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What I like best about my job is interacting with the people,
talking to various types of people that come in,
looking for jobs, just the overall atmosphere of the place.
My name is Chad Christman,
I’m the IT administrator of Goodwill Industries of the Inland Northwest.
What I like about working computers is
they’re never the same…
"I.T. this is Chad."
they’re always something different,
so you always gotta be thinking outside the box.
When he first came to Goodwill,
he had never worked before.
And from day one, Chad was very interested in computers.
I used to always take computers apart, put ‘em together,
try to make ‘em work, lot of the older ones.
So we started working with our IT department
to see if he could perform some assessment tasks within the
computer area.
He loved it.
To further my education,
I got the A+ and the NetPlus certifications.
An IT position came open at Goodwill.
I talked to my job coach at the time;
she referred me to go ahead and apply for the job,
I applied and they asked me if I wanted to take the position.
I started as the IT administrator in 2005.
My current job responsibilities is taking care
of the servers, the outlying areas,
backup, SharePoint, any employees’ computers,
and then overlooking the departments.
Chad was born on May 28th.
And he was a very healthy baby.
I sat him into a walker and he was walking
around the house in a walker.
And that’s the last time he walked.
Chad was four months old when he was in the car accident.
What I know now about the accident is that I was
sitting in the passenger seat on my mom’s lap and we got T-***
and I got thrown out of the car window
and landed underneath a tire.
The doctors, they worked pretty hard to keep him alive.
He had bruising of the optic nerve and went blind for a while.
He had broken ribs.
I struggled when he was a baby to keep him alive.
He got pneumonia a lot.
We were sent to Shriners Hospital.
They told me that Chad was going to be in the wheelchair,
that he was paralyzed.
He couldn’t walk.
And I looked at the doctors and I said,
you know, I don't care.
I've got him.
What I was like as a kid, I liked to do whatever the other kids were doing.
I hung out with a lot of skateboarders,
So, we'd go down to the skate park.
I'd do the ramps. I'd jump off curbs.
The Medical Rehab Consultant had told us that
Chad has a brain injury.
So he couldn’t learn.
He couldn't get a driver’s license.
He couldn’t graduate from high school,
But he proved everybody wrong.
Fundamentally, Goodwill looks beyond
disabilities and focuses on the abilities of an individual when
they come in for services.
Well, Goodwill, they’ve helped design the cart for me.
we designed it around the wheelchair,
to where, when I pull up to it, I have little drop pins that I
drop down into, wheels a little offset,
that way they fit good with the chair.
And it helps me transport monitors, computers, etc.
He’s very knowledgeable with Windows operating systems and
the server environment.
And, you know, he’s helped develop all that.
And he has been ...
works by my side in developing the server system that we have
in place.
And he backs me up…
ATVing with Andy is just fun to get in the outdoors, get out in the woods,
something that’s totally different from in the building
at Goodwill, and just...
it gives me freedom.
And there’s no phones, no wires, no computers.
It's nice to get away.
I’m proud of him.
I couldn’t be prouder.
Because I think he's succeeded a lot ...
from where he was and where people has told him he
would never do it.
Well, he’s showed people he can do it.
Winning this award makes me feel proud,
successful, like I’ve made it.
I’m on the right road, I’m headed towards where I need to be.
Chad’s story is certainly a fundamental
transformation from student to teacher.
And that in itself is the embodiment of Dr. Helms’s vision
of helping people help themselves and ultimately
helping others.