Staffing Shortages Crushing Your Nonprofit? Here's The Solution

[0:00]  and over the course of the two years the children that were very actively engaged in early intervention therapies and education were exceptionally more able to go on to live the life that they wanted to live than the children that didn't get those Services you know as a as a story uh when I went into my CEO six years ago to to give him my notice he said you know I'm not going to try to talk you out of it and the main reason I'm not going to try to talk you out of it is that the ark needs you and he went on to explain that his eldest son was diagnosed with autism at a young age and he knows for sure and certain that if he and his ex-wife had not had the resources to give their son absolutely

[0:49]  everything they were able to bombard him with services to make sure that he was consistently getting applied Behavior Analysis and speech and occupational therapy IES and so on and so forth if they hadn't been able to do that they don't know what his life would be like now and what his life is like now is truly amazing based on the challenges that he had when he was a kid all right all right guys welcome back to a brand new episode of the heart and hustle podcast now today we're going to be having a incredibly important

[1:35]  conversation because I have the leader of an amazing organization here Lisa Max is going to be joining the show now her work that we're going to be talking about today is with The Arc now the arc is an organization that is helping individuals with disabilities we're going to be talking about what exactly that means we're going to be talking about the mission of the organization we're going to talk about the changing landscape of supporting our communities when it comes to disability servic and mental health we're going to talk about some of the Staffing challenges for all the leaders out there who know how difficult it can be to attract top talent and retain talent for our bigger Mission fulfillment we're also going to talk about some really important topics like Early Childhood Intervention now Lisa welcome to the show thank you so much Keenan and I'm thrilled to be here so Lisa in our previous conversation you

[2:23]  described yourself as somebody who is recovering from a career in technology what does that mean I can't I love that yeah I I am a recovering engineer as we like to say uh I spent all the last six years of my career in technology uh cyber security before it was ever called that AI before it was ever called that used to be big data and so on and so forth and my my area of specialty where what I wind up gravitating to really was privacy and identity and the the first thing that I really dug into with that was doing some really fun work for the Department of Defense and what we were doing there was rolling out the dod's ID card program a smart card a chipped card for a physical and logical access and

[3:11]  then installing a lot of the physical security uh equipment around the world on Military basis so I became really really familiar with the importance of having a solid credential that works that asserts your identity all of the time I learned more than I ever thought I would know about cards and card stock and how you can make a card tough enough that you can scrape ice off the windshield CU you know that'll happen on occasion and uh and so on and so forth but what really caught my ear on all of that was the idea of data protection the idea of privacy personally identifiable data protected health information all of your payment data of course everything related to your banking your credit

[3:58]  cards so on and so forth and um and one of the things and I we're going to be digging into this as we move forward but one of the things that I learned is that from the perspective of identity theft much more happens with people with disabilities they are disproportionately victims of identity theft and for me that was kind of a call to Arms to make sure that some of the focus at least of the work that I did was was on making sure that we're protecting the least among us one of the areas that I'd like to be able to talk about here on the podcast is kind of the intersection of heart and hustle so recognizing that you got into the technology space quite early let's rewind a little bit and let's describe you as a younger

[4:45]  individual what type of things were you passionate about as you were coming through your life experience did you have any early instances where technology was going to be that thing you wanted to pursue what was that like honestly no so I really didn't I mean earlier on I was going to be a doctor and then for quite a while I was going to be a lawyer and then the way that life happened I wound up just getting into a job that sounded interesting and it all went from there I am a voracious reader so I love to learn I love to read I love to understand I'm very much a why person so living in the world of technology gave me all kinds of opportunities to understand why to keep up with what was new and what was different and also gave me the the ability to work with and manage a lot of

[5:35]  people that were neurodivergent we didn't necessarily call it that back in the day and you know it's easy to kind of yeah engineer the engineer brain you know that sort of thing um when I look at that now I realize that that's all all about who we are we're always looking at things differently so didn't think I'd be working in technology necessarily did think that eventually I would be working to serve and support people with disabilities that's something that I started doing at a very young age I'm also a self-described pathological volunteer so at a young age I went through fire School up in New Jersey and I was a State Certified firefighter EMT I got to deliver twin girls it was incredibly exciting we kept

[6:23]  in touch for a long time um and all of that really just pointed me to where I am the start aligned and I am absolutely delighted by that I was having a conversation with the CEO yesterday and she made a comment that often we think our careers are going to represent a ladder but rather they are a spiral staircase all the experiences that we have along the way bring us to Opportunities like where you're at right now with the ark 100% couldn't agree more I would like to talk a little bit about what Drew you to the ark so there's lots of opportunities after you're you know coming out of a career in technology and in your recovery process what was it about the Mission specifically of the ark that kind of brought you to this opportunity so here's where I get to brag about my dad a little bit uh Dad passed in 2016 so if I refer to him in the present sense you

