Kyle Hahn is 32 and works at the Walgreens distribution center in Windsor, Connecticut. Nothing unusual about that, except that Hahn lives with a disability — he has attention deficit disorder (ADD). Many companies might not take a chance on Kyle, but he found himself quite welcome at Walgreens, a company that has a policy of hiring persons with disabilities. Hahn came to Walgreens through the company’s Transitional Work Group Program, a 13-week training series for people with disabilities.

“It helped me learn how to do different functions,” Hahn said with excitement. “It felt great unloading my first truck, and I’m still unloading trucks today.”

Disability Advocates: Walgreens

Carlos Cubia, Vice President, Global Chief Diversity Officer at Walgreens Boots Alliance, spoke with the Disability Tribune about what inspires the company to be inclusive of people with disabilities.

“At Walgreens we believe everyone, regardless of the community in which he or she lives, deserves to live a good, healthy life,” Cubia said. “These company values extend to our commitment to being an inclusive and diverse company. We champion diversity and believe that we should reflect all the communities we serve.”

Cubia pointed out that 78% of the United States population lives within five miles of a Walgreens, and that Walgreens interacts with approximately eight million customers from across a diverse array of groups in their stores and online each day.

People with disabilities make up one of the most under-represented groups in today’s workplace, Cubia shared. He noted that several studies have shown that companies that champion people with disabilities outperform others. Revenues are 28% higher and profit margins were 30% higher.

“We know that our employees with disabilities help us foster collaboration and better connect with customers,” he said. “They enhance overall employee engagement, and their unique perspectives help us to increase innovation.”

The first step towards a more inclusive workplace, Cubia noted, is for employers to educate themselves about people with disabilities.

“We believe that as employers explore how they can be more inclusive, they will realize there are tremendous benefits for their businesses, their company culture,” he said. “By being inclusive, they also contribute to improving society for everyone.”

Hahn is one of many graduates of Walgreens Traditional Work Group program. Initiated more than a decade ago, TWG partners with state agencies and local non-profits to identify job candidates, provide orientation curriculum and on-the-job training. The program also provides support for candidates with a job coach to guide them through the employment training.

“As of August 31, 2019, Walgreens had nine distribution centers and regional warehouses in the United States running the Traditional Work Group initiative,” said Cubia. “Roughly 14% of employees at Walgreens distribution centers and regional warehouses self-identified as disabled as of the end of the fiscal year. The program provides training on all facets and functions at our distribution centers from how to unload delivery hauls, check-in and tag deliveries and prepare product for shipment to stores.”

Hahn credits the program with teaching him how to perform at his best, as well as in helping him to navigate the workplace.

“It helped me to learn how to do different things,” he said.

Hahn admits that he’ll sometimes get stressed — especially when there are major changes to protocols — yet he feels supported by his team.

“I love my managers,” he said. “My co-workers are great to work with and they help me out. It’s not too bad. I feel like Walgreens is a second home to me.”

“TWG helps us to foster an inclusive culture where growth and development opportunities are provided to individuals with disabilities, and at the same time increasing knowledge and understanding about disabilities across our workforce,” said Cubia.

Walgreens also runs a second training program for people with disabilities looking to specifically work at a retail pharmacy. The  Retail Employees with Disabilities Initiative (REDI) focuses on recruitment, training and hiring people with various levels of ability to work in the company’s retail pharmacies.

“We partner closely with publicly funded community providers on this effort,” said Cubia. “REDI expanded to a total of 37 states and 278 stores during fiscal 2019, up from 227 stores in fiscal 2018. Through the REDI program, hundreds of potential employees have been trained to work in our stores.”

Beginning in 2019, managers were given the option to extend training on a case-by-case basis by up to three weeks to allow more time to improve performance of particular tasks that a trainee may struggle with.

“REDI’s primary focus is to train individuals with disabilities to work in a retail setting,” Cubia said. “Although there is no guarantee of employment at Walgreens, following successful completion of training, candidates are encouraged to apply for open positions at any Walgreens.”

