Teri: As adults we have an onus to work.
Hoby: Right.
Teri: We have a right to work. Our quality of life, for you, for me, my quality of life, my ego has a lot to do with the work I do, with how work affects me. And to dismiss a whole population of people, 70% of people that are visually impaired, we have a responsibility to create opportunities, whether it’s within the NIB network or within the community.
Welcome to the Heard & Empowered podcast presented by the National Industries for the Blind. You’re not just a listener here, you’re a catalyst for change. Whether you’re blind, visually impaired or an ally, this is your ultimate resource for building a fulfilling career and an enriching life. We’re on a mission to shift perceptions, open hearts and minds and unlock unparalleled job opportunities for the BVI community. Ready to be heard and empowered? Let’s welcome our host, Dr. Hoby Wedler.
Hoby: This is a special episode recorded at the 2023 National Industries for the Blind Conference in Washington DC. Please excuse any audio quirks as we capture these conversations, but we guarantee the wisdom is pure gold.
Hello, and welcome back to the Heard & Empowered podcast. And today, I have the absolute pleasure of chatting with Teri Shirk. Teri, welcome.
Teri: Thank you, great to be here.
Hoby: It’s great to have you on the show. Now, as you all know, this podcast is provided to you by National Industries for the Blind, so Teri’s work is very much aligned with National Industries for the Blind. Can you tell us a little bit of what you do right now?
Teri: Sure. So, I am the president and CEO at Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Cincinnati, Ohio. And we are a NIB affiliated agency.
Hoby: Awesome.
Teri: So we have a lot of different product lines, but some of that is AbilityOne work that we do with NIB.
Hoby: Perfect. Well, this show is all about getting people excited about what careers are available, what options are available, but before we get into that I’d love to just hear a little bit about your background and sort of how you came to work at the Cincinnati Association for the Blind as president and CEO, if you don’t mind.
Teri: Yeah. Well, I’ve been at CABVI for two and a half years. And I keep saying it’s like coming home for me because I graduated from college with a degree in psychology. You know, you either go get a master’s degree or you luck into something, and I happened to have a friend of a friend of a friend who was looking for somebody at Clovernook Center for the Blind in Cincinnati.
Hoby: Okay.
Teri: So, I went there at 22 years old and started on their work floor as a job coach, helping people work better and smarter and be more efficient. And stayed for 12 years and left as their vice president of industrial operations.
Hoby: Love it.
Teri: And then since then, just the whole 35 years of nonprofit management, mostly working with people with disabilities in workforce development. And then a long stint over at the Alzheimer’s Association, working with people who needed support because of dementia affecting their families.
Hoby: Wow. So, you’ve spent a lot of time working in the disability sector, the nonprofit disability sector.
Teri: Yes.
Hoby: And it’s interesting, it sounds like you got into it right out of college by being introduced through a few degrees of separation to the blind community. And this job is really the most recent job you’ve had since that job immediately after college with the blind, is that correct?
Teri: Yes, and it feels like every piece that I kind of collected along the way goes into being the CEO at CABVI.
Hoby: I love it.
Teri: So it feels very comfortable, quite diverse. But I’ve counted myself as very lucky coming into – I worked in group homes in college with guys that had come out of the institutions, and that was my entrance into this.
Hoby: Totally different world.
Teri: It was. What was great about working with folks who are visually impaired at Clovernook is the importance of work that is part of the culture around people with visual impairments. And I always tell that story, what I always heard is people coming back from the wars, World War 1 and 2, with visual impairments, and the advocacy for work for these guys, right, that came back.
And so I got very early, kind of indoctrinated, just like my philosophy set in everybody has a right to work that wants to work. And that has really carried through everything, including what I’m doing now.
Hoby: I love that so much.
So a lot of our listeners are not necessarily super familiar with the model of how agencies like the Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired work. So maybe just if you can help me educate our listeners on what agencies like yours provide, both from a work opportunity perspective and from what we call rehabilitation training, so training blind people to live independent and prosperous and successful lives.