[7:12]  know present tense please just bear with me because whenever I talk about this it goes back to the kind of volunteer work that my dad did dad was a dentist up in New Jersey one of the best ever seriously I'm not the only person that says that but he was also one of of the only ones that would work with people with disabilities specifically intellectual and developmental he was also a member of the Lions Club in Marist toown New Jersey and the charity that they raised money for was what is now known as the Ark of Mars so from a very early age I was a part of what the Lions Club was doing to raise money for the ark so when I was about six I have great memories of thinking I was the coolest thing on earth because got to be

[8:00]  a waitress for the annual spaghetti dinner uh but with all of that I got to play with these really great people and one of my dear friends Gina Rosenberg I didn't know that at the time Gina was in her 40s because to me she was just a really cool kid to play with so you know we played dolls we did all of the usual stuff because I'm such a talker it didn't really impact the relationship that she would was non-speaking but to me it was more than normal to spend a lot of time with people that had these types of disabilities so gravitating toward the ark it was really just a Return to Sender I love that you know one of the things that I'd like to be

[8:46]  able to do is kind of level set the challenge that organizations like yours face in our current communities so when I first started working with a local organization here in Las Vegas Nevada we found out that there was a 6,000 family weight list for organizations that can help with diagnosis and services for people with Autism okay now back in the day there was 1 in 156 children were being diagnosed with autism at that point in time as of the most recent data this year at our 5K fundraiser with this organization 1 in 36 children how are we supposed to meet the demand of the rising need for services in our communities when we are often kind of bottlenecked with so many people needing demands but there aren't that many organizations like the arc out there to support people with what's your two cents on that it's a really interesting challenge there's no question about it

[9:34]  and in order to change that Paradigm it's going to have to happen from the bottom up and from the top down you know the number one thing that I truly believe is that we have to change the conversation we have to change the dinner table conversation we have to change the conversations in the boardroom and everywhere in between because to make a change on the scale that's needed is truly going to take everyone it's going to be employers it's going to be politicians at every level of the spectrum and it's going to be the parents that are no longer afraid to keep to to make noise they're not going to keep quiet anymore and I'm really hopeful that that's going to change the needle what really does it money sure it's easy to say money and we're

[10:25]  certainly never going to turn money down we know we need money but there's also so much load balancing that has to happen there and that's something that we're really working toward all the time we do a lot of lobbying locally and based on my past history of lobbying at the state level and and also on Capitol Hill being able to have those conversations local state for now we'll get into Federal as soon as we can uh hopefully is changing that you know one of the things that I recognize about great leaders is is often when we come across challenges we frame them as opportunities and I hear an inclining of that in your voice is we have a unique opportunity to come together as a community and to create louder voices to be able to change this problem why do

[11:13]  you kind of think it's important for leaders especially in a space like yours to look at the overwhelming demand for services in our community as an opportunity rather than a challenge well it all comes down to Innovation right I you know first and foremost when you're in a human services organiz ation you're going to have to squeeze every dime I I often say we got to make Lincoln cry because we've got to squeeze all of those pennies and that causes of necessity people to be very entrepreneurial and we all know that that's really the thing that makes a difference in any business is being able to look at things sideways being able to look at some of the lwh hanging fruit and grabbing that without ever missing a beat and then also going after some of

[12:00]  the bigger stuff so that's I think is really what it comes down to that and Grassroots initiative you get a few parents in the room man are you going to hear what's needed you're going to hear it very clearly you're going to hear it very specifically and that's one of the things that we are here to do really the Ark of the US across the country every member Arc and so many other organizations as well it's to lift up that voice and to make make sure that everybody not just the right people everybody is hearing what those needs are and understands to you know left turn for a minute I like to think of disabilities as anything that can in any way hinder you from living the life that you'd like to

[12:49]  leave so we all know that there are physical disabilities the really obvious disabilities somebody has a spinal cord injury somebody's had a stroke somebody is blind or or somebody that that's a member of the deaf Community there are things that we see that are really kind of obvious those visible disabilities but there are so many more invisible disabilities so disabilities can be invisible they can be temporary when somebody's having a really bad moment and they can also be permanent so helping everyone to understand that if you're lucky enough to live a a long life you will absolutely become a member of the disability Community everybody's going to be a member of the disability community at some point so it's

[13:38]  shortsighted for all of us not to be working to find Solutions I love how we're talking about Innovation not only from a technological standpoint but also an innovation perspective in thought now I think this is really important because one of the biggest challenges that we face in the mental and behavioral space in general right is the idea of stigma now one of the things that I think we have to be able to do as even hosting a podcast like this is create safe spaces so people feel heard seen and validated in their own unique experience and that's why I like to have conversations like you or like this with you is because when we share our unique perspectives often it's easy for other people to find their story inside of ours in our previous conversation we talked about a story of stigma that I thought was really impactful you had mentioned that there was an individual