Disabled employees receive the same pay as their non-disabled counterparts and are held to the same job performance standards. All kinds of disabilities are represented in the company’s training programs and hiring practices. Cubia feels that an inclusive environment, one that welcomes people with differing abilities, is a win for all.

“We have seen an incredible dedication and work ethic from people with disabilities,” he said. “It’s about giving everyone opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities and contribute to society. That’s what we are doing here through these programs.”

There are two ways for a person to be hired into the Traditional Work Group Program. The first is a direct referral from state agencies, which is the case for people who have held jobs before or have some warehouse experience and would enter through the company’s application process.

“The second, through the TWG program, is where we utilize our partner to filter our candidate through local and state agencies,” said Cubia. “We rely on our vendors connected to our distribution center locations to identify interested and qualified candidates for TWG.”

For the REDI program, candidates are referred by state agencies to local organizations that provide job skills training.

“Another way that REDI gets their candidates is from the providers themselves,” said Cubia. “We also rely on the providers to screen these candidates to see if they’d be a good fit for the retail environment.”

Hahn said that he’s proud of the work he does.

“I’m most proud of serving our stores, working with my colleagues, with disabilities and without disabilities,” he said. “I feel proud of working for a great company that accepts me for who I am and trusts me to do the job right and to get it done. I feel like I am a great team member and that I could be here for a long time. My team members have supported me when I’ve needed a little help. It’s great to have team members who are willing to help you.”

Cubia added that Walgreens is proud of these programs because they have allowed individuals to gain their independence.

“Whether it is working independently, holding a job or purchasing their own home, these programs are allowing people with disabilities to open new doors for themselves and to write their own ticket.”

For more information about these programs, read the REDI program guide and the TWG program guide.

Dr. Tony Greco is a disability rights advocate for mental health and addiction support and the founder of GET HELP.

In 1977, my parents met in an AA meeting. My mom was still a teenager and my dad had a couple of years sober in the program. She was a troubled youth; in addition to alcoholism, he could not read or write, and suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness. They found comfort in one another, as new people in recovery often do. If the stories can be believed, they married shortly after she got pregnant. And again, as new people in recovery often do, my mom relapsed and would not get sober for another 23 years. In 2001, that unexpected baby she had as a teenager, now a young man, picked her up from a psych hospital to drive her to American Hospital in downtown Los Angeles for, what would hopefully be, her last detox.

I have been trying to get my mom clean, sober or, at the very least, functional since I was 7 years old. Truth be told, my childhood was a battle ground of both my parents’ dysfunction. I can remember coming home from school one day at 15 years old to a completely barren house, for the exception of my things in my bedroom. I was alone, homeless and turning to the same familiar haunts and vices as my own parents did, in spite of all my attempts to be anything other than like them.

Addiction is a Symptom

I found myself looking to the same strangers in 12 steps meetings at 17 years old, and have been there ever since. Unlike my parents, those meetings worked for me, but it required coming to terms with things much greater than just addiction. Like many of us who turn to addiction, the problem is deeper than addiction. Addiction is a symptom. If we don’t stay clean or sober long enough to get to those underlying problems, we will surely return to the quick fixes and damage of addiction. But we need to get clean or sober before we can even begin to address the underlying things like trauma, depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder or any number of the personality disorders that develop from the difficulties we face in our lives.

We give what we are given, and the pain and dysfunction is often systemic, often generational. We are living with the sins of the past, the sins of our fathers, mothers and those before them.

Since I started recovery at 17 to heal from those proverbial sins, I have always focused on trying to help others. It gave me a purpose. An anchor. I have spent the better part of my life always trying to find the ways and means to do that. That desire to help, and the series of events that has put me on every side of the problem, was the birth of what would become a company I started called GET HELP — which puts me on every side of the solution.

The Disabilities of Addiction and Mental Health

It was always difficult for me to understand that my parents had a mental illness, that they were disabled; initially by their respective diseases of addiction, but deeper still by their debilitating depression, anxiety, bi-polar or schizoaffective behaviors. Deeper still was the unresolved trauma of their own childhoods, their own histories. In recovery, I saw hundreds, if not thousands of people who were just like them. I began to understand. What I understood most clearly was the only way to help them was to first help myself. Second, help others. Hopefully one day soon they would be amongst the others.