Teri: Right. So, first and foremost, we have a mission to empower people who are visually impaired. And so independence is available. And that comes in a multitude of facets, one being our services, right?
Hoby: Sure.
Teri: So you have to be able to get on a bus and get where you need to go. You need to be able to live independently in your home, whether that is for older adults losing their vision being able to use their microwave still or for younger kids having adaptive equipment on their computers so that they, you know, that’s for everybody, but the entrance point is different.
Hoby: Sure.
Teri: So we do orientation mobility.
Hoby: And that’s really teaching people how to use a cane, right? Or a guide dog to get around.
Teri: Correct. Right. We do rehabilitation therapy. So in your home, independent living kind of skills.
Hoby: Sure, how to cook, how to clean.
Teri: Right, how to cook, how to clean, how to do that in adaptive ways. We have services for children, recreation and music therapy where we help them to use the sight that they do have in their world through music. We have low vision clinics, so what we say is when your glasses don’t work for you anymore, you come to see our doctor, our occupational therapist, our vision therapist and get the tools that can help you remain independent.
Hoby: Sure.
Teri: We have social workers on staff and then we have a whole department that is adaptive technology. So that’s mostly anything from how to use your smartphone to how to use JAWS, which reads the screen for you.
Hoby: Sure, of a computer.
Teri: Or sometimes it just makes it bigger.
Hoby: Yeah.
Teri: And we are getting ready to embark on – We have just done a million dollar renovation in our building, which was funded by grants and by the federal government, actually, through Senator Sherrod Brown helped us get some funds. And we’re building a computer training center and looking at workforce development, so helping people find jobs in the community.
Hoby: That’s amazing.
Teri: So then the other side of our mission, so that’s all of our vision services, right?
Hoby: Sure, and that’s more of what we would call the agency side, right?
Teri: Yes. And we also do radio reading services, which is where we have podcasts. So we have volunteers, hundreds of volunteers that come in and do anything from read the Wall Street Journal to novels. And that’s 24 hours a day programming for people.
Hoby: That’s amazing.
Teri: Yep.
Hoby: And how does one subscribe to that programming?
Teri: They would call us or a like agency. So when I worked at Goodwill in Dayton, we also had radio reading. So you’re going to reach out through radio reading to find your local and they’ll send your radio and that radio then has 24 hour access to multiple channels and you can listen to about anything you want.
Hoby: That’s fantastic. So really, for those of us who might have a hard time reading print, and particularly seniors who sort of lose their sight a little bit later on, maybe don’t have the time or the desire necessarily to learn Braille, they have full access to audio.
Teri: Yes.
Hoby: Audio books, audio text, whatever they want.
Teri: So that’s our program services. And then the other piece of empowering people is employment. So we have a multitude of ways we do that. We have our AbilityOne manufacturing, which is a set aside program through the government procurement that we work with NIB. And there we do tape conversion, so take a roll of tape that’s about the size of your car and slice and dice that down into a roll of duct tape that you would use at your home, right? So the government buys tape from us.
And we do rolls of paper. So same thing, giant roll of paper and take that down to like if you go to the doctor and they’ve got an exam paper and they slide that up on a booth there, that’s the kind of paper we make.
Hoby: And all this work is done, and we’re going to hear more about it in a second, but all this work is done by people who are blind or visually impaired.
Teri: Correct. In our manufacturing plant, 88% of our direct labor are people who are visually impaired.
Hoby: That is so cool. And it must make you feel so proud.
Teri: It’s amazing. And there’s nothing like bringing somebody through. So you’ve got these giant pieces of machinery and, like I said, it’s slicing and dicing tape. So there’s knife banks and there’s whirling parts and there’s giant rolls of tape. And here are two guys who are totally blind who are machine operators. And we’re a Teamster shop, so it’s a union shop, they pay very well. And they’re in there competitively employed, loving what they do. You know, I think of Dave, he’s been there, I think, 13 or 15 years as a machine operator and totally blind and he’s running this giant, giant knife bank machine. And people are just stunned.
Hoby: Right.