[14:26]  who was a part of some type of tragedy and his mother coming from Asian descent felt very stigmatized when it come to accessing Mental Health Services can you kind of talk about that yeah absolutely um we're talking specifically about the shooting at Virginia Tech many years ago 32 people died um and and one of the things we lose sight of is that 33 people died because the shooter was killed as well um you know for a a family that comes from a culture where the pressure is on the mother especially both parents but especially the mother the mother has to be perfect because the children have to be perfect and if the children are by the family's definition less than perfect that's mom's fault well in this case mom knew that her son

[15:15]  had some pretty significant challenges with his mental Wellness knew it to the point that she immigrated to the United States because she believed that she was going to be able to get the help that she needed for him and be able to kind of turn his life around and unfortunately we know how the story ended up and when that happened there were so many people that were vilifying the shooters family and my heart just broke for them even before I knew the story my heart just broke especially for the mom because knowing that there were so many issues to start with so much judgment on behalf of her family all I kept thinking was This Woman's got nobody right now because there certainly wasn't going to

[16:03]  be anybody from the community that was going to support her and we already knew she didn't have family support and I kind of wish there had been a way for me to reach out for her and there's no way that that's meant to excuse what happened but to help with the fact that if she had been less stigmatized if she had had the help help might have come earlier and it could have completely changed the outcome for that that child's life and this is a big part of kind of the big macro societal issues that we're dealing with in society right now in our previous conversation I bring this up a lot in the podcast it's really important to hammer home but in 2022 the Surgeon General came onto a national broadcast and said the biggest challenge in our society today is not another viral outbreak of a pandemic but an

[16:50]  epidemic of isolation and loneliness and when I think about 1 in 36 families being impacted by an Autism diagnosis that is a lot of people that are outside of just the direct patient care that need a sense of community and support So how do you think we're going to be able to not only meet the needs of these individual patients and clients but also the surrounding family as well because everybody in this scenario needs help we need to have open honest conversations we need to eliminate the stigma how are we supposed to overcome this challenge again it's by working together the the only way I believe that we can reduce the stigma is to own our own stuff so full disclosure I am a a a cancer thriver I don't like the word Survivor for me it feels a little bit

[17:38]  overly dramatic but I have survived cancer and it was awful and my family fell apart and I don't have a problem sharing that story especially because ever since I started talking about that just you know friends neighbors whatever I wasn't ashamed of it and I was speaking freely about it I can't tell you the number of phone calls I've gotten the number of emails or text messages or hits on you know social media whatever it is hey can you call me and invariably it's somebody that just got a diagnosis and they want to talk to somebody who's been there done that isn't going to judge whatever their decisions are maybe I can help them talk through some of their decisions that sort of thing and I truly believe that

[18:27]  we need to expand that concept so the other thing that I share and I have permission to share this is that my eldest son experienced a traumatic brain injury when he was 14 and the resulting years from that injury when he was 14 we still didn't really know the best ways to treat concussion there was no such thing as a concussion clinic the prevailing wisdom at the time was you look okay so you know get back on the horse and ride and man the struggles were crazy the strugg resulted in some really really serious substance use disorder some really really seriously bad decision making and so on and so on and so forth and we're really lucky which sounds strange to say

[19:15]  when you're talking about having to do jail and having to do rehab and and so on and so forth we're really lucky because we live in a place in the world that if you're vocal enough if you in insist on the help that you require you can get it and that's changed everything and you know he's he's wonderful he's amazing he's he is living his best life I've got an eight-year-old granddaughter the light of my life and it really worked out well for us but again we never hid our story my son certainly never did he never felt that he was to be blamed for some of his decisions but not for the root cause and that has helped a lot of people being open and honest with a story like

[20:05]  that puts people in the position where they know that this is safe space they know that they can share their story they know they can ask if I can recommend a lawyer whatever that might be so circling back to where you're going everything related to disability and you know with the last decennial census the numbers that came out were that 26% of the population in the United States has a disability wow think about that that's mindboggling whatever that disability might be that's enormous think about the the impact on our health care System to get back to whether or not you can get the the help you need gosh it's overwhelming there's not enough help there's not enough money and anybody

[20:54]  with any kind of disability at some point is going to struggle with their mental Wellness there's going to be anxiety there's going to be depression there's going to be the sense that you are the only person that can try to fix this there's going to be the stigma and the shame whatever the disability may be and that expands to the family and to everyone around you and intersectionality makes all of that worse right so at some point due to Medical Miracles and so forth most of us are living longer so again all of us are going to wind up being a member of the disability community at some point if you are also a member of any other minority if you're a woman if you're black if you're Hispanic if

[21:42]  you're anything else if you're Muslim whatever your difference might be and you have a disability now you are compounded and it it's it's almost like an exponential kind of a thing like compounding interest so to speak it's just going to the challenges are just just going to continue to grow so ways that we're making progress Faith communities there's so much great stuff that's going on within Faith communities to make sure that people are getting some of the health they need to make sure that that people have appropriate translation and interpretation when they need to have conversations about medicine or healthc care or education and clearly I could go on and on on that I completely agree you know as I was

