Good News Friday!

Today I’d like to highlight some very ingenious methods that an employee in our CORE/Labor Source department has developed to help individuals receiving supported employment services from Imagine! achieve more success in their jobs.

Supported employment is such a great example of Imagine!’s mission in action. When the people we serve are able to work, they are truly contributing to their communities – paying taxes and spending their hard earned money locally.

But supported employment is not without challenges – physical and cognitive barriers can make it more difficult for the people we serve to succeed at work. Overcoming those obstacles isn’t always insurmountable, however. Sometimes a little creativity is all that is needed.

Here’s an example.

Donna, who receives services from Imagine!, works at Boulder-based InClover, placing bin lot number stickers on the bottom of Grin Treats bags. The bag has a fold at the bottom, which is fairly easy to open if a person has equal use of both hands, which is not the case with Donna. Her right hand works well; the left is not so cooperative! So to make it possible for Donna to do this job independently it was necessary to create a couple of different ways to hold the bag in place so she could apply the sticker. Richard Lowe, a CORE/Labor Source Supported Employment Specialist, had a creative solution to this challenge. Check out the photo captions to see what he did.

The first step was taking two paperclips and bending them slightly at an upward angle, and taping them to the table so that Donna can slide the bag onto them; the paperclips anchoring the bottom fold.

The second step was taking two boxes of gloves and taping them together so that they hinge.  Donna can reach up and flip the top box over onto the Grin Treats bag, which holds it down securely. 

From here she is able to place a sticker on a right hand finger, and with another finger open the fold, then place the sticker. 

She then flips the box back up, and repeats the process.

That’s not Richard’s only clever way of overcoming obstacles to successful employment, however. He’s made quite a few. He even shared an essay he wrote to explain his thought process. Here’s an excerpt (by the way, if you don’t know who MacGyver is, learn who he is here. There couldn’t be a more appropriate symbol for Richard’s simple adaptations.):

One of the many skills needed to thrive in Supported Employment is ingenuity: the ability to look around pretty much anywhere and improvise solutions to consumer obstacles using items at hand or easily obtainable: paper towels, tape, Sharpie Marker, cardboard, magazines, on and on. As patron saint of this ability, MacGyver could cut himself free from ropes with a pine tree scented air freshener, use a dirty sock to zip-line away from imminent death, and repair and hot-wire a 30’s era truck using a paper clip, ballpoint pen, rubber band, and turkey baster.

For us lesser mortals, solutions don’t always reveal themselves so quickly; sometimes it takes months of observation and cogitating before the “simple” solution emerges as if it was obvious all along.

Imagine! consumers have strengths and challenges just like everybody else. One essential quality of the skilled Employment Specialist is to identify consumer strengths and reinforce them; and to identify challenges, then support their navigation however possible. Adaptive solutions are created specifically for each consumer based on range of motion, cognitive abilities, and fine motor skills.

SE staff are able to study immediate real world situations, incubate ideas, explore logical possibilities, and then to conceive, design, and execute solutions taking as many specific consumer variables into consideration as possible. Doing it requires basic tools, imagination, know how, and will.

Thanks Richard, for leading the way and demonstrating how sometimes the best solution to a challenge is the simplest one. Thanks also for inspiring your fellow employees and the people you serve.