Teri: Now, I said for me I started this when I was 22 years old, so I’ve been surrounded my whole life by people who are blind. So I don’t even, you know, it doesn’t necessarily faze me anymore, right?
Hoby: Which is cool.
Teri: Which is kind of cool, right? It’s kind of like that’s the way it should be, because if we say everybody has a right to be working in the job they want to be working at and having a good quality of life, it shouldn’t be shocking to see somebody working.
Hoby: I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with this whole thing of expectations, of low expectations because people are afraid of losing their eyesight, I think. And they immediately put themselves in the shoes, so if you tie your shoes in the morning, oh, that’s amazing, you know?
Teri: Correct.
Hoby: But these are high expectations. I mean, come on, it’s amazing. And it’s a great way for the rest of society to learn what’s possible when we can welcome them into our facilities.
I didn’t mean to digress there, but I just wanted to understand that a lot of your workforce, 88% you said, is blind or visually impaired.
Teri: Yeah, on our manufacturing floor. And then we have –
Hoby: So you cut down tape and paper?
Teri: Yes.
Hoby: That’s one of the manufacturing services.
Teri: We do a good bit of assembly out there.
Hoby: Okay.
Teri: And then aside from our manufacturing, we also wanted to diversify into things that are more knowledge-based jobs, like digital skills, right? So where you’re using a computer or you’re doing customer service. So we have a custom sign shop, which is sort of a combination of those two things. And we have an office supply company and a furniture design and sales company, so that’s VIE Ability.
Hoby: Okay. That’s all by AbilityOne?
Teri: Yeah, VIE Ability.
Hoby: When you say VIE Ability, you mean –
Teri: That’s the name of our, that’s the brand of our office supply company.
Hoby: Okay, got it. And are those products manufactured also by your staff?
Teri: We do sell a good bit of AbilityOne products. So there are fifty-something producing agencies in NIB, and a lot of them make office supplies under the AbilityOne program. So we sell those.
Hoby: Got it.
Teri: But we also work with several large distributors too. Basically we have right now 60,000 products on our office supply board on our website. We have several State of Ohio contracts, one of them being for office supplies. So what we say to the state is that we will employ people with vision loss to do that. So in our office supply company, our director is visually impaired, our manager of customer experience is visually impaired, all of our customer service reps, our operation specialists, they’re all people who have lost their sight.
Hoby: Sure.
Teri: We have, one of them was an elementary school teacher, one was a warehouse manager, one was a nurse. Our employee of the year that’s here with us today was a nurse and lost her vision. And now they have new careers in office supplies.
Hoby: Wow, I love it. Talk about paying it forward and giving back and saying, look, we’re going to put our money where our mouth is, for lack of a better expression. If we look at that, we can see the director is blind.
Teri: Yes.
Hoby: So anyone who reports into that person has no excuse, they’re working for someone who is blind.
Teri: Yep, and he grew up with us, basically. He came to us in his 20s and he’s worked with us from a customer service rep, he’s grown that business. So we’re indebted to him and his knowledge.
Hoby: The number of stories I hear, Teri, within the NIB agencies of upward mobility just makes me so happy to see people start in one place and if they’re consistent and they’re persistent and they stick with it long enough, they just keep climbing the ladder.
Teri: Yep. I actually have talked to two separate CEOs in the last two days that are people that started – I just talked to a guy from AVRE in New York, Kenny. He started, he was telling me about on their production floor when he was in college. And now he’s their CEO.
Hoby: Wow.
Teri: So, I mean, that happens too. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one other venture we have, which was last year in May of 22, we purchased a freight brokerage, Route Transportation, and we’ve since created the CABVI Logistics. And we are working with a number of the NIB agencies to move freight for them.
Hoby: I love it.
Teri: And the goal is twofold. We said we wanted to go find a company to purchase and we had two goals and a caveat, right? So we wanted to create jobs for people who are visually impaired. We wanted those to be knowledge-based jobs, career advancement jobs. And we wanted to create dividends to go back and revenue to go back into our mission.
Hoby: Sure. And go back to fund sort of the agency side.