[22:31]  thinking here and I'm listening to you you know to paint this picture for us um we have some bottlenecks in our system currently right we can't get enough people trained in time we can't get enough people hired in time you coming from a technology background as an engineer I'm interested to hear your unique perspective in what role does technology play in being an accelerator to increase access to trusted information to services to diagnosis with your unique background I think you might have a unique take on what role this technolog is going to play that for a long time in the mental and Behavioral Health space has kind of been stigmatized to use that word again yeah absolutely and you know it's fascinating to be a part of to see what's going on the way technology has changed over the

[23:19]  past 20 years I look at the par Olympics and look at some of the devices that our athletes are using and they are hitting it out of the ballpark so to speak regardless of their chosen Sport and pretty much regardless of their disability especially for physical disabilities so we're all we all know that we're all familiar with that whether it's an old school Walker or it's a a super Hightech titanium Runner the running device that allows somebody to really you know beat up the track uh what I'm seeing now what I'm loving now is that we're able to really dig more more into AI into machine learning into Adaptive Technologies that can give people back their voice everybody's

[24:08]  familiar most people are familiar with physical disabilities and with what the the technology so to speak the assistive devices look like to help those folks the thing of it is that particularly with invisible disabilities one of the biggest challenges regardless of the reason is the inability to communicate can you imagine that you know you know what you want or what you need or what you'd love to be able to talk about but you cannot do that you can't come out with a voice that works the the frustration there is is truly just overwhelming and what we see with a lot of people with Autism diagnosis in particular is we we see these really ES

[24:58]  ated behaviors and it looks like somebody's just throwing an absolute temper tantrum at in the food store because Mom said no to something or you know whatever that might be and the number one reason for that is that that little person can't communicate effectively so we're having a really good time with this we are just dipping our toe into some of the AI assisted uh applications um all right so I'm a total geek we know this we've we know this about me um and and there's there are so many websites out there that are just you know Geeks for Geeks so to speak and I love them all and it's easy to find listings every day of new technologies new websites whatever it might be that

[25:47]  can be helpful and some of the most profound that I'm seeing have to do with exactly that with giving people their voice so some of the super cool stuff using machine learning learning an individual's voice when they have really eccentric speech patterns or when they're very difficult for the human ear to understand and being able to translate that into human understandable speech it's fascinating it's absolutely fascinating so I honestly didn't even think about this use case I'm sorry Lisa to jump in here but we see all of these different platforms that are coming out with an AI voice clone of yours and the only thing that you need to do is recite one sentence and it can duplicate the rest of these words through that input so are

[26:35]  you projecting that we're going to be able to use this technology as a enhancement to help people communicate in real world scenarios if they have the ability to do something like write out a message on their phone and then it communicates in their actual voice that's exactly the case and you know here's a fun fact text messaging screen readers voice to text Alexa Google home all of these things that recognize voices voice command they originated as assisted technology for people with disabilities closed captioning I love asking this question how many people who do not have hearing deficits put closed captioning on their TVs they can keep the volume lower whatever you know whatever that is so it's kind of the

[27:23]  opposite it's not that these Technologies are coming especially designed to help people that don't have any type of a deficit it's that they're coming out these Innovations are happening for people with deficits and we find that everybody can benefit any type of accessibility for one person is great accessibility for others one of my favorite saying is we as humans create technology and then that technology creates us right I mean even the invention of fire as an example when fire first was a discovered we saw over the next years that the human jaw shrank because we weren't having to chew through tough meats and our things were cooked and it's interesting to think about in the future like if we kind of forecast out the emergence of these type of Technologies like Ai and how they're

[28:12]  going to impact our space you being an OG technologist from back in the day did you think that these pieces of Technology were going to start popping up in these types of use cases so quickly I'd love to say I would have predicted it I'd love to say that I had invested in it early on yeah exactly you know the truth of it is I never had this stuff on my bingo card and that's what I love so much about being in this space and still having lots of reach back to really smart technical people is that it's easy for me to understand the use case makes itself you know the the the sales pitch is just innately involved in whatever the technology can do uh I keep harping on being able to give somebody their voice and one of the things that

[29:01]  we found within the past couple of years uh one one of our one of our community member of our community have a son um with an Autism diagnosis and he's got some some really challenging behaviors and one of the many things that the family has had to fight through is the expectation that he was intellectually impaired oh he's got to have an intellectual disability oh he's never going to meet make it through school he's never going to be on any kind of standards of learning track nothing like that is going to happen come to find out it was simply because he was locked in and his mom started using something called A letter board now this is a bit of a controversial thing because the idea is that the individual looks to uh