Many people want to get clean. There’s a moment in their life when they have that “ah ha, maybe, just maybe…” moment, and if there is not an easy path forward in that moment then they are too often damned to repeat the same cycle, over and over again. I was fortunate in my “ah ha” moment to have a mom and dad who could direct me to a meeting. The meeting directed me to a psych hospital. A psych hospital that had “Hospitals & Institutions” panels with volunteers who came in and shared their personal stories with us. In between the hospital food, padded rooms, bed straps and white coats… I heard a message of hope. Again, those people directed me back to meetings.

It would take years of attending before I built up the resources and strength to face my deeper demons in therapy. I am among the fortunate few. Many, many people do not get that far. They don’t get to build up the psychological strength to support them to face those demons. Why? They don’t have the resources, structure or access.

It took many years of recovery to build the strength, both psychological and emotional, to return to school, to start therapy, to do things that “regular” people did in their lives. Through that work, and the kindness of strangers, I learned how to go to school and to get the education that helped make me a more effective healer. The child of high school drop outs, the son of a father who could not read and write, found himself putting one foot in front of another, graduating from college and going on to get a doctorate in clinical psychology. In grad school, I found many people who were just as stumped about how to help other addicts; within the first semesters of school I found myself being viewed as the resident expert on addiction — by fellow students and by the professors as well. Before my Masters even posted, I found myself lecturing for other professors to my peers, teaching them what I knew about addiction and recovery.

My experiences taught me the hard way how difficult it was for people to find help when they actually wanted it. I tried to do this as a clinical psychologist and realized the tools for finding help for people, especially people with little to no resources, were ineffective, insufficient and, in many cases, outright harmful: directing people to places that were not the right fit, brokering patients, sometimes even paying them to be in their facility.

Download the GET HELP App

I mention all of this because, ultimately, it drives one of the root causes of inadequate care for individuals with mental health and addiction challenges — the lack of coordination in the continuum of care and the rat-race runaround to accessing resources. When individuals are already struggling to find and address the root of a mental health problem, the constant barriers to getting the help they need when they need it can easily discourage people and knock them off their path to wellness. This is one of the founding principles behind GET HELP. Having walked that road as a youth in recovery and again as a Psychologist guiding people in recovery, it was clear that we needed a better way to coordinate resources and aide people on their journeys. The knowledge is there. The experience and tools to help people are there. But navigating that labyrinth can be a journey in of itself — one most are not lucky enough to find their way in like I was.  Someone struggling shouldn’t have to be strong enough to figure it out on their own and jump through the hoops of siloed systems of care to arrive at a destination of well-being.

Something needed to be done. I knew enough about technology to get me into trouble, but not enough to get me out. I decided to create a tool for people to find available beds, and that became (or I should say consumed) my life’s work. GET HELP solves this by putting ALL the resources someone, or their caretaker, would need in one place. It interconnects agencies, shelters, health care professionals and other resources in a way I wish I had to help my parents when I was a kid — and in a way I continued to need as a professional adult. Technology can deliver all of this to people when they need it — and I’m proud that we’ve built it.

Today, using the knowledge I’ve gained over the last 25 years of trying to find help for people, I created GET HELP to connect treatment providers with the professionals trying to help, and with the public trying to find help for themselves or someone they love. It isn’t easy — nothing worth having ever is — but I’ve been fortunate to align with some amazing individuals who are also dedicated to creating a world where anyone, anywhere, can get the help they need, when they need and in the way they deserve.

Tomorrow, we will live in a world where information is democratized and where everyone, not only the most fortunate or privileged, can get effective treatment when they need it. Until that time, we will continue to work toward a world where luck has nothing to do with a person achieving recovery. This COVID-19 crisis taught us that the sharing and democratization of key health care and mental health elements needs to come sooner, not later. My team and I at GET HELP are proud to be at the forefront of pioneering that change.  Managing this crisis, and everyone’s round the clock need not only for resources, but for data, beds, capacity and more, has shown us that not only is our platform timely, it works exactly as we intended, helping coordinate resources on both sides of the equation.

