, innovation and research. Learn more at www.medstarhealth.org.About the D.C. Firefighters Burn FoundationThe D.C. Firefighters Burn Foundation is dedicated to assisting in the recovery and rehabilitation of injured firefighters and burn survivors from the Washington metropolitan region. The foundation supports burn research, treatment, and rehabilitation programs at Washington Hospital Center and Children's National Medical Center. Learn more atwww.dcffburnfoundation.org. Sponsor Girls with Grafts Interested in becoming a sponsor of the show? Email us at info@phoenix-society.org. Enjoyed the show? Tell us on social media using hashtag #GirlswithGrafts and tagging Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors! 

The field of sports medicine isn't just for serious athletes: The Nicholas Institute for Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma (NISMAT), Northwell's sports injury clinic, has made sports medicine better, more accessible, and grounded in research. On this episode, the 20-Minute Health Talk team pays a visit to NISMAT, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, to talk to Tak Fukunaga, DPT, ATC, CSCS, sports physical therapist and NISMAT's Manager of Rehabilitation Services, and Michael Zacchilli, MD, orthopedic sports medicine surgeon at Lenox Health Greenwich Village and team physician for the College of Staten Island, to shed light on what they do to treat people at all levels of physical activity.

We dive deep into the world of healthcare leadership with Keri Dickinson, a seasoned PT and Senior Director of Rehabilitation Services at Sturdy Health. Keri shares her passion for a "People First" leadership style and unveils the transformative power of the LAMP Institute of Leadership Certificate in Healthcare Leadership. Join us as we explore the Institute of LAMP Leadership, the Academy of Leadership and Innovation, and the LAMP School of Management. Discover how understanding your core values and communication styles can empower you to become an authentic and effective leader in the healthcare field. This conversation is a must-listen for anyone seeking personal and professional growth in their leadership journey.Bullets:Keri Dickinson, a PT with over 26 years of experience and 11 years in formal leadership, joins us to share her insights on healthcare leadership.Explore the Institute of LAMP Leadership and the courses offered, including the Academy of Leadership and Innovation and the LAMP School of Management.Learn how the LAMP program emphasizes self-assessment and experiential learning for personal and professional growth.Discover why leadership is more critical than ever in the rapidly changing healthcare work environment.Gain valuable insights into leading others with authenticity by understanding your own values and communication styles.Find out how the LAMP Institute of Leadership can benefit professionals in the healthcare field, including PTs, PTAs, OTs, CODERS, educators, and more.Learn about the Committee opportunities available within LAMP 301 and the exciting possibilities for growth and development.Uncover the resources and support available within the APTA for self-asset and professional development.https://www.aptaali.org/page/LAMP

On this episode of We Talk Health,  Kevin Decker is back to share all the new things happening at Volunteer Hospital in Martin, TN. In this podcast, we talk about the new providers, what's new in women's and surgical services, the new wound care center and the on-site wellness center. Tune in to hear all that Volunteer Hospital has to offer right in Martin, TN! Guest: Kevin Decker, CEOWest Tennessee Healthcare Volunteer Hospital Host: Kara MobleySocial Media CoordinatorShow Notes:Women's Services:New OB/GYN - Dr. Robert Chin. To schedule an appointment with Robert Chin, MD, call (731) 587-5321.Renovated Mammography Suite including upgraded 3D technology & dedicated separate entry & parkingSurgical Services:General surgery services offered locally including appendectomy & gallbladder surgeryPodiatry services NEW interventional pain management proceduresNew Advanced Wound Care Center:Latest treatment available including debridement & advanced tissue procedures Hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamberTo make an appt. Call 731-588-5910 - Wound Care CenterWellness Center on Site:Fitness/Wellness equipmentWellness programs including personal trainingExpanded hours: 6am to 7pm Monday through FridayAbout Volunteer Hospital in Martin, TNWest Tennessee Healthcare Volunteer Hospital is your community healthcare provider; a 100-bed facility offering inpatient and outpatient care, emergency service, heart care, diagnostic imaging, pediatric medicine, physical therapy, and a range of specialties. We believe in the power of people to create great care. We're 78 healthcare professionals strong. We are your hometown health provider. And we work hard every day to be a place of healing, caring and connection for patients and families in the community we call home.Services and Departments: Cardiac Care, Diagnostic Imaging, including mammography, Emergency Department, Interventional Radiology, OB Emergency Department, OB Hospitalist Group, Rehabilitation Services, Sleep Disorder Center, Cardiac Rehab, Surgical Services, Wellness Center, Women's Health and Wound Care.Protect yourself against breast cancer with a mammogram–and without a referral–at Volunteer Hospital. It's quick. And it could save your life. To schedule a mammogram, call (731) 541-8303.All information, content, and material listed here is for informational purposes only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis, and/or medical treatment of a qualified physician or healthcare provider. If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 911 immediately.

In the wake of the pandemic, our healthcare system's vulnerabilities were laid bare, exposing a pressing need for affordable medical care, particularly as the Baby Boomer generation continues to age. The escalating costs of healthcare have pushed countless Americans to the edge of financial ruin and beyond. The crucial question that arises is whether there exists a solution to address these systemic issues. Join me in this captivating podcast as I engage in an enlightening conversation with the esteemed Dr. Bill Bronston, delving into the depths of our healthcare system's challenges and exploring potential options for a brighter future. Dr. Bronston, a passionate advocate for healthcare reform and social justice, has dedicated his life to serving others. Born in 1939 in Los Angeles, he grew up in a family connected to the film industry and had a deep-seated desire to care for people from an early age. In 1961, he enrolled at USC Medical School, drawn to its reputation for clinical medicine and a desire to serve the underprivileged. However, he soon became disillusioned with the mechanistic and impersonal approach to medicine he encountered in his studies. Inspired by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War protests, Dr. Bronston became an activist and organized medical, nursing, and dental students across the nation under the banner of the "Student Health Organization." Their goals included advocating for a socialized healthcare system, supporting the civil rights movement, and demanding curriculum changes in professional schools to incorporate a culture of care and progressive medical values. As a conscientious objector, Dr. Bronston pursued his psychiatric residency at the Menninger School of Psychiatry in Topeka State Hospital. During this time, he played a pivotal role in organizing an American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union, leading to a union job action that gained administrative control of all Eastern mental health hospitals in 1968. Relocating to New York, Dr. Bronston immersed himself in various activist movements, including the Black Panther Party, the women's movement led by Gloria Steinem, and the struggle against the Vietnam War. He also became involved with disability rights activists, working to connect their cause with the broader anti-institutional agenda. In 1970, he served as a clinical physician at Willowbrook State School, an institution for individuals with intellectual disabilities, where he exposed and helped shut down inhumane conditions through a federal class action lawsuit. Returning to California in 1975, Dr. Bronston assumed the role of medical director for the Department of Developmental Services and Department of Rehabilitation Services for the state, a position he held for over two decades. In the present day, Dr. Bronston remains committed to the ongoing pursuit of justice. He expresses deep concern over the current state of medical education, emphasizing the corporate influence, mounting costs, and burdensome debt that hinder doctors from engaging in community service. He strongly believes that healthcare should not be a commodity for sale, denouncing the current system as one that prioritizes profit over personalized and affordable care. Despite the opposition from the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital cartels, Dr. Bronston is confident that the single-payer movement will prevail. He argues that people are increasingly aware of these entities being adversaries and the need for universal access to the remarkable advances in healthcare and medical research. Dr. Bronston envisions a radical change occurring within the next decade, driven by a transformational shift in the pursuit of human rights throughout history, rather than a gradual evolution. Related websites for more information www.ourhealt.pub and www.publichostagepublicransom.org --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/vibelivingpodcast/message

Guest: Kristin Szymanek, MA, CCC-SLP - In this episode, Michelle and Erin are joined by Kristin Szymanek, MA, CCC-SLP, Director of Rehabilitation Services at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. The terms “Pediatric Cancer,” “Palliative Care,” and “Hospice” can easily send shivers down your spine. These terms can stir emotions that are intrinsically difficult to grasp. However, as pediatric speech-language pathologists, we may have the joy of working with little ones and their caregivers while they navigate their journey with pediatric cancer or pediatric feeding and/or swallowing disorders, clinical swallow evaluation or instrumental examination, suspected language delay, or even be called upon to evaluate and treat a suspected phonological impairment. Kristin will guide you on the SLP's role and responsibilities as part of an oncology team, including unique barriers when working in this setting and with this population and how to infuse grace and evidence-based practice into palliative care.