[29:52]  looks to um a letter or a number on a board and uh and and the person who's helping them reads out the letter or the number that they see the person looking toward so there's a lot of controversy about well is that really coming from the person or is that what the the uh the person holding the board is saying but regardless that wasn't what this mom was doing and she was able to unlock her son and get him to the point where he could then communicate well he could type he could move forward and he's got a Blog now he's brilliant his vocabulary is off the charts he could do anything now granted he still has his challenges social skills behaviors that are

[30:38]  associated with his diagnosis sure but by unlocking this child we have created the most spectacular human being who could tackle kind of any job that he ever wanted to have so getting back to the question of Workforce man take off your blinders allow people the technology and the education and the advocacy that they need and you're going to just create your own Workforce regardless of what it is that your company does you told me in our previous conversation you know the one biggest Joy about my job is I get to ask the questions what do the really smart people need I get them what they need and then I get out of the way now this is an interesting perspective to me in leadership because often we feel like

[31:26]  when we are the leader or some leaders feel like they have to be the person who's coming up with the Innovations and things like that why have you recognized that surrounding yourself with really smart people as an example is the best way to be able to fulfill a mission like the ark is trying to F trying to do I don't ever want to be the smartest person in the room that's number one number two even if I had wanted to there was never enough time in my life to accumulate all of the degrees and all of the certifications and all of the experience that the experts have so by getting out of the way what that really means is that I let those people I encourage I kind of force the smart people to take the lead now that doesn't mean that I'm completely hands off not

[32:13]  by any stretch I try not to micromanage staff might disagree I love having a hand in what's going on I love being able to add some depth or breath to the idea but it is very rare that I'll say no to trying something new I may say not yet but it's rare that I'll say no because that's what the smart people are telling me they need and I know that they know what they need so yeah get out of the way let them do their jobs I listened to a uh a interview with Jeff Bezos one time and he talked about how he was very intentional about building in a culture of exper experimentation inside of Amazon when it comes to meeting the challenges of our communities and meeting the need for

[33:00]  services I think we have to experiment with a lot of different ideas how do you think you can give a little tip or a cue on how leaders can get their team to lean into that willingness to fail through experimentation and not be I would say held back because of it does that make sense it makes perfect sense and I I strongly believe this is one of my soapbox issues that our educational system has to teach children how to fail with Grace because what happens is that you you've got people that come out of high school college graduate school professional certifications whatever it is and they may have all of that technical knowledge but they're afraid to fail so that they don't want to take those risks they're uncomfortable with

[33:49]  the thought that something might not work now unfortunately I have not yet been able to change the educational system throughout the United States I'm working on it in time in time but you know but as far as in the office goes so to speak I don't know how you don't do everything in your power to create that kind of an environment are they going to fail absolutely are are some ideas going to fail magnificently heck yes but we're going to celebrate them and we're going to slice and dice and learn every little thing that we can and there's always going to be something you think okay yeah don't do that again but that's okay because we know there's something to not do and that can help us make decisions about what we can do should do must do

[34:38]  one of the Frameworks that I've been working on becoming very grounded in kind of my decision-making process as a leader of my team is understanding the idea of longer time Horizons when we're trying to make things happen in the next month compared to the next year we make different decisions compared to the next year compared to the next 10 years we make completely different decisions and the only objective that we really have in business today is to keep the game going how do you kind of think about the concept of longer time Horizons especially in the space that you're in well you know one of the beauties of age is that you can look back and see the whole timeline during the course of your life there are still moments when I Marvel about the fact that I've got a supercomputer in my pocket because I was

[35:26]  one of those Geeks that walked around afraid that I was going to drop my pile of punch cards and I think about the the power of that and that lets me extrapolate forward technology I the the growth is incredible The Innovation the entrepreneurship that's happening around that so you know what happens in the future we can only predict so much and one of the beauties of the the work that we do is that we do have the chance to really focus on the here and now we we want to look at how we can make a difference one child at a time one adult at a time in one simple way and then move on to the next thing and then move on to the next thing but simultaneously you have to be looking at what's out

[36:14]  there so I think I probably St Drive the staff a little bit you know hard with things like this but because again I am a voracious reader I'm always listening to podcasts I'm always reading I'm going to my Geeks to Geeks website and so on and so forth and anytime I find anything of interest in a particular area I will forward that on with a you know hey can you please take five minutes and read this and let me know what you think that doesn't mean that it's something we're going to be able to implement anytime soon it doesn't mean it's something that we should Implement anytime soon but just because I think it's a cool idea doesn't mean that the smart people are going to agree with that but it does hopefully send the message that we are

[37:04]  always looking forward so yeah take care of what's happening in the moment but let's also make sure that we're looking at what's going to help our kiddos what's going to help our adults whether it's five minutes from now or 50 years from now Lisa the biggest opportunity that sits in front of us especially in spaces like you're in is to paint a vision so big that highly talented people can find themselves inside your vision what type of vision are you casting for the work that you guys are doing at ARK to be able to attract talent that comes into the space because we recognized that there's a lot of other opportunities out there for people so how are you thinking about casting that vision for people so first and foremost we make sure that people understand that our purpose our big hairy audacious goal is to bring about a