If you are interested in supporting the work we are doing, you can visit our website at www.gethelp.com; tell your treatment providers and other professionals about GET HELP® and find out how they can make their resources available on our platform so that the next 7 year old looking for treatment for his mother doesn’t need to wait 23 years to get his mother back. Let’s get and stay connected now. Together, we can.

In January of 2017, my family and I discovered that our 15-year-old son Sebastian — a straight-A honor student, a painter, a sculptor, a potter and a water polo-player — was almost completely blind. We were going through old photos and realized that he couldn’t recognize himself or anyone else in any of the pictures. We then discovered that Sebastian had taught himself to count his steps and turns as a toddler, and had been navigating our own home as a blind person would, all his life.  Sebastian had also taught himself early on to process his vision verbally, using words to help him “see.” The only things he could see for real were letters and numbers. That’s why nobody knew he was blind. Not even him.

An epic struggle to get a medical diagnosis and basic services ensued. The answer we heard over and over again, from psychologists, neurologists, vision therapists and Sebastian’s trusted pediatrician was, “I cannot help you.”

Countless other parents of children with disabilities that are not readily apparent or easily understood know how it feels to come up against one dead end after the other when searching for the help they need. And in this age of coronavirus pandemic, where services considered nonessential are being curtailed, these same families may feel like they’ve been forgotten altogether.

It took almost six months, seeing one specialist after another, for my family to learn that Sebastian is one of tens of thousands of people in the United States alone who has cerebral/cortical visual impairment (CVI) and to get him the basic services he needs.

CVI was identified as the number one cause of visual impairment in the developed world more than ten years ago and still doesn’t have a diagnostic code.

Here are my tips for how parents of children who have any disabilities can become better advocates for their children when professionals aren’t taking your concerns seriously — or aren’t listening at all:

Trust yourself

You know your child better than anyone else in the world. If you are seeing behaviors or symptoms that concern you, trust your instincts. Sebastian’s symptoms of his visual impairment were very subtle when he was little, but once we figured it out, I knew without a doubt what his condition was. That certainty gave me confidence, and that confidence kept me going against all odds.

Listen to your child

Listening to your child doesn’t just mean hearing what they tell you with words. It means paying attention to what they may not be able to say. Crying is communication. A child’s fear, anxiety, anger or pain is as real to them as yours is to you. If your child is verbal, talk to them about what they are experiencing and what it is that distresses them. If the child is too young for conversations, or is nonverbal, close examination of behavioral patterns is necessary.

Be persistent

Doctors are only human and they only know what they’ve been trained to know. As we are discovering with the COVID-19 infection, new infections and medical conditions are discovered regularly, and many older ailments are still poorly understood. If one medical provider is unable to answer your questions or provide your child with the necessary care, find another. Some individuals are more curious and on top of the latest research than others.

Document everything

I have 36 single-spaced, typed pages of documentation of what we went through to get a diagnosis for my son’s vision impairment. I wrote down everything of importance that I could remember about each medical appointment, as well as discoveries we made about Sebastian’s visual processing along the way.

Your persistence can be the difference between getting help for your child or not.

Expand your search beyond the medical community

Different professions vary in how quickly they educate their members on new medical and scientific information. Educators, occupational therapists, science researchers, speech pathologists or any other related field may sometimes be a parent’s best resource. We finally got help thanks to Lukas Franck, the senior consultant at The Seeing Eye guide dog organization who helped connect us to the best vision and brain experts in the world.

Be prepared for the long haul

It took us 15 months to complete our medical journey. We saw approximately 20 different doctors without success. A research study in Paris and another at the Harvard CVI Laboratory for Visual Neuroplasticity finally led us to a conclusive medical diagnosis of CVI from Dr. Barry Kran at the end of March, 2018. The head of optometrics from the New England Eye Low Vision Clinic, Dr. Kran is a leader in the field of cerebral/cortical visual impairment, and was and continues to be an incredible support for our family.