Teri: Yes, right. And so that’s what this logistics company is doing for us. We have an employee there, Porsha, who is visually impaired and she’s a load coordinator. So her job is to talk to truck drivers all day and make sure that they’re picking up the loads and dropping them off and they’re on time. And it’s a great professional job for her and she’s thrilled. And all their jobs are remote. So they’re all from home, so no transportation barrier. And all of their –
Hoby: Ironic with a transportation company.
Teri: Yeah. And their systems are all Salesforce based, so they’re very accessible.
Hoby: Very accessible, Salesforce does a great job at that.
Teri: Yeah. Yeah, so we’re very diverse. And like I said, the goal is independence, whether that is in learning a new bus route, using your microwave, or having a job that you love and a good quality of life.
Hoby: And let’s talk about, you mentioned something very key, which is these work from home opportunities. These opportunities that people have not to have to go into an office because transportation can be a barrier, either by skill level or by time it takes or frankly by cost.
Teri: Correct.
Hoby: So what are – You mentioned the Freight Brokerage is all remote, work from home. What other knowledge-based jobs are work from home?
Teri: Well, we’ve converted most of our office supply folks who are now working at home at least three days a week, even our management. We have a remote work policy, there is a qualifier in there also that says if you are visually impaired, we will work with you more even to allow you to work from home because we understand the barriers that exist. My commute is anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour, and that’s nothing compared to the buses or –
Hoby: Paratransit.
Teri: Paratransit can be, you know, I know. Or there’s all kinds of times that you come over there, you come out of work and then people are sitting there waiting for their Paratransit at 5:30 at night.
Hoby: Right.
Teri: And we would love to eliminate that. It’s kind of hard to do that with somebody that’s manufacturing tape, they kind of have to be there. But we’re being really, really open with all our employees, but particularly those who, like you said, time, money, effort, lack of control of your life. You’ve got to figure you might get home in an hour, you might get home in four.
Hoby: Right.
Teri: So we want to eliminate that for folks. And so that’s why the route business was so appealing.
Hoby: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And one of the things that we think about here in trying to get people to go out there and seek employment is the work from home opportunity, because a lot of times, quite frankly, families would feel uncomfortable about someone crossing a street or taking a bus. So I think that work from home opportunities are a really good first step for someone who wants to step out there into the workforce, acquire a job, but not have to go in five days a week.
Teri: Yeah. And I think that’s where, you know, Covid gave us a few gifts, right? It gave us some unwanted gifts, but one of the gifts that I think that it gave to the community of people who are blind is the fact that remote work, video conferencing are just standard operating now, right?
Hoby: Right.
Teri: And so right after Covid, when our office supply company was growing, we’d always had everybody come into the office every day. And we had a woman who lived in a very rural community who had been saying for two years, I’m going to move into Cincinnati. But she had to move her family. She had to leave where she was comfortable, her community where she had support and resources and move into the city. And she just could never make that break.
But we really wanted to employ her. And we said, okay, well, let’s try it. And so she works full-time from home out in Adams County, which is, again, pretty rural. There’s no transportation. It would take her hours to get in every day. Same with our contract management services that we do for the armed forces, most of those are now remote. They went remote during Covid and the Air Force and DLA and the other branches have let those people continue to work at home and not have to get on base and take a taxi and take a bus and take all those things.
Hoby: Well, and the other aspect of that is that it’s all computer work. Why would you need to be in an office other than the positivity that comes from creating that culture with your colleagues? But you can do that on Zoom now.
Teri: Yep. And that’s what’s so great that we did get that. We did get that because I’ll tell you, I worked at home for three years when I was working for Alzheimer’s, and that was from 2015 to 17. I never took one Zoom call, not one, nothing. And then all of a sudden, three years later you’re living on a video call. And that would have made my life so much better at home had I been on those.
Hoby: And not just on a regular phone.
Teri: Yeah. But it’s how quickly the pace of change due to Covid, really, I think, is what happened.