[37:53]  just Equitable world for people with disabilities we've defined disabilities very broadly again to to attract clients staff so on and so forth but also to help people understand that we are willing to take a chance um I I am an enormous advocate for obvious reasons for hiring people with disabilities whether they're obvious disabilities visible disabilities disclosed disabilities or private disabilities whatever that is is making sure that we are keeping a very very broad recruiting process happening and that we never say an immediate no to anybody with a disability unless of course they truly

[38:41]  are not able to perform the functions of the job and sometimes that happens especially from a physical disability perspective but for instance we've got several employees that work with our our children in our K to2 school and they have disclosed autism they get it they get it at a level which no other typical employee is going to get and in general they are wonderful long-term employees they tend to have far fewer absentees absenteeism and so on and so forth so when we look at things differently when

[39:30]  we consider people for what they know and not what they are it changes the entire Paradigm you I've been saying for most of my career um and maybe this is because it takes one to know one but I didn't necessarily want the the kid that had just graduated from college or from from a master's program or whatever with with degrees in computer science that's lovely that's wonderful that's great they've got a whole lot of book learning and that's worth a fortune however if they don't have any experience in the world it meaning that they don't understand truly how to collaborate you you might have one or two Lab Partners when you're going through school but

[40:18]  then you walk into a conference room and there are 10 people around the table and they're 10 really smart people so you need to actively learn and engage and also to fight your corner when you know that you've got a really valid point uh but I always said I would much rather have the you know the kid that was kind of taking a more security circuitous route somebody who maybe had gone through the military um that can be a challenge especially in Government Contracting where degrees are required but uh it's really a very different way of looking at who your next employee is going to be my advice is always to widen your gaze to look at different places where you can recruit to look at different ways that you can accommodate an

[41:06]  individual that has any kind of a disability and you will find that your open positions are going to go down pretty quickly this is a really healthy lens of curiosity here so the thing that I recognize I have so many conversations with different leaders and I talked to this individual named Frederick Martin from a Health Care system in Kentucky and he said one of the things that the modern leader needs to understand is that we have a completely different generation of people who are coming into our Workforce 5 to 7 years from now that Workforce does not have the same skill sets of interpersonal communication and all these other type of things yet they're exposed to technology that is pushing them down this path of digital experience so much quicker so are you thinking about this next generation of

[41:55]  being somebody who's going to need to be be extra invested into when it comes to coming out of higher education or are you looking at lived experience as that great equalizer if that makes sense I think it really has to be a combination of all of the above you know as managers it can be a real challenge I shouldn't I shouldn't open that to everybody as a manager I can only speak for myself but it can be a real challenge to learn how to even recognize how to work with a younger generation because their experiences are completely different when we first started to see digital natives in the workforce that changed everything and the government still uses Microsoft Outlook for instance most businesses I would Hazard a guess are still using Microsoft

[42:43]  Outlook and and communicating that way man it's just it's such a heavy application and it there's always some kind of an issue and so on and so forth so folks that come into the workforce that are digital native that want to be able to communicate instantly they want to be able to use slack they want to be able to use all of these other tools that are available a leader needs to learn to adjust to that and you also have to have the humility to say I had no idea what you're talking about can you please educate me on this new thing and help me understand how it's going to help us that can make all the difference in the world and we also have to accommodate the fact that you know all right I'm going to get on the soap box for a

[43:30]  minute we are raising a second generation of children who struggle with mental Wellness we are raising a generation who has to have lockdown drills who has to be afraid all the time you think about what that does to the human body the cortisol levels that are off the charts all the time well how do you incorporate that person into to the workforce how do you make sure that they feel safe that they can be okay here when the reality of it is that nobody can even make that kind of promise but if we are listening to what these folks need I you know work life balance we used to talk about it all the time I kind of hate that term but when you

[44:18]  think about what people want what people need what's going to make their career their work most fulfilling if you're not listening to that if you're not finding smart fast ways to adapt to that these really great folks are going to find jobs elsewhere that's a really big part of it active listening and Implement what you can when you can we as leaders have to show up with soft skills that have been in the front of mind for a lot of different leaders today but it's so much more important to be able to meet people where they are today um when I think about your ability to ask a simple question what what do you want out of this role right by being able to take interest in someone's end goal we can then reverse engineer or figure out how

[45:05]  we're going to be able to enable them to get to the next place in their career everybody wants to be developed everybody wants to be invested into and I feel like often we get caught in here's an interesting concept we get caught in the instant gratification trap now often older Generations like myself often point at a younger generation say you guys just want everything so quick I hear a lot of this from leaders who say we have people coming out of college they want to make six figures right away but often I look at the other side of that the other side of the coin which is our leaders often find themselves in the instant gratification trap as well are they willing to be patient enough to invest into these people so they can become the Future Leaders of these organizations what do you think well as somebody who will stand in front of the microwave tapping my foot um patience not one of my virtues but by the same