If you are having trouble finding medical or educational assistance for your child, trust your gut, listen to your child, don’t give up, expand your search for help, and be prepared to go the distance. Parents of children who have disabilities are the bravest, most persistent and knowledgeable people in the world. Your knowledge of your child is profound, crucial and irreplaceable. Finding professionals who understand this fact and are willing to listen is half the battle.

Order Stephanie Duesing’s book, Eyeless Mind: A Memoir About Seeing and Being Seen on Amazon!

Stephanie Duesing is devoted to raising awareness of Cerebral/Cortical-Visual Impairment (CVI) and advocating for patients with this prevalent but largely unacknowledged cause of visual impairment. A music educator, Stephanie has taught elementary and middle school music and chorus, as well as private voice and piano. She also opened her own Musikgarten studio, where she taught classes for families with babies, toddlers and preschoolers. She’s a graduate of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and lives in the western suburbs of Chicago. Learn more on her website at www.stephanieduesing.com. 

Nothing in Karina Ulrike Sturm’s childhood prepared her for what was to come. The German native, who now lives in San Francisco with her husband, had a happy if uneventful childhood. It wasn’t until she was 24 that Sturm began to notice the symptoms of an invisible illness that at first she didn’t understand. When she traveled to the U.S. to see a doctor in Maryland, Sturm received a diagnosis that explained the years of pain she had endured: Sturm, who had taken to wearing a neck brace, was told that she was suffering from neck instability caused by Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. At last her life began to make sense.

According to the Mayo Clinic, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is “a group of inherited disorders that affect your connective tissues, primarily your skin, joints and blood vessel walls. Connective tissue is a complex mixture of proteins and other substances that provide strength and elasticity to the underlying structures in your body. People who have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome usually have overly flexible joints and stretchy, fragile skin. This can be a problem if you have a wound that requires stitches, because the skin often isn’t strong enough to hold them.”

Ehlers-Danlos causes a great deal of pain and often comes with related conditions that can be debilitating to the patient, though the patient often doesn’t look sick. It’s an invisible illness that many people don’t take seriously. Sturm seeks to change that.

In her new film, We Are Visible, Sturm chronicles her own struggles with the illness, and interviews people from all over the world who share the condition with her. It’s a profoundly moving and eye-opening film that will hopefully find an audience outside of the Ehlers-Danlos community. It’s a film that calls for compassion and understanding, and explains in no uncertain terms exactly what Ehlers-Danlos can do to a person’s body.

Sturm tells us she experienced her first symptoms in 2010, when she was 24 years old.

“The symptoms I experienced in 2010 were mainly related to a severe cervical spine instability (neck instability),” Sturm tells us. “For instance, my arms would be numb all the time, I had a hard time breathing, my motor control was completely off, half of my face and my tongue were numb, my legs became weaker and weaker and I had to spend most of the day in bed.”

As with many other Ehlers-Danlos patients, Sturm suffers from a variety of other conditions related to her original diagnosis. She lives with POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), which affects her blood pressure, heart rate, and how her autonomic nerve system functions. This condition can be affected by even the slightest environmental changes, such as warmer than normal weather. Flare-ups can make it impossible to stand on her feet without fainting. She also has a condition called Mast Cell Activation, which affects her gastrointestinal system.

“I think it’s hard for people around us to understand or relate to us because for the most part, Ehlers-Danlos is an invisible condition,” Sturm said. “You can’t see the pain from the outside. And many of us are masters in hiding our issues behind a smile. The world around us doesn’t understand the concept of a disability that doesn’t have obvious signs. Oftentimes, this leads to misconceptions and as a consequence to many hurtful interactions.”

Sturm notes that many Ehlers-Danlos patients are called “fakers” if they use a wheelchair one day and are seen walking the next day.

“Since the condition affects us differently every day, we sometimes need assistive devices, but other days, we don’t,” she said. “Our environment, however, isn’t aware that disability is also a spectrum and that some disabilities are invisible.”