Hoby: Well, I am just so excited and impressed with the fact that 88% of your workforce is blind or visually impaired, and that you are so dedicated at Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired to bringing people back to work and employing them. Because it’s an amazing thing, we can train someone with the skills that they need for success, right? But then if we also fill in the rest of the package by providing them with the means, the rewarding means to live that independent and self-independent, both from a getting around perspective and from a financial perspective, it’s just remarkable.
Teri: Right, thank you.
Hoby: And my hat is off to you, Teri, for the great work that you’re doing there.
Teri: Well I’ll tell you what, the whole NIB network is, you know, and SourceAmerica, really committed.
Hoby: Just amazing.
Teri: Yeah.
Hoby: Yeah. And just so that people know, there’s a program called AbilityOne, which is a governmental program. And National Industries for the Blind basically assists, it’s called a central nonprofit that assists companies, agencies like Teri’s to get their products sold into the federal government. And then the other side of that is SourceAmerica, which is sort of the other side of this, which really provides those services, now mostly using manufactured goods by agencies that work with National Industries for the Blind.
Teri: Correct.
Hoby: So one of the things that I hear a lot, and my goal with this podcast and the goal of NIB by working with us to put together this podcast is to try to lower the unemployment rate of the blind, which as we know is 70%.
Teri: Right.
Hoby: Way too high. If we look at the unemployment rate for the general population, it’s less than five and we’re at 70, it just doesn’t compute. So when I talk to people about getting jobs and wouldn’t it be great if you were out working and earning gainful employment, what I hear so often is my benefits are too good to start working.
Teri: Yeah.
Hoby: So I want to know from you, how do we break down this paradigm? And how do we tell people and convince people that work is a good thing?
Teri: Yeah, I hear that. I mean, if you’ve been told your whole life, you know, social security, you’ve got to have your social security. And our system is broken, right? You lose that, it’s very hard to just – You can’t just say, oh, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on.
Hoby: No, it takes years. I speak from experience.
Teri: What is good for people with visual impairments is they need to understand that they can earn, what is it this year, twenty four hundred and some change a month before their social security disability is impacted, right?
Hoby: That’s a big deal because that’s almost $30,000 a year.
Teri: Yeah. And people forget that, right? So we are working, and I think a lot of agencies – So we offer very good competitive jobs. It is in an environment where a lot of people are visually impaired, but it’s also very integrated. When we say 88%, that’s of our direct labor. There’s also, it’s about half of our overall workforce. But we offer very good quality jobs, again, across a whole array. And those start at all different places. And one of the things we used to say, well, you have to work full time. Well, we’ve erased that and we say, look, we’re going to meet you where you are.
So I have a young guy that we’ve been working with lately in his late 20s, he’s not worked in years. When you lose your vision in your late teens or early 20s, that can have all kinds of effects, right? On fear and concern about being out, right? And people end up not building a career, right?
Hoby: Right.
Teri: Or they take a job making minimum wage and they say, I’m just going to keep making minimum wage and they don’t learn the skills then to move up, right?
Hoby: Exactly.
Teri: So we want to work with people where they’re at, and understanding that social security is important until you can help them break through, right?
Hoby: Right.
Teri: But that’s a match of you want to make sure their wage and their benefits go beyond their life on social security, right? So we balance that with folks. So last year we did a reevaluation and we had a guy that was making about, I don’t know, I want to say 12.50 an hour. And when we looked at his job, we said, really, this is almost a $50,000 a year job. But because of social security, we had kind of artificially kept him there, right?
Hoby: And he probably didn’t complain.
Teri: And so he had built his skills and so we were able to offer him a promotion and give him a wage that aligned with his skills and talents and what he could bring to the agency in that job. And he was able to let go of social security. That’s what we have to do, we have to be mindful of getting people’s skills to the point where the wage they can earn is beyond what they’re getting with social security.
Hoby: And I think what’s so important about what you’re saying is that people earn that wage increase. People earn that next step up the ladder as they go.
Teri: Yes.
Hoby: And they earn what’s coming to them. It’s not like we’re giving people favors by promoting them. It’s like, oh, you’ve been working too long in this position, now you’re going to be promoted. These are people who are normal, wonderful, able people who just happen to be blind or visually impaired.