Kristen Mackey, Administrator of Arizona Department of Economic Security- Rehabilitation Services Administration; Jacy Wilmes, Managing Analyst Financial Services Administrative Team supporting the Division of Employment and Rehabilitation Services, and Morgan Harmon, Senior Financial Analyst, for the Finance and Business Operations Administration, joined Carol Pankow in the VRTAC-QM Studio. Kristen, Jacy, and Morgan explain how they have navigated and managed the fiscal support services consolidation at Arizona VR. Learn about the solutions and lessons learned that make Arizona's synergistic approach work for everyone.   Listen Here   Full Transcript   VRTAC-QM Manager Minute: How to Survive a Move in VR support services and Come Up with a Solution that Works for Everyone- Arizona VR   Music} Speaker1: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: Welcome to the Manager Minute. Kristen Mackey, Administrator Arizona Department of Economic Security- Rehabilitation Services Administration, Jacy Wilmes Managing Analyst Financial Services Administrative Team supporting the Division of Employment and rehabilitation services, and Morgan Harmon, Senior Financial Analyst, for the Finance and Business Operations administration are joining me in the studio today. Holy cow, I can barely say all of that, big crowd. So thanks for being here. Kristen, how are things going in Arizona?   Kristen: It's going well. We are settling into a routine of hybrid services and just getting to be really nice time of year here in Arizona. The weather's beautiful.   Carol: Well, you go, girl. I wish it would have been nice when we were there in January. It was not. It was raining. I'm like, What happened?. And Jacy, how are you doing?   Jacy: I'm doing great. Have a baby on the way right in the middle of July. So, you know, perfect time to have a baby in Arizona when it's 120 degree weather.   Carol: Oh, wow. Well, congrats on that. That's pretty cool. And Morgan, I got to see you out at CSAVR. How are things going?   Morgan: Yeah, it was great being out there. Great seeing everybody. Things are going well from my end. Got some vacations planned that I'm really looking forward to.   Carol: Excellent. Excellent. Well, thanks for being here today, guys. Really appreciate it. Kristen, you were actually on my very first podcast back in May of 2021, talking about how VR is going to look post-pandemic. That cracks me up because it seems like a decade ago and so much has changed since then.  For our listeners, our fiscal team at the VRTAC-QM have been working with Arizona combined under an intensive agreement, and we've gotten to know Kristen and her team so much better and are also working with both the DSA fiscal staff and the Division Administration fiscal staff. It is a really complicated setup, but we're going to get to that in a minute. So coming off the recent CSAVR conference, I thought it was really fitting to talk about how to survive a move in support services and come up with a solution that works for everyone. And I was talking with so many different VR agencies and folks are struggling with this movement of support services. I'm talking about, you know, moving your fiscal team, your HR, your IT from under the VR purview into more of a shared services model or up at the DSA level or sometimes even a move where it's going to a statewide entity.   Carol: And that is really common with IT. Now, you can't stop the DSA from consolidating services since it's happening everywhere. So let's figure out how we can work through this to make it work for VR. So when we were on site with Kristen back in January, we saw how this consolidation was working firsthand and we got to meet some pretty terrific people that are very committed to learning and understanding the VR nuanced pieces of the work. And so I wanted to break this story of what happened in Arizona. And I think you all can be of help to some other states. Now, I need to make one more disclaimer. No state has a perfect system and everybody struggles still, but they have really taken a great approach in Arizona to get this into a workable situation for all. So let's dig in. So Kristen, kick us off with a little information about Arizona VR. Like how many staff do you have, How many customers and how long have you been with the agency?   Kristen: Thanks, Carol. Arizona is a combined VR unit, and we have about 326 staff members right now that are just in the VR world. And then we have our support services that also help manage the madness as we say. We serve just under 11,000 clients right now. Our numbers are slowly starting to trickle back up, but we're still about 30% less than we were prior to the pandemic. I have been with the agency for 15 years. I started as a brand newbie transition counselor and had worked my way up and was in the policy unit when WIOA came into fruition. So that was a great place to be at that time and then moved on into the administrator role a couple years after that.   Carol: Well, it positions you very well being in that role with WIOA coming into play for sure. So Jacy, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about your background and current role?   Jacy: Yeah, I graduated from Iowa State with a degree in finance back in May 2020, right when the pandemic hit is when I graduated. This was my very first job out of college, and I started off and I was actually supposed to be the WIOA and Employment Administration analyst, but we had someone leave and I got swung into the RSA role. There was a lot of learning. So I was a financial analyst fresh out of college, really just got thrown into this position a ton of learning for about a year and two months on that program. Got it in a pretty decent spot and in the Financial Services Administration world and then got switched over to the unemployment insurance program. So I became a senior financial analyst over there. I worked on that program for about 9 to 10 months and think for everyone in RSA, just be glad you're not in UI. So yeah, and then I took over the management analyst position on the team, which is kind of just the workflow manager for the team. So we have a supervisor who's a senior managing analyst and then I'm right under him, so I just manage all the workload on the team. I review all the Fed reports. I review everyone's documents. I kind of get the whole team in the same groove with our actual workload.   Carol: I like it. I like that you used groove. You can tell you're all in a good groove for sure. Appreciate that. How about Morgan, Over to you. The same question.   Morgan: I graduated from ASU, got my degree in economics, and right after graduating I went the personal finance route where I started off as a broker for Charles Schwab, got my series licenses, talked with clients, place trades all day. I enjoyed it. But I had a friend who worked for the state's Department of Economic Security, actually over UI who would reach out to me like every few months is like, Hey, you should come work with me. And so about a year and a half ago, I took the leap. I left my job with Charles Schwab and came to work on public finance for the government. And I really haven't looked back since. I've really enjoyed my time here. I enjoy the people that I've been working with currently on a financial planning and analysis team with a great group of people. But being placed over RSA has definitely come with its challenges. It feels like the previous analysts in my role have all found pieces of a puzzle that they've been putting together and then when they leave, it's like they move that puzzle and things are still somewhat in place, but other pieces have moved and then it's just trying to put it all together. And I've enjoyed that challenge. I've enjoyed learning the program. And yeah, we've got a great group of people here.   Carol: Yeah, very cool. We saw that when we were down in January. That's why I just thought, I've got to talk to this group because you guys really have a unique setup and I think it will be important for other people to hear about that. So, Kristen, why don't you talk to us about the overall structure of the organization, like the DSA you live under, what services are under the big DSA and kind of that how this all lines up?   Kristen: Yeah, The Department of Economic Security is one of the largest agencies in state government. We serve more than 2 million clients every year, more than 40 programs to address all of the social and economic needs of those that we serve. DES is employees. We really have more than 8000 employees across the state. So we're a ginormous state agency. Seven program divisions such as adult Protective services, child Support services, developmental disabilities, and then our division, which is employment and rehab services, all of the DOL programs are also within our division. And so we work closely with the WOTC and UI and our local workforce development areas. All of that is under our division. So we are one of the largest divisions within the department as well. Then there's six operational divisions that help keep the lights on and everything that happens to, you know, keep the programs moving. Yeah, as Sarah would say, it's a big dot deal.   Carol: It is a big dot deal. That is a big group. And as Jesse said, we can all be happy we're not in UI.   Kristen: So yeah, we see that firsthand every day being part of our division, the UI madness.   Carol: Oh yeah, absolutely. So, Kristen, when did the change occur for you with this movement of the fiscal team from under your direct purview? Kind of describe what happened at that time.   