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Merritt: Thank you all for coming. This is a great turnout for our first, of
what we hope will be a series. A little background about myself, I am giving
you this only because it really plays into the Raison d'être
for this series. I am actually a lawyer by training and I worked at
Verrill Dana for a number of years and then I was in-house counsel
doing employment law for UNUM Provident Corporation for a few years.
Then I went out on my own and did human resource and
employment law consulting and my business transition
through a long story, which I won’t bore you with,
and I now do more marketing and communications on socially responsible and sustainable initiatives.
I started working with Larry about three and a half years
ago helping educate employers on the benefits of
hiring people with disabilities. When I began doing this work with Larry,
what I noticed over time was what seemed to be a pretty big gulf
between the private sector or for profit businesses and the providers.
My feeling that I sort of kept coming back to was if we can bridge these two,
if we could open up these communication pathways, I think a lot more effective things could
come of and better placements and better communication
and better collaboration between the for profit and the non-profit.
Hopefully we can sort of begin this dialogue and move this conversation forward, so there
is better communication and collaboration. Albert: My name is Linda Albert and I am currently
the director of human resources at the Portland Public Library. My background is a little
bit unusual in that I was in the rehab world for twenty years and worked with all different
caseloads of folks, mental health, and physical disabilities. I worked a lot with development
disabilities. I found myself in a role as an executive director of a private agency
where I started to do a lot of human resource activities. That was how I made the transition
into more of a human resources role. So right now in a role, in a non-profit so that is
a key thing that is a little bit different and a little bit the same about what we are
going to talk about today. I am also active with the Human Resources
Association of Southern Maine, so I am more involved with a lot more business types of
human resources folks. There I am the community and external relations board member. In that
role, one of the most fun things that I have done is be involved with interviewing skill
training at the Maine Correctional Center for inmates who do the work ready program.
So that has been great and it has been a great way to for me to kind of put my hand in working
with people who have more of a hidden, what you think of as a hidden problem in the work
force. I am going to give you a little bit of a context
of the library because as I said we are non-profit. We are not a city department, we are a private,
non-profit corporation and as such, you know, we have a mission. For us, part of our mission
is to serve everybody if we can. Part of that is also, we feel strongly about serving people
who are children, people who are students, the whole gamut, rich/poor alike, so we are
a good place to hit up for what you are interested in, because I think we are more open minded
in some ways. Novak: I am Joe Novak, I am the School to
Work Coordinator for the Portland Schools. I am responsible for trying to develop work
and work training situations for the entire gamut of the special education population
of the City of Portland. Having been a classroom teacher for most of my career, I have more
than thirty. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to work with a huge diversity of the
population that you find in a large school system like Portland. So I have developed
situations for non verbal wheelchair students in the functional academics programs to the
Governor Baxter School for the Deaf, Sub School at Portland High School, the Behavior School
at West, the Sail Program, which is for students on the autistic scale at Portland High School
and everything else in between. So I am out knocking on a lot of doors in different situations.
One of the things that I started in with at this job seven years ago was to pick up and
sustain an ongoing relationship with Linda and the Portland Public Library. I think we
certainly been able to sustain it and I think over time grow that relationship and maybe
the might be helpful to some of out there today.
Merritt: Really a large part why we felt this might be productive or we hoped this would
be productive, I also wanted to just kind of throw out there quickly, I am really interested
in hearing what would be helpful for you, what information do you feel like you want
from the private sector that we can somehow get for you? Whether it is in the form of
bringing in employers or whether it is the form of a presentation on marketing. You know,
a couple of the topics that we had bounced around one was sort of how do you develop
business connections and network with businesses? What are some good opportunities and some
ways to go about doing that? We might talk a little bit about some of the online resources.
Another one that kind of came up throughout today’s conversation is what are some of
the business, what is the business case for employment of people with disabilities and
how can you really make that in a compelling way. That is sort of near and dear to my heart.
But any other ideas that you have, you know, whether you want to write them down and give
them to us or send an email, I don’t know, shout them out right now. But we really, I
hope this has been helpful. It has been great from our perspective. There has been really
a lot of great discussion and, you know, we hope to continue more. Now I will hand, I
won’t hand the mike over. But the suspense will end now with Vanessa.
Vanessa: Well first I want to thank you Merritt, Joe and Linda for attending today.
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