Sturm stumbled into filmmaking through journalism, which she began studying in 2018.

“As soon as I heard we could produce a film for our MA thesis, I knew I had to produce one about Ehlers-Danlos,” she said. “Additionally, one of my teachers in my journalism degree was a passionate documentary filmmaker and her passion transferred to me as soon as I studied her documentary filmmaking module. She inspired me probably the most throughout the whole journey, and so did my fellow students, who supported all my ideas even though my specialism, chronic illness and disability, was more or less new to them. This was extremely special to me because I had rarely experienced that people without a similar background like mine would understand me.”

There were many challenges that came with filming chronically ill people as a chronically ill filmmaker. All of her potential interview subjects are dealing with what Sturm calls a “non-predictable condition,” so making plans to film was difficult. Often times plans to film did not work out because the subjects might end up in the hospital shortly before filming was scheduled to commence.

“We had to be super-spontaneous with changing the scenes we wanted to share with the world,” Sturm said.

There were also challenges to her own health — filming caused Sturm to suffer consequences to her health that she has yet to fully recover from.

“Of course, there were lots of logistic issues since I filmed in six different countries,” she said. “And then you have to deal with many ethical questions when producing a film about chronically ill people. So overall, I had a problem to fix all the time, but I don’t regret any second of it, because this film gave me so much.”

As a film, We Are Visible is a profoundly moving experience, one which underscores the struggles those who live with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome must deal with. There’s loneliness and isolation, as Jade, a young patient finds out. Jade lives with severe gastro-intestinal complications related to her EDS, and also contends with chronic pain. When her interview for We Are Visible was filmed, Jade had been in the hospital for a month, and had received no well wishes from her schoolmates.

The film opens with quotes of some of the things that EDS patients might hear from others: “But you don’t look sick,” “You are too young to be sick,” “It’s all in your head,” and “You are faking it.”

The latter was told to Sophia, a school-aged patient in Maryland who needs a number of assistive devices just to get through her day. Sophia’s mom, Ashley, also suffers from EDS, and is obviously having a hard time with the fact that her children are also sick.

One of the most moving interviews in We Are Visible is with Denise, a woman in Germany who suffered from a number of conditions related to her EDS. Though it’s a struggle, Denise tries to make the best of each day. Recently diagnosed with cancer, Denise passed away shortly after her We Are Visible interview was shot. In the film, Sturm expresses her gratitude that she got to meet Denise.

“What I was trying to accomplish with my film on one hand is to show EDS in a global context rather than focusing on only one specific country because even though access to healthcare is different in every country, the challenges people face are still overlapping,” Sturm said. “On the other hand, I wanted to not only emphasize the challenges we face every day, but also the incredible strength that every person with EDS has or have in order to cope with this condition. Media representation of people with disabilities is often quite stereotypical, and they use a frame of pity or the frame of the super-hero, neither show reality for disabled people. I wanted to convey what it is really like to live with an invisible condition and experimented with some journalistic practices to achieve this.”

Sturm hopes that non-disabled people will come to understand they cannot judge a person based on their appearance, and that rather than make assumptions, ask empathetic questions.

“And for our disabled community, I want to achieve that they can relate, feel less alone, and most importantly, I hope they feel validated,” she said.

On Sunday, January 12 at 2pm, We Are Visible will be shown at Chapman University, One University Drive, in Orange, California (near Los Angeles) in Beckman Hall, room 404. Sturm will be there to participate in a Q&A. The screening is free and the room is accessible.

Click here to RSVP for the free event

For more information on We Are Visible, please visit the film’s website.

Also, please visit Karina Ulrike Sturm’s personal website for more information about her journalistic work.

David-Elijah Nahmod is a film critic and reporter in San Francisco. He also has articles that appear regularly in The Bay Area Reporter and SF Weekly.

A few years ago, Subhashish “Subs” Acharya attended a job fair in Boston, MA to film a documentary. Amongst a sea of tables and stations, he noticed a vendor who had over 150 people with disabilities crowding its post — all hoping to apply for a job with the company. Acharya then approached the vendor and praised him for opening his business to candidates with disabilities. The vendor said he wouldn’t be hiring anyone and he just wanted, “…for them to feel good and be included.”