Kristen: Yeah. You know, the department had been doing some of the shifts and kind of had you had talked about, you know, IT training. What are those services that support the divisions but kind of do the same thing for all of the divisions and all of the programs. And so about 5 or 6 years ago, we had the shift in contracts, training, fiscal, policy. All of those were moved to a shared services model. And under that shared services, you may have a single administrator or a single point of contact for the entire division. And as you just heard, our division is really large and very different in the services that we provide. And so we found that it's not always super helpful to have one person that is spread across all of those different programs. So previous to that, we had the fiscal staff reported directly to the RSA administrator and that fiscal person had a team of individuals under them. We had very tenured staff in those positions. We had people that retired from their positions. And so the work then became, you know, it was a unit. They all learned from each other. They had been through monitoring. They had known all the fiscal people and federal RSA. They had done all of the work. And so I think we're not immune to what business is now, right? People retire, new people come in, people leave, people shuffle. And we found that we just had staff that didn't have as much knowledge of our RSA programs and didn't know the technical side of the work either.   Carol: Gotcha. So this new structure, it's kind of a little confusing still to me. A little bit. If we could like go through what does this exactly look like? And Kristen, maybe you talk from the highest level and then I'm going to go to you because you have like the next chunk and then Morgan can talk about like, how does this all fit for the fiscal?   Kristen: Yeah, it is complicated. The department has the operational division, which is the division of finance operations or financial operations. That's where Jacy is housed. So they do kind of the big bucket activities under the grants management portion of the work. And then within our division we have the Finance and Business Operations Administration. So that is where Morgan and team are housed. And Morgan and Jacy, they work very closely together to manage the aspects of the work. And then, you know, I'm a pest and throw myself in there every once in a while, more often than they probably wish to understand, you know, how do we manage the work and what needs to get done and when.   Carol: That sounds good. So. Jacy, you pick it up from where Kristen kind of talked about it, Like, how does this flow between you and Morgan?   Jacy: Yeah, if I use acronyms, Financial Services Administration, we call FSA. That's where I'm housed. So an FSA, we kind of like Kristen was saying, we manage the big buckets of things. We do the big Fed reports, we do all of the federal drawdowns, we manage the payment systems, we manage the budgets in our accounting system. So when we get new award letters, Kristen sends them over to us. We load them in, match everything up to what the feds have sent us. We reconcile the revenue we receive to make sure that we're actually spending it down. We do a lot of analysis that are kind of more higher level and the way we work with Morgan and team, I would say they're more in the weeds of things. They see a lot of the actual invoices where we just see an expenditure into a category. So we'll see personal services, employee related expenditures, while they may see the actual documentation for that cost. So the way we work with Morgan is we just really rely on their knowledge of the program itself because like Kristen said, in division of financial operations were moved around a lot. So I'm the managing analyst on the team. I'm over our employment administration. I dabble in a little bit of childcare so we don't have a vast knowledge of each and every program. We try to become a subject matter expert in each one. When I came on, I was actually a subject matter expert for FSA in RSA because that was the one I spent the most time on. And then I'm also a subject matter expert on UI. I don't have the most expertise in the other areas and that's where other people come into play and that's where we utilize them. It's an interesting setup. Whenever we do an analysis specifically for our spending down our match. As everyone knows, spending down match is very complicated with RSA just having to meet a 15% pre-ets and also 21% state match. We work with Morgan and team to kind of utilize the client system they use and also our accounting system to come up with, okay, how much have we actually spent, what are we authorized? And then also just utilizing them for any questions we have when we see expenditures or anything on the federal report that just looks a little off from what we think we should be reporting.   Carol: Gotcha. So I was thinking and you just graduated from school in 2020 and look at all the buckets that you are over or impacting. That is a lot. Good for you. Good for you.   Jacy: Thank you.   Carol: So, Morgan, tell us about like, okay, now you're the weed guy, so you're the weeds. How does this I shouldn't have said it that way. So sorry. How does that all work? How does that work? Being the weed guy.   Morgan: It's fun. I say that with air quotes. Jacy explained it really well. Kind of our relationship there. What I would say a lot of my job is working with the programs like the various nuances that each program has, how they work with clients. We take, like the Transition School to Work program, where the ones that approve the budgets, we send out those invoices, we make sure that we're collecting that money and if necessary, we'll do an expenditure correction and a pretest, which would then send a Jacyso that he manages that at the grant level. I'm looking at it all on the program level. So my main deliverable that I provide each month is a budget packet, looking at each individual program that all feeds into like the Section 110 grant or independent living. We look at each of those programs, how they're performing, how they can improve and then go from there.   Carol: Yeah, I have to say, your budget packet was really impressive because you guys had showed us the reporting that you do and I'm like, Oh wow. I had told Kristen, I'm like, You are actually very fortunate that you have these fine gentlemen who really get at a lot of great information about what is exactly happening with the financial position of the program.   Kristen: Yeah, I'll give credit to Morgan, too. I mean, like I said, we had tenured staff and, you know, I think we all thought we were doing it just right. And as we dig in, we learned that maybe we weren't just doing it just right over the years.   Carol: Right.   Kristen: And so just having that fresh look into what is actually happening and are we doing it the right way. Morgan and Jacy and the team have done a really great job at reevaluating our processes and making sure that we're heading in the right direction.   Carol: Well, and since you brought that up, Kristen, you would let us know there was quite a bit of turnover, and that has seemed to now stabilize. Like that core group that is around now seems good. And you've all been around for more than six months, which is really, really nice. So Kristen, how do you keep that momentum and knowledge alive with this turnover that's been happening?   Kristen: We think we're still working on it, right? Recognizing and know that the teams have folder structures in the background that we look for access to. But all of the reports that. Morgan. And are working on. And I'm amazed at the work they do in their Excel spreadsheets and books in the macros and the databases and everything. I don't understand all of that. And so you see these documents are housed in folders and it's really up to them to try to figure out like, what is this? You know, they can push a button and it'll pull things forward. But is that really the right information? So I'm really fortunate that both of the teams, I think, are working towards memorializing what is it that we're doing and how does it work and what is the actual behind the scenes work that, you know, what are we pulling into these documents? It's not just relying on a preformatted sheet and having it just pull what it's always pulled. So just trying to just be aware and think. My role is I poke quite a bit. Is this right? Do we know what that's pulling? Can we identify what that means? So just allowing some space for additional questioning versus just assuming that what's been there and always there is right. Because think we love the people that worked with us before and nothing against them, but we need to make sure that we're doing it the right way at this point in time.   Carol: Yeah. And love it, Kristen, that your team is always really willing to say don't understand what this report means. I love that. I think it was Jacy and Morgan were handing you some stuff and we were all in a meeting and you're like, Okay, what does this mean? Can you guys walk me through this? And I love that because then Morgan and Jacy have a really nice way, a good style of talking in plain language to us non-accountant kind of people or whatever, and could explain the process really well. It was cool.   Jacy: Yeah. So I think there's a few things I could add to that just because, like Kristen said, there's a lot of files we use. So I think one thing that we've really been working on as an agency in general is just standard operating procedure. When we create a file, we also create the steps to update the file. What we're looking for in the file. When I came on, it was my third month was when the RSA17 dropped. That's when it became a brand new report. So I had to create the entire template in Excel. I had to create all the backup documentation that goes into that report. And it was very confusing. And I think every quarter it's still a work in progress of like the deeper understanding of that report. And now they come out with new kind of technical assistance for it and it's really helpful. So we kind of update our ways of how we update it. We talk a lot with Patricia, our RSA liaison, and she's very helpful on telling us, Oh, like this is what you should be doing here. So those are the kind of things we do on the finance side of things is we create a standard procedure, we create actual templates so that way it doesn't have to be redone. It's just the next quarter someone can take my template and add on to it and then also see the standard procedures of like, okay, this is how I would update this. We also specifically for everything we do, we go through a multiple step review process. So for federal reporting on the team, three people review it and those three people could all have a different experience with federal reports and they could ask very good questions. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was Kristen mentioned that me and Morgan have been really good at supporting, but to be honest, we couldn't do it without the advice or what Kristen and the team wants. At the end of the day, we're support services. We provide what the program thinks is useful. We try to just update whenever we have our monthly projections meeting, and that's when Kristen kind of mentions like, Hey, I don't think this is as useful as it can be or hey, like I think this is really good. Please keep this in there. And we constantly are updating our packet to meet those needs of our divisions.   Carol: Yeah, that's what I loved about you guys most because there is this really back and forth and this fluid flow and it isn't super rigid. Like, well, we developed this report and this you get what you get. So that is like one of my favorite parts. I know when I was working with your person that does a contract monitoring and just was able to review that standard operating procedure on that, which was super well done. And there were just a few little pieces to include in with current reg changes and things like that. Super responsive. Like I thought the work that you all are doing with those standard operating procedures is just you're nailing it. It's really good, really good. So I know our team was super impressed with the work of everybody, but I really wanted to go into a little more about that work Morgan does. So as I'm understanding, he is still on your side of the house, at least. Kristen, within the Finance Administration, within your division, and he has this colleague Zach. And so I got a chance to do some initial training with Zach as he first onboarded because of course VR is a big, interesting topic with lots of weird terms and acronyms and trying to get him grounded. But Morgan, I was wondering if you could walk us through a little bit more about the work you do for the VR program. And you got a little more in the weeds and you were starting to do analysis on some different things for folks. So can you talk a little more about that?   Morgan: Of course, the way that we used to be structured is our team had about three or more analysts that all worked under RSA, but back during COVID, that was cut down to two analysts. And then when I accepted the job, I was the only analyst doing the work that I do, which was working directly with the programs. Mike would meet with the various program heads over Behavioral Health Services Transition school to work, meet with them. We'd talk about the programs, figure out what kind of work they needed or adjustments they needed from a financial perspective, and then would take that information, roll it all into our budget packets, and then go present that to Kristen. The hard part of the job is it felt like I was routinely just turning a wheel. I was looking at the previous work that the analysts were doing, trying to piece together what they did, but then I didn't want to break anything, so I just kind of kept it in their same process. It's been a learning and growing process, trying to piece together RSA from the training that I received. And then about three months ago we were able to bring on another analyst to help support RSA as well. And I feel like the knowledge and the core that we have around this program is growing significantly to the point where I'm now able to work with Zach. He's able to handle a lot of the day to day tasks, making sure that we're getting these invoices sent out, that we understand the numbers that are in Libra or System seven, what we're reporting for the account balances and making sure that we're actually properly tracking where our dollars are being spent, if they're going into the correct program or what reports might need to be adjusted because we might be over reporting on a grant, especially if we can't understand where that money is coming from.   Carol: Want to ask you a follow up question on that, Morgan because I had seen it on site. You were starting to dig in and you were doing this analysis. Have you had any kind of aha moments as you've been looking at the data, as you're putting information together for Kristen and have some things like just jumped out at you about what you're looking at?   Morgan: Absolutely. And I think the biggest one recently was understanding Match and how match plays into everything that we do, where that money is coming from, how much we're receiving, how the state dollars are matched with federal dollars and how we're reporting that. And then have we been reporting that properly between projects being 100% fed? Have we been mixing state in there and found past reports that that's been happening? And so now we got to go through and correct it and feel like building a foundation of the program has really helped me understand what needs to be done from a financial perspective. Understanding the grants, where this money is coming from, how match plays into that, and then spreading that out across the programs. It was really eye opening to understand that this is what we are managing and this is what we need to fix.   Carol: Yeah, I love that. I do. I love that. Kristen, I just wondered back to you, how is this work of Jacy and Morgan really impacted you in your ability to manage?   Kristen: Gosh, like having the line of sight into the budget and the projections and the out years. What's our reversion potential? What do we have like managing and seeing all of that nearly on a monthly basis is the point we're trying to get to. I remember thinking previously we got these budget packets are beautiful, but wasn't sure like what grant your money is, is coming from. Is this what where does this go? How did how am I. So at a month to month glance it was fantastic. But from an overall big picture of managing the grants over multiple years was a challenge for me and preaches a very specific example. What is being applied? You know, how far am I away and how much is that going to detract from the overall grant? So having some of those conversations and I think as a group, we've said these things out loud and we've tried to figure out, okay, how can we have documents that help all of us understand what's happening? Because not only do we have ourselves right and we are involved in, you know, usually daily, from at least our perspective, you know, probably as well. But we have a line of leadership that's also that we have to report to that doesn't understand and won't ever understand all of these nuances. And we need to be able to say to them in a very clear picture, this is what where we're currently at. And so that building those documents not only for ease for me and my team to understand, but for us to also be able to communicate that up the chain very easily, given all of the strange nuances that we have.   Carol: Yeah, I've really liked your approach because you have included your leadership team in so you know, you've had Brandi in there and your other folks and then how you communicate with your boss Lynn. Like, I love that. And she was participating in parts of our trainings when we were out. And I love how you kind of grabbed this whole group of people because you're all better if everybody understands what's going on.   Kristen: Absolutely. And I'm big on if we don't know, we just need to ask. Nobody's going to get hurt feelings. Let's just be open and honest and try to understand what's happening. And am an over communicator will probably see everybody and their dog on something. And you know, if they get it too many times, that's fine. I'd rather people have it and be aware than not be aware.   Carol: Yeah, that's good stuff. So Jacy, I remember back to our meeting in January and I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this guy is really kind of at the DSA level you were super engaged. And really I felt like. You are so on top of things. How did you get up to speed on your role working with VR? I mean, like in a short amount of time. Think about it. You graduate in 2020, you did UI, you've done all this other stuff and now the VR world. And I feel really confident in your abilities and your learning. How did you do that?   