Teri: Correct. And I mean, I think that kind of goes full circle back to the very beginning of this where I said as adults we have an onus to work, we have a right to work. Our quality of life, you know, for you, for me, my quality of life, my ego has a lot to do with the work I do, with how work affects me. And to dismiss a whole population of people, 70% of people that are visually impaired and not give them, not only the right to work, but to allow them to lean into the onus as an adult that you work.
Hoby: Right.
Teri: It’s an expectation, you work as an adult.
Hoby: You work.
Teri: And so we have a responsibility to create opportunities, whether it’s within the NIB network or within the community. And one of the things I want to point out is that, like Dave, so here’s our machine operator.
Hoby: Sure.
Teri: And he runs that big thing with the knives, right? He can’t just walk into some other company and say, here, put me on a machine like that because we have lots of buzzers and bells and feedback systems. And if a tape isn’t getting printed, it starts saying printers not working, right?
Hoby: Right.
Teri: But what we do is we stand as a testament to where for not much of an investment, we made those machines accessible and other companies can see that. And then Dave can walk into any one of those companies and get that job.
Hoby: What I like to say is that we’re only as disabled as the technology around us makes us.
Teri: Correct. Yep.
Hoby: Yep. And, boy, what you just said is so valuable for business owners, small, medium and large. If we just do a little bit to make our systems accessible to anyone, the world goes so far.
And just back to your quick comment about our egos need to work. And you and I as business owners, when I go on vacation, that vacation is a heck of a lot sweeter if I know that I earned the money to be there.
Teri: Yep.
Hoby: I don’t want it to be given to me. I can’t.
Teri: Right.
Hoby: So we need to give people the right to work.
Teri: We do.
Hoby: You know, it’s so amazing. I could talk to you for hours, Teri. This is just fascinating and I love our discussion.
Teri: I appreciate it.
Hoby: We’re unfortunately coming right up on time, but I have one final question for you. If you were to give advice to someone searching for a job who’s being told by their family, no, no, no, you need to stay home. You shouldn’t be out there working. Maybe because the family likes their benefits, maybe because the family doesn’t want to deal with them not getting benefits. What would you tell them?
Teri: Well, I personally think that there are a lot of agencies like ours out there and there’s a lot of expertise there. That’s the support that that person needs, right? They need to align themselves with expertise because they don’t even have their own answers, right? And they can’t answer their family, so it’s kind of hard to argue that with your family, right?
Hoby: It is, yeah.
Teri: But if you work together with experts, you know, you come to CABVI and you’ve got experts, you’ve got orientation mobility instructors who have 25 years of experience teaching people and they can tell that family the stories of how that works. They can help that family become comfortable. Our social workers understand social security benefits and can help that individual and that family work a plan around those benefits, right? Because it doesn’t mean working doesn’t mean losing your benefits. It could be a transition plan.
So my number one piece of advice would be to lean into the expertise of the agencies in your local community that can support you.
Hoby: Teri, I love that. That is absolutely what our listeners need to hear because there are agencies all over the country, maybe not doing quite as much as Teri, but doing a lot in their own regard. Absolutely lean in and reach out.
I would love, if you don’t mind, in the show notes of this episode to include just a contact email for you because you’re so inspirational and if people have questions, I’d love for them to be able to reach out. Would you mind?
Teri: Love it. Yeah, it’s Teri, T-E-R-I dot Shirk, S-H-I-R-K at cincyblind, it’s C-I-N-C-Y-B-L-I-N-D dot org. So teri.shirk@cincyblind, with a Y, dot org. And you can also go to the Cincinnati Association website or right there in the team leadership and you can call, I’m available.
Hoby: Thank you so much.
Teri: Thank you. Thank you, Hoby.
Hoby: Well, thank you for being available. Folks, this is the Heard & Empowered podcast and we just had an excellent conversation with Teri Shirk of the Cincinnati Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Teri, thank you.
Teri: Thank you.
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