[45:55]  token I guess because I am innately so curious I always want to know what somebody else is suggesting thinking feeling recommending and I think that's really where the difference is made if a leader is willing to listen to other options other ways of doing things that doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to be the decision but simply by doing that asking talking to people hearing what they're working on being truly genuinely interested in hearing how they are solving the problems that are in front of them that really changes the the whole business because then people know again it's safe to take risks and you're not going to

[46:42]  offend me by telling me I'm a dinosaur and I really need to look at things a little differently hopefully it'll be a really cool dinosaur but you know I I understand and appreciate that my depth and breadth of experience does not include the things that the younger generation know now we also have to get away from stereotyping I am completely guilty of this I don't understand where's the where's the work ethic where why would somebody not show up to work when they don't have PTO when they haven't called out when you know they just want a day off and the way that I figured out how to manage that to the extent that I actually have figured out was to ask that question help me understand

[47:30]  something you don't have paid time available so you're not going to be paid for the time that you're off you know that it's going to be putting an additional burden on your co-workers because when you're out somebody else has to pick up the slack you understand all of those things but you still opt to do this help me understand why and the answer is invariably I just need to make sure I'm taking care of myself H whoa dinosaur here saying okay I never thought of that right what do you mean self right self-care what are you talking about and then really digging into that so that I could understand what that's really about and the whole idea of if I'm not taking care of myself if I'm not in

[48:21]  pretty good physical and mental health I'm not going to be able to do do my job well especially the kind of work that's done here where you're working with clients and students that have extreme disabilities that have serious needs you have to be 100% present for every hour that you're working so okay you needed extra time off I can understand that and that also goes to our benefits it goes to making sure that our staff is taken care of and appreciated so for instance in addition to a very generous paid time off program most of our staff have anywhere between 30 and 40 paid days off each year so that's all of the major holidays we run

[49:10]  year round but we do take a week here two weeks over the the winter break there um and we make sure that folks have plenty of time off that they are compensated for their time off and that they are able to focus on themselves and that really is a change from from the way that I grew up I if I had ever gone into my boss 20 years ago and said yeah I need a mental health day I can't even imagine what kind of response I would have gotten so you know it's it's really nice to be able to learn from the the younger really smart people I was having a conversation with a uh another leader out of Florida in North Carolina guy's name was Will Jones and he talked about one of the biggest problems that we are

[49:57]  not talking about is CEO nonprofit burnout and in our conversation I brought up a conver I brought up a a framework if you will it's called Energy adders versus energy depleters often we have experiences and things in our lives that are constant energy depleters and we rarely focus on the energy adders now energy adders are not just taking time off but that could be enjoying a good read a good article things that fill up our cup and I'm a big believer that there's no such thing as over working there is just under resting as a CEO of a nonprofit how are you thinking about making sure that you're okay from the self-care lens with those energy adders and those energy depleters that is a great question um I have reached this wonderful stage in my

[50:44]  life where I no longer have children that are at home um my I have grown sons which is which is lovely and wonderful so what used to be the answer to that no longer is so I am able to travel I am able to spend as much time as I want reading I am able to spend as much time as I want hanging out with my dogs and and other various rescues in my house um so and I do know that I need to do those things for me I am not going to be able to lead adequately if I am constantly in a black mood and the energy vampire are real and they are out there so how do you protect yourself from that by

[51:32]  being grounded in the things that build you up what what fills your cup making sure that you're paying attention to that and sometimes some days that can be as simple as running out and getting McDonald's because sometimes you just need grease whatever that is if it's something you need to eat if it's you know if if you need to just go take a 10-minute walk to nowhere uh if it's looking at social media for a couple minutes and you know laughing at stupid memes whatever that might be it is absolutely crucial so knowing that we need to take care of ourselves hearing that our staff needs to take care of theirself themselves and may need a little extra time than what what we would have considered for ourselves all

[52:19]  of that adds up to giving each other Grace there are days when we are all energy vampires there are days when we are all sweetness and light and if we can give each other Grace to be all of those things I think that's when everybody can be healthier as we start Landing the plane here I want to talk about a topic that you are very passionate about and that was Early Childhood Intervention what's going on with the crisis that we're seeing right now absolutely so according to the CDC over the past 10 years there has been a 61 1% increase in diagnoses of autism 61% now you can chalk that up to a whole lot of things some people say well you

[53:07]  know we didn't know before we didn't label it we didn't have a diagnosis so to speak that's probably part of it uh there didn't used to be people that you know doctors that were developmental pediatricians or or whatever the case may be so yeah that absolutely skews the number the fact that there are documented diagnoses however that really doesn't change what's going on and what's going on is that we've got a population that needs more and more and more support so one of the things that we've seen and and this is hard data is that uh one study that I read I think it followed the children for two years and over the course of the two years the children that were very actively engaged engaged