The business man’s answer deeply disturbed Acharya, and in that moment, he recognized he wanted to help the disability community and make a real social impact. So, he became a disability advocate and created Project Starfish — an organization that has a work model that allows people with disabilities to learn leadership skills, practice social engagement, and cultivate their strengths. Business development was Project Starfish’s initial priority, with the core idea being to work with startup businesses. That meant teaching clients how to outreach, use the internet, research, and understand business lingo to get on board with a real-world company. For the past five years, Project Starfish has given Acharya’s clients a simulated experience of what a real-world workplace is like, training them to adapt to and work within it.

As Project Starfish grew, and as his other business ventures flourished, Acharya realized he needed to hire someone to manage the organization full time. So, the role of leader was given to disability advocate Nasreen Bhutta — who is visually impaired.

Bhutta’s involvement began in 2014 while she was taking an online course. A friend tweeted to her about the organization, piquing her interest with the nobleness of its cause. Two weeks later, she called and spoke with Acharya, who invited her to join the organization. She recalled her beginnings with Project Starfish stating that she, “…put together the HR Corner, which consisted of [simulated] job interviews and exit interviews” and created a recruiting course, called Training 1.0, with a Starfish colleague.

From there, Nasreen progressed “from HR to managing, to overseeing, and becoming sort of the right arm of Project Starfish.” Nasreen is now a certified recruiter and sourcer, for which she received a diploma. She also stated that the mentors of the organization have developed several projects, including Human Resources, Business Development, Social Media, The 60 Minute Initiative (a program run like 60 Minutes), and a few others.

Although Nasreen has seen many success stories over the years, she told the Disability Tribune that there was one that meant a lot to her as a mentor.

A gentleman from Maryland came to them for training and Bhutta noted that “he was shy and he had a stutter. He told us he wanted to learn skills to stand out.” He was also visually impaired, however it did not hinder his hunger for employment. According to Nasreen, he was a wonderful researcher, and, at the time, Starfish was engaging their clients in a virtual game with a company everyone in the community knew: BRC Race, a racing game. The clients played to learn new skills and also worked alongside a real company. One of the project tasks was working with people and much to her delight Nasreen exclaimed that her pupil “stuttered less and was more confident! It’s why we are always designing new projects, whether it’s a game, 60 minutes, social media marketing, or business development. We are teaching people skills that they can carry with them and use on any career out in the workforce.”

Project Starfish’s business model is an effective one, as evidenced by Bhutta’s success story and others like it. And while the organization is still training clients to enter the workplace, Bhutta points out that their coaching approach “has changed; it used to be that we would take on large groups of people and they’d become part of the organization.” That practice began in 2013; however, by 2017 they began to shift their process.

Bhutta recalled she had returned from India that year, and was striving to train more clients. However, she commented the new clients coming in for workforce training “were more skilled, and some owned small businesses, which they worked on from home.” All of the people at the end of training wanted more: they wanted employment. So instead of doing large groups, Starfish shifted to focusing on training the individual, creating a one-on-one session for customized training. Nasreen added, “Every business has to evolve and change in order to run a [sic] successfully, which is why we changed as well.”

The future is bright and full of opportunities for the organization. Bhutta announced, “[Project Starfish is currently] working on a couple of projects; we’ve partnered with The Sourcing Institute Foundation (TSI), and we also have an initiative going on in India working with NGOs (Start Up Business) and cancer care, as well as healing and holistic centers, which is ongoing. We are always looking to expand, for newer social causes to get involved with, and to partner up with new companies who focus on social and business impacts.”

To learn more or to become a client, visit the Project Starfish website at http://www.pstarfish.org/.

Christina Pires is an essayist who enjoys the simple things in life, like eating candy corn by pumpkin light on a cool Hallow’s Eve. She also loves reading, writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, and singing. You can follow her Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/TheCreativeBrewery/