Jacy: First, I just want to kind of say the culture of the Financial Services Administration is a lot of overachieving. We have a lot of smart people in FSA who are just very passionate about the work they do. So when I came in, it was really I wouldn't say there was like downtime or chill time. It was like, we got to figure this out, we got to figure this out. So it was like we in FSA are just very passionate and also our culture is just overachieving. Like we all are striving to be the best version of ourselves, and I think that pushes each other to that limit. Sometimes I work really late, sometimes my boss works really late and sometimes it's not even necessary. Sometimes we don't even have to work late. We're just really passionate about what we do. Yeah, so I'll kind of give you the rundown of when I first started, when I first started and came on like I mentioned, I was supposed to be on a different program. The person in RSA had taken a position in California and left, so I was in a day's notice. I was moved over to RSA and started doing the drawdowns, started doing transfers, started doing loading budgets. So I was really thrown into it. There wasn't a whole lot of training for me. I was just kind of told like, Hey, I need you to load this in our accounting system, or Hey, can you please process this transfer from a different state agency? And I was confused. I was really confused for my first month, probably I was trying and trying to understand, but there was just so much going on that I just had no idea what I was doing. But I was still processing stuff. And then I would say one of the things my boss at the time, I was a financial analyst, he was a senior manager and also a few positions higher than me. He told me like, Hey, we don't have a subject matter expert over VR or RSA and FSA. And at the same time, our counterpart who had been in the position for over a year had just left too. So then Morgan's boss got thrown into the position. So it was two new people with no resources on VR essentially for finance side of things. So obviously the program has people who are very knowledgeable, but the finance side of things, we were two people brand new. So one of the things my boss told me was, okay, you're going to study the regulations every day. That's your daily work. So I would literally go on to the CFR, the Code of Federal Regulations, and I would read it. I would go to VR and I would read, okay, so we need to meet a 15% match requirement. And I would also read about our 21% match requirement and all that's included in there. And then I would go into our kind of reports and stuff and I would say like, okay, so we have appropriation for the entire division, but we use it mostly for VR. We also have a VR appropriation that match and that only takes up half of match. So where's the rest of the match coming from? And we get these different revenue sources and there's just a lot to piece together. And so at the same time, you know, Trevor was asking me questions, I was asking him questions. And I think that really pushed us both to learn. Like we were like, okay, they don't know. And I don't know, like someone needs to know. It was a long process. I wouldn't say I knew anything in my first month. I barely knew anything in my second month. By the third month, I probably had a little bit better understanding, but I'd still go into meetings and be asked questions and I'd say I'd have to look into that. I have no idea. I would literally have the code of federal regulations on for every meeting, and I would literally be typing in code words, trying to figure out like, how do I answer this question? And then eventually, after about six months, I understood those regulations really well and I could explain them. And I think that also really helped me with my reporting because now I knew, okay, this is what I need to look for in our accounting system to pull into this report. I need to pull in these different appropriations. I need to pull in what we call program code in our accounting system. I need to pull these in to get the revenue for our match. I need to get the expenditures. So it took a long time and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't still learning. I'm still like, I think when you guys came, it was eye opening for me. I was like, okay, there's some stuff that we could update or some stuff that we can improve. And I spent a lot of time on RSA still, you know, just trying to get the analysts that we hire on up to speed, but also just trying to understand all that I've learned on that program and try to communicate that to the analysts. And it's not easy and it doesn't work in a day. It doesn't work in a month. It takes multiple months of studying and multiple months of working through problems and issues that come up. I think another big thing was changing how we like we just changed our packet. We present to Kristen every month to include different things and we're still we're trying to work on updates for our fiscal year 2024, trying to get rid of, you know, we had this page and I think it confuses everybody. I don't think it's helpful. So we're trying to fix it so that it's like it just makes a lot more sense. So we're still updating daily and I think that helps my understanding of the finance side of it. You know, when I update these files, when I create these analysis and create these views, it's like, okay, now I understand like what this is actually showing.   Carol: I love that you've done that because like, it's so key. I've told other folks as we worked in other states, part of it is understanding and I'm glad you go to the Electronic code of federal regs. I mean, that's the place to go. Because it's always the most current. There are other versions of things out there, but the eCFR is the best. But you take in just a few minutes every day to read and learn. That's how you learn. I mean, that's how we all learn. You just have to go at it a little bit at a time. You're not going to you know, it is like drinking through a fire hose. You aren't going to absorb it all in one, you know, one day or a month or 2 or 3. It takes time as you're working through the pieces of this program. But you started somewhere, and I think that's such a critical message for folks because I think people get so involved in the transaction or I'm doing the thing I'm doing whatever event, I'm putting the thing together. But you're doing it in abstract because you don't understand what you're putting together. You're following the motions, but you may not have all that deep understanding behind it. And that comes with learning. And so good for you. I mean, I'm really impressed about that. So, Kristen, what do you think is fundamentally made, this whole situation work for you?   Kristen: Well, you just heard the dedication of Jacy and Morgan really been blessed to have individuals that care about the program and wanting to do right and do well because the mission of the program is so important. And so I think we've been blessed in that. We haven't always had people that have been so invested. And so having that and really building that team, feeling a sense of team, like we're all in this together, we're all learning together, it can't be really a us versus them type of thing, which I think is easy to do. And I know that even from program side, it was really hard when my folks got taken, right? It was like, Oh, I kind of took that a little personally. Oh yeah. And it was hard for those team members too. And so how do we continue? How did we keep people together and organized around the work that we do? It's not us, them, it's the people that we serve. And so I think that's been a really key and critical element and everybody can join together in that vision. Again, I said it before, I am a past. I don't know what I don't know and I don't have a problem asking questions. I don't have a problem kind of poking and saying, Well, what about how about I'm kind of more of a vision kind of person. So if I've got something up there and I tell the team all the time, like don't fiscal speak, don't have it. So I'm just going to kind of say what I'm thinking and would this work or how does that work? Have we considered? And so just having the opportunity for those conversations is, I think, really helpful and just setting the culture of no questions, a bad question. We're not here to attack each other. We're just trying to figure out how do we do this better. And I really believe that everybody on the team has that mindset of how do we get better at what we're doing so that we can ultimately better serve our clients?   Carol: Yeah, it's been a great approach. So I want to get to some lessons learned because I know we have listeners and we have them from all over the country and there's folks in the similar situation to you. You know, people have lost their teams that were under the VR purview. They've been moved up to a DSA level. They don't have maybe as intricate levels as you guys all have. But what would you say are a couple lessons you learned that might help people in a similar position in another state? Is there 1 or 2 things and Jacy, I'm going to go to you first on this.   Jacy: Yeah, I think from the finance side of things, federal reporting is not the same agency to agency, program to program on our team. We manage every program for the state or for our agency, which is 90. So we do 90 reports and we get kind of this groove of reporting and just, Oh, this makes sense. The RSA17 is different. It's a different beast. It is not at all similar. The program is not similar to anything Department of Labor. So I think as a support services shared services team, really getting away from trying to manage all your grants the same way, I think we really learned we have to do this differently for each of our programs. We can't have the same process because it just won't work. That's one lesson we really learned and we've been really working on trying to not separate it, but just manage it differently. Another lesson I think I've learned is, you know, I was really shy, quiet when I started. I didn't like reaching out to people. I just felt I was young, just graduated. I felt like I was going to annoy people who've been here a really long time. They're going to be like, Why doesn't he know this? But now that I've been here a while, ask questions, communicate. Like Kristen always says, she thinks she's a pest. I don't think that's being a pest at all. I actually appreciate meeting with people and talking through things because then I learn something, but also problems just get solved so quickly and you communicate. I think problems just grow and grow and grow when they're not mentioned or caught. And even if it's not an issue, but if it's brought up, then we can explain it and then, okay, everyone feels comfortable with this. Now. I really just think those are the kind of two big lessons I've learned.   