[53:56]  in early intervention therapies and education were exceptionally more able to go on to live the life that they wanted to live than the children that didn't get those Services you know as a as a story uh when I went into my CEO six years ago to to give him my notice he said you know I'm not going to try to talk you out of it and the main reason I'm not going to try to talk you out of it is that the ark needs you and he went on to explain that his eldest son was diagnosed with autism at a young age and he knows for sure and certain that if he and his ex-wife had not had the resources to give their son absolutely everything they were able to bombard him with services to make sure that he was

[54:45]  consistently getting applied Behavior Analysis and speech and occupational therapies and so on and so forth if they hadn't been able to do that they don't know what his life would be like now and what his life is like now is truly amazing based on the challenges that he had when he was a kid he works he's got meaningful employment he writes music he is a gifted musician uh there's so much to him that probably wouldn't be there if not for the resources that were available so what my boss said is that that's what your tasked to do your job now is to make sure that those resources are available to every family to every every child so that whatever it is that's going on that's causing all of

[55:32]  these diagnoses that's causing this this wave of children with autism we're able to meet the wave and knock it back and make sure that every child gets to live the life they want to live you said that and if we're okay talking about this you can just let me know but you said that you are forming a tiger task team if you will that is looking at how do we increase access to good information how do we make access to good information bilingual multilingual how do we help people way find to get on resources get on weight list things like that can you kind of talk about how you're kind of spooling the team up to kind of combat this macro issue and how we're talking sure sure thank you for giving me the opportunity so again it's parents that typically change the world when when you're talking about any type of disability or or challenge that that

[56:21]  children face and what we're doing is gathering the best the brightest the smartest the most experience and having these conversations internally and then externally with our politicians with our government leaders hyperlocal Grassroots kind of a thing but that's what's going to really move the needle is being able to have those types of brainstorming sessions to be able to do something different now how we go forward here's another place where technology comes into play especially AI one of the biggest maybe the biggest challenge when a family receives a diagnosis for for lack of a a better way of putting it they realize something is wrong somebody has a catastrophic in illness or injury now they really need to find a way to

[57:10]  navigate the world of disabilities well where do you start where do you find that information so what we've got going on in our website right now is a rudimentary road map the whole idea is that we want to get to the point leveraging AI that somebody can start anywhere any door entry and they're going to be able to follow a path that gets them to the information and the help that they need in that moment wherever in the country they live because now I'm thinking real big it's not just about Lowden County it's not just about Virginia it's not just about the the DMV anywhere in your country in the country because state laws differ and and the available resources locally differ

[57:58]  enormously but making sure that somebody can navigate that on their own that changes everything if somebody doesn't have documentation if somebody's not comfortable speaking the the technical language of medicine or education or whatever that is whatever those barriers might be can be broken down to the ground if we can provide the resources digitized that can get them the answers they need man this is an exciting time because because we have great minds with really smart people thinking about how we're going to be able to tackle this problem and I just want to say you know it's such an honor to be able to sit across the table from somebody who I would consider and I say this as a compliment is an outsider coming into this space because we need different perspectives and this is why I truly

[58:46]  believe in a large majority of the people who are entrepreneurs who tune into the show is we have unique perspectives that can bring different ideas to the table on how we tackle these macro ch challenges because one of the things that I know is when you are in a time of flux a time of uncertainty the one thing that we want to be able to do is reach out to an organization that is trusted that can give us accurate consistent and immediate information we have an initiative that we call closer to zero which is any delay in getting information when you're in a time of turbulence as a family hours days is way too long how do we use technology as an accelerator rather than a replacement so we can get people the information that they truly need and I'm so excited to kind of see where you guys take this because we need more leaders that are thinking like you about how we're going to be able to tackle these challenges

[59:33]  Lisa seriously it's an amazing job and I'm really excited to kind of see where you guys take this thank you thank you thank you so one of the things that we like to do is we land the plane here as we come to the end of our episode is our previous guest asks you a question now their question is a simple one but I'm very interested in your response how do you know what you are doing is relevant wow working at the ark easy peasy look out the window and see Miracles and to know that I however indirectly have been able to bring that Miracle about that's how I know it's working that's how I know it's relevant that's how I know it's making a difference one life at a time well for everybody who's tuning in watching and listening today

[1:00:22]  once again Lisa Max you are an amazing leader and you are the def of the intersection of heart and hustle and you've definitely extrapolated that for us here today the challenges that we're facing the unique perspectives that we bring to the conversation how we're building a team for the future how we're leaning into the Future Leaders of our organization as well plus how we're having an Innovative and curious mindset when it comes to innovating in technology in thought in Access is truly inspiring so for everybody who's tuning in I just want to say thanks for coming on the show that's a wrap