Carol: I cannot imagine you being shy. I just have to say, I always see you as a person that's very willing to talk. So those are great lessons. Morgan How about you? I'm going to go to you next. Any lessons learned that you could share with other folks in a similar position?   Morgan: I 100% agree with what Jacy said, especially when it comes to communication. Communication is key. Being able to ask questions, being able to know who your points of contact are for different programs. Being able to reach out to them for support, asking them questions just so that you have a good understanding of what you are doing is big. I would say, especially for the first few months I was there with Jacy. I was shy. I didn't know who to reach out to. I heavily relied on the analyst who was in my position prior. And it wasn't until I was able to break that mold and start acting on my own and start reaching out to people, even if it wasn't the right person to reach out to. I now knew the answer to that question and could then sort through problems on my own. Well, not necessarily on my own, with the support of who I needed and the various points of contact are. And the next is take your time. Take your time to learn what we're working with. Take your time to look through the numbers of the budget, to share what questions you have on the numbers. Even if something doesn't quite make sense. I frequently reach out to Jaycee to understand what this program code is and why are we reporting it in this way, and are we missing something if we're not reporting it properly? And so I would say those are my two biggest lessons and something that I try to instill in Zach as he's coming up through the training process as well. Ask the questions that you don't know the answer to and take your time to think about what you're doing.   Carol: I love that. That's really good. You guys are all super good mentors as the new folks come in too. I really appreciate that. Kristen, I'm going to let you have the last words and a couple lessons you've learned.   Kristen: Be involved. Didn't realize the impact as an administrator that I needed to know on the fiscal side and again, coming from program highly involved in what changes do we need, what do we need to do to programmatically to do better. Think fiscal was more of an afterthought. Like the money comes and the money goes and we'll just continue to do our program work. But really understanding what the impacts of the fiscal and the behind the scenes fiscally also advocating, as you heard, I mean, there's just a ton of work. So while there's shared services, but advocating for those direct supports. So Jacy is spread across several teams. But I'm fortunate that we have a direct support team in Morgan and Zach and their upline leadership is apportioned directly supporting. So I think that's given the capacity and the bandwidth for Morgan to be able to understand a little bit more, for Zach to be able to understand a little bit more jargon, ask those questions versus just plugging along to keep the daily lights on. I feel like that's really been super helpful for us. Finally, just, you know, again, both of us have said communicate. We just need to be able to ask the questions of each other and try to get the answers we need and plan forward. Right. It's a continuous improvement. So nobody's expecting it all to be done tomorrow, but continuous improvement and then I will plug the VRTAC. We've never had an opportunity where we can bring on an analyst and have an analyst have, you know, kind of a quick one hour, two hour meeting. Right. You know, never have that opportunity to understand and just get those words out there. Period of performance, you know, grant management, all of those things that as a program person don't understand, I can't really convey very well. So very appreciative of the work and opportunity to have you all help us in expanding our knowledge there.   Carol: Yeah, we appreciate that. We really want to get folks started on the right foot. So well said. Kristen, I really appreciate you all being on with me today and thank you so much. And I'm looking forward to your continued good work. Have a great day.   Kristen: Thank you. You too.   Jacy: Thank you. You too.   Morgan: Thank you.   Music} Speaker1: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Scott Dennis, Assistant Superintendent of the Maryland Division of Rehabilitative Services (DORS), joins Carol Pankow in the VRTAC-QM Studio and tells us about how Maryland DORS increased recruitment and decreased resignations by raising salaries to compete in the regional job market. Learn how they opened the door and proved the case.   Listen Here   Full Transcript:   Music} Speaker1: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: Well, welcome to the Manager Minute. Scott Dennis, assistant superintendent of the Maryland Division of Rehabilitative Services or DORS, is joining me in the studio today. So thanks for joining me. How are things going in Maryland, Scott.   Scott: Things are going well, Carol. I appreciate the opportunity to join today's podcast. Excellent.   Carol: So a little background for our listeners. I did have some familiarity with Maryland DORS. I had worked with Sue Page. She was the former director and a national level. We were on the executive committee together and Sue and I also did a couple panel presentations and that was super fun. And I was so disappointed, you know, when she had retired in '18, I had just worked with her. And then like the next week she goes, I'm retiring. She had sent me a note and I knew you had been her deputy and I think you were named right in 2019 to replace her, was that right?   Scott: Yeah. I came into this position an acting role in 2018. Sue left in June of 2018 and I was named, the Acting. Was permanently placed into the position in January of 2019.   Carol: Gotcha.   Scott: Almost five years now.   Carol: Nice. Well, it was really fun because early in '19 you and I, we were working on that RSA workgroup around Rethinking Performance. So I liked getting to know you and realizing, Oh, you're the fiscal guy too. You were the fiscal guy for the agency. So it's been fun to have that kind of a little lens into your agency. So I know you've had some unique challenges that we're going to get into later. And I understand that there had been some previous runs at trying to get employee wages increased, which, you know, had failed. So this was all prior to you being at the helm. And the state of the recruitment and retention issue nationally has been front and center for every VR agency, I think. And you were able to more recently secure a rather significant employee pay increase. So I am sure our listeners are on the edge of their seats and are anxious to hear, How did you make that happen? So let's dig in. So Scott, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, like how long you've been with DORS and how have you got to the position you hold today? What's kind of the path you took?   Scott: Well, sure. I kind of happened into VR. I was working in a private sector in retail and was looking to do something different than that. And as anybody who's ever worked in retail, there's a lot of long hours that are very odd and so forth. So I was looking to do something different and happened to come across an advertisement in the paper for a director for this program called the Business Enterprise Program for the Blind.   Carol: Oh, wow.   Scott: It kind of struck me. And so I said, Well, I've got a retail background, I've got a business background, let me get my shot at it. And so I put in my application and went through the interview process. And about four months later in 1990, I became the director of the Maryland Business Enterprise Program for the Blind, which was kind of unique because my background was not in the area of either VR or in blindness, but I did bring that business background, which is what the agency at the time was looking for. It was a great experience. The business enterprise programs for the blind bring their own unique challenges and so forth, and trying to operate a business environment inside of a state government. And you've got some real challenges in trying to do stuff fast and an organization is trying to slow you down. But it was a great experience. I was the director for BEP for six years and then our state director, who was Bob Burns at the time, said, I need some help over at DDS. And I went, What's a DDS? Because my focus had been strictly on BEP. And so he sent me over to the Disability Determination Services as the assistant director over there, and I oversaw sort of the administrative side of the DDS and did a number of activities over there. We moved into a much larger facility. We also at that time moved off a state legacy system onto *Levi. And for any of those who have been around a long time and have a program, you understand how far back that went. After about five years of DDS, moved over, back over here to the side of the shop and became the director of business services, which included all the administrative functions of the agency and sort of the financial piece of it. And so I was that until 2018 when I became the assistant state superintendent.   Carol: Very cool. I had no clue. Your days started with BEP. That is amazing. Good for you. You have a definitely a great broad history there. Paint a picture for our listeners about DORS and what agency you live under. What's your designated state agency and how many staff do you have in VR? And you already said you had DDS, but is that service under your purview as well?   Scott: Yeah, we're  housed within the Maryland State Department of Education. We're probably one of the first big divisions of the Maryland State Department of. We were created in 1929 and we at that time the division had two employees and a budget of $15,000. And the only reason I know any of this is because we've got the enacting legislation sitting out in the hall. We had two employees and $15,000 worth of state appropriation at the time. And of the two employees, one was the director of the agency and the other one was his secretary. He was also the counselor at the time as well. So obviously but we've been here ever since. The Division of Rehabilitation Services is comprised of two main programs that we operate are the VR program, obviously, as well as the program. In total, we've got 648 employees in total, of which 416 of them reside in the VR program and the remaining 232 reside in the DDS program. Within that VR program operates an Office of Field Services, which is very much operated the way the general agencies operate and then we have an Office of Blindness and Vision Services, which operate very much as a blind agency. And so we have a director of each one of those offices. They have their own budget and own staff and so forth. Then we also operate our Workforce and Technology center, which does a lot of our training and so forth, as well as a number of community based services out in the field and so forth. So yeah.   Carol: Yeah, you have a large operation. Holy cow. I didn't realize all of that. That's a bunch.   Carol: So let's talk about your unique position as far as the state. You border other states, as does every state. You know, people probably think duh, but there's something special about where your state is positioned in this country, because I always hear people say that you're the training ground for people that move to RSA. Can you talk about like what that geographical situation has played for you as far as your staff?   Scott: Yeah, and appreciate that. It does provide a unique situation for us. We border Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia as well as D.C. We do have some challenges, especially when we're competing with the federal government. And so because of the federal agencies that are housed here, it has become a real challenge because obviously the states don't pay as much as the federal government does, in particular around the Washington, D.C. area. The salaries are much higher than what we as an agency was able to offer. I mean, in some cases we'd have staff leave and they would nearly double their salaries as a result of that. In some cases, you just can't blame them. It has been a challenge having some of that federal government around, you know, as especially the presence of it, you know, large presence and so forth.   Carol: So we all know about this great resignation, you know, that's been talked about in the news. VRs experienced that itself. So how has that impacted what was happening in your agency? What were you facing for vacancy?   Scott: We were facing a high level of resignation. It was almost I hate coming in in the morning and turning on my computer and opening my email to see how many people resigned that particular day or week. And so we got hit pretty hard. We had about 40 counselors and supervisors, so it was about 30% of our workforce. We had vacancies in and that's on the VR side, on the side. You know, for those agencies that operate that, we had 59 vacancies and our examiners, which was about 45% of that. And, you know, the big culprit was they were going elsewhere, both private and public, to organizations that were paying them substantially more money than what we could afford, at least at the time. It hit us bad.   Carol: Well, I know your number's up there. I'd heard from some other directors talking about you like a 60% turnover in counselors and all these crazy numbers. It's hard to imagine how the work is able to get done. So obviously, you've got this geographic situation, you've got the great resignation going on, and you decided to embark on a journey where you wanted to get these wages increased. Can you tell us more about what went into that?   Scott: It was more than just me. I mean, it was a total agency effort. And I'm talking about from the top. In 2021, we got a new state superintendent who was from Texas. And so he was obviously very new, very young and high energy. And so being one of the large divisions and he wanted to have a one on one with me. And so we sat down and we talked. And what he wanted to know what DORS was to begin with and what VR was because he'd always been in education and so forth. And so we, you know, we talked and his first question, you know, real serious question was, what's your biggest challenge? I said, I can't hire, I can't retain because our salaries are so low. And I gave him an example. I said, we've had a recruitment out for three weeks now and we've got one person who is applying and they don't even meet the qualifications down in Montgomery County and Prince George's County, which are two largest counties in the state as far as population, but they're also the two counties that encircle Washington, D.C. And so the obviously the wages down there are extremely high because of the federal government. And so getting any staff at the wages that we were paying was next to impossible. We couldn't recruit, period. That was just the part of the problem. And so, you know, after I told him what the wages were, he even coming from the south out of Texas, even by his standards, the wages were low. So he put together, you know, he tasked the senior management, not only of the Maryland State Department of Education, but also of DORS to start working on a salary adjustment. Obviously, with something like this, it takes all hands on deck because it's just not one person who's doing all the work and guiding this. And so he tasked us and so my staff started doing feelers out to other states to find out what they're going for. We looked at the federal government and some of the positions that they were hiring for that had sort of equal entry level requirements. We looked at our counties. Some of our counties were paying way more than what we were. And so we took all that into consideration in looking at what is it that we wanted our salaries to look like. The other piece of this that was probably sort of the saving grace for us. Our counselors are in a classification series in this state that's only unique to DORS. It doesn't cross other state agencies or anything. And because of that, our Department of Budget and Management allowed us to do what they call an off cycle adjustment. Typically when they take a look at their salary adjustments and so forth and see whether they need to rescale them, they're looking across all the state agencies. They've got to balance who's got money and who doesn't, money when they start to raise salaries for, you know, let's say, an office secretary. Well, every agency has an office secretary. So they've got to have to balance this all out. When they say, okay, we're going to raise the office secretary's levels, well, they only had to look at us. They didn't have to compare us to anybody else, which made it a lot easier. And because a lot of our salaries, the way the state funds us, they put most of our state match dollars into our case services budgets. And so we've got just a small amount that actually goes towards salary. And so when we kind of pulled this together and say, okay, where can we go with this? We said, Hey, for a little bit of investment from the state side, we've got more than enough appropriation and federal funding over here. We can support this without any problem. So the meeting started in September. We kind of got going in earnest just after the Christmas holidays. We spent basically from October through December polling just gathering information. And then in from about January on, we started writing this up, getting everything put together. And then by late April we had the package ready together and we presented it to our Office of Budget and Management and Director of State personnel, and we suggested a threshold that we thought we could go to. They didn't quite agree with that. So there was some negotiating with the Department of Budget and Management, but we landed on a on a figure that was acceptable that they could live with that wasn't so far off that they were going to have problems with other state agencies as well, once they learned about what we had done. Our superintendent really wanted to push our salaries. He wanted it to be the highest in the nation.   Carol: Wow!   Scott: And he was pushing very hard to get us there. Didn't land there.   Carol: So how far did you get? How high did you get to go?   Scott: We got a substantial pay increase for them. We got, depending upon where they started, it was well over 20% pay increase for our counselors and examiners, which really stabilized it. I mean, it kind of gives you an idea, our salaries, starting salaries for what we call our VR counselor ones, which are individuals who come in with just a bachelor's degree, no experience. So we kind of have to build them up. We were starting at like 41,000 between 41 and 42. Our VR 2-counselors are individuals who have come in with a master's degree, no experience or some experience. And they were starting around 44,000 at the time and we were able to get them up. I mean, today our starting salary for counselor one is 57,000 and a couple of months with the new fiscal year will go to 58. Our twos were starting them at 60,000 and they'll go up to 62 in July. And then we have a technical specialist series and these are for individuals who again, have master's degrees, have been here a couple of years. They're starting in the upper 60s and low 70s now.   Carol: Yeah, good for you. That's pretty amazing. So were there other positions included? So it's not like your examiners or counselors. Were there any other types of positions in the agency include?   Scott: Well, we had to go back and do a readjustment because it affected both our counselors and our supervisors because it's a series of counselors, one, twos, technical specialists and supervisors. Then we have our regional supervisors and our regional directors. Well, because of it went up by grades and steps. Basically our regional supervisors were making the same thing as our office supervisors now. And so we had to raise them. When we raised the regional supervisors, they were making the same thing as the regional directors. So we had to raise the regional directors, but it had to happen over the course of time. The first push was the counselor series and so forth, and then we had to come back about a month later and do the rest of the others and so forth. So yeah, it's been sort of a work in progress and we still have some other classifications to take a look at as we kind of move down this path.   Carol: I wondered about that. If you had some work left to do.   Scott: Yeah, yeah, we do. We have to kind of go back. I mean, our support staff, we've got to go back and we've already started that work already to start looking at that group as well, because again, those classifications go across all state agencies, so we have no authority to raise those salaries. So we have to go back and do what we call a reclass them, which means we have to take a look at their classifications, see whether or not it still fits the job duties and so forth. So that's the only way I can raise that series, those individuals up. I just can't do what we did with the counselors. And in some cases, those salaries and all that are all controlled by the union.   Carol: Yes.   Scott: And so you've got to kind of have to work through all that stuff. So those positions take a little bit longer to kind of get through.   Carol: That makes good sense. So how long did that take you for this?   Scott: The first like I said, we started in 20. We started in September when I first met and we started in September. Late October.   Carol: Was that 2021?   Scott: Right.   Carol: Okay.   Scott: And then the pay raise went into effect on July 1st of 2022. So it took us nine months to kind of get it all put together and work through all the processes and doing the negotiation and so forth. So yeah.   Carol: And it's interesting because you are a union state as well. I came from a union state too, so there's extra things that go into play because I know some other folks have been successful across the country, but they didn't have that added complexity to it. So it was good to see you were able to do this in that environment.   Scott: Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things is even though we're part of a union, because the series is strictly DORS, we brought the union in once we had kind of got everything kind of worked through and said, okay, here's what we've done. They could have said, Yeah, no, we don't want you getting a pay raise. We worked at it that way just because and we had to cross even within our parent agency, if our parent agency, the Department of Education had a classification series and some of the stuff that they did, this would have never happened.   Carol: right.   Scott: Because of that uniqueness, we were able to get it done.   Carol: Yeah, the stars were aligned for you, for sure. So how have these increases impacted your staff recruitment and retention?   Scott: Oh, yeah. Big. I mean, it's like I mentioned earlier, we couldn't find staff or if we did, our supervisors and directors were making the decision of, I got to have a body, and so in some cases you're just getting a warm body. This has nothing to do with the person or anything like that. But they were probably individuals that this may not have been the best fit. But because you're sitting there as a supervisor and you've got 3 or 4 empty caseloads sitting on your desk, at least if I can get them in and get them do some work that's less work that I've got to do and so forth. So we were making some decisions on trying to sort of balance whether this was the right fit for people, but also looking at the number of people that are actually applying for the job was extremely low. I mean, we might come up with 4 or 5 individuals that make like really good candidates. And then when you made salary offer to them, they went, Uh, no thanks. In some cases we actually had made salary offers to individuals who had interned with us and wanted to work for us. And then we made the salary offer and they went, no thanks.   Carol: They're like, I can go work at Target instead.   Scott: You're exactly right. Because the salary, especially down in Prince George's and it is extremely high. Maryland has the highest median income in the country. You know, it's driven by about 3 to 4 counties in this state that drive that. And so that kind of shows you how tough it is in some other jurisdictions to find people and retain people is extremely difficult. Like I said, you know, one of those recruitments was just before we put out the salary change where we had gotten one individual. We got the permission to start publishing the new salary and we went from 1 to 40 in about two weeks.   Carol: Wow. Good for you.   Scott: For example, we had a recruitment out for this for about a month and maybe have gotten 25 to 30 applications. We re-advertised and got 170 in 3 weeks. So we went from 30 people to well over 200. So it obviously had a tremendous impact. In fact, I just had a regional director in talking with me earlier this week, talking about the quality of individuals that we're now seeing, because I haven't seen this high level of quality of people that we've gotten in years. So yeah, the impact has been immediate.   Carol: That's terrific. Have you had any staff want to come back? Maybe that left?   Scott: Well, actually, funny you asked that. We went back out to we had several staff. members who left 3 or 4 months earlier, and these were good staff. Sometimes you have staff leave and you go, thank God. Other times, you know, you see staff go out the door and you go, What a loss. And so we had about a half a dozen staff that had recently left that were sort of, oh, man, I hate to lose them. And so we reached back out to them and we were able to get four out of those six back. We almost got five back. But when they went to talk to their new employer, they went, Oh, we'll give you a pay raise. So she ended up getting a pay raise out of it because we told her what we were going to give her and they went higher. That's the benefit of a private sector situation versus, you know, state government type of situation. So we were able to get some seasoned staff back really quick. I mean, literally within weeks after the new pay plan went into effect. So yeah, it's stabilized. I'm seeing right now what I would consider sort of normal turnover. Now you're back down to 5 to 6% turnover rate versus 25 to 30% turnover rate. It's really made a made a difference in the world. It's stabilized the agency. We have a wait list. We had to basically shut it down because we had so many vacancies. I mean, we have had one and we were bringing people off the wait list. We just had to literally just shut it down. We couldn't handle. The individuals that were coming in the door that met the criteria for Category one. We were struggling with that along with our pre-employment. We just couldn't handle. We couldn't do it. So we shut it down.  Once we got stable. Our regional directors and director of Office Field services came to me and said, We can handle bringing people off the waitlist now. And so we've been able to start bringing people back off the waitlist now.   Carol: Good for you. That is terrific news is a big win all the way around. I just wondered if you had any advice for other directors and leaders across the country as there may be interested in doing something like this in their state. What advice would you give them?   Scott: The biggest advice is you've got to get buy in from your senior secretary, superintendent, whoever is your most senior, most person in the agency, because at the end of the day, they're the ones that are really going to have to go to bat and particularly when you start dealing with the counterparts over at your budget office who are always going, Oh, that's going to cost us a dollar. No, I don't think so. That's where you really need to have sort of that political clout to kind of push some of this stuff through, because it's not, it's not easy. And again depending upon the environment, to some degree, we benefited from the environment itself because obviously we weren't the only state agency losing people. And so the state, I think, recognized that they had to do something. Because even other state agencies around us couldn't hire people because of the state wage. And so I think we kind of hit it right at the right time, so we were able to do it. So I think the combination of two. One, we had a superintendent who had no problem to go banging on the secretary of budget management's door and say, I need this in order for this program to function and opening the door and then letting the rest. of the team go to work and prove the case.   Carol: I Like that you said that, prove the case. So if folks wanted to reach out to you. What would be the best way for them to contact you? Because a lot of times our listeners will say, I want to talk to Scott Dennis about what he just said.   Scott: Yeah, I mean, anybody can reach out to me. My email address is Scott Dot Dennis (D e n n i s) @maryland.gov.   Carol: Excellent. I really appreciate you joining me today and congratulations on the win. I just wish you continued success as you're working through your other positions. This is very cool. Thanks, thanks much.   Scott: Not a problem. Thank you, Carol.   {Music} Speaker1: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!