Episode 69: I always thought of my work as mindset realignment.

You're listening to Demand and Disrupt, the podcast for information about accessibility, advocacy and all things disability.

Welcome to Demand and Disrupt, a disability podcast. I'm your host, Kimberly Parsley.

And I'm your co host, Sam Moore. She is in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I am in Henderson, Ky. And it is a brand new year, 2026. That's going to take some getting used to for me to say. And, and I'm sure you as well, Kimberly, but with practice it'll come more natural to us. And you had the pleasure of chatting with our special guest this time around. Who would that be, Kimberly?

To start us out for 2026, which. Yep, weird to say. Can't believe it. Drum roll. I know this is the year my son will graduate from high school. Weird. I know some so. But today before all that, we will be talking to Milton Tyree. Milton has had 40 years in the field of supported employment for people with disabilities. So that means that he was doing supported employment before they even called it supported employment.

Before it was such a thing.

Before it was such a thing. He is going to talk to us about that, how that came about, some of the changes. He retired as a project director from the Human Development Institute at HDI at University of Kentucky. He's also done some work on a theory called social role valorization. And that's kind of an interesting field of research and study. And he's going to talk to us about that and it's truly fascinating. He's done some work on that, not just here in Kentucky, but also in Canada, India, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Oh, gosh, he's practically global.

I know. And he is. And Milton, I met Milton when I went to hear Some People May remember. I interviewed Dr. Julia Watts Belzer when she won an award up at the Louisville Seminary.

Oh, I remember that.

Yeah. And I went to hear her speak and Milton was there and I got to meet him. And you know how there are some people who just, you just want to hug them. They're just the nicest person from the get go.

Sure.

Yeah. And then you get to know them better and you're like, hey, they'd be good podcast guests.

Well, he, he just, I mean, just from the beginning, Milton was interesting and just kind and just the sweetest person. The kind of person you just don't mind talking to forever, you know, like me.

Right, Kimberly?

Just like you, Sam.

Just like you. So yeah, you better say that.

Gonna get the pleasure of hearing Milton tell us all about himself. You know what's best about him though, Sam? Milton is a Hilltopper.

Oh, yes. Tops, baby. Tops. Tops, Tops.

Exactly.

So.

So we'll get to hear all about that and what he majored in at Western. But. So, Sam, I got to know. How was your holiday?

Oh, it was. It was great. Santa Claus did me far better than I deserve. I got some. I got some new Hilltopper shirts so I can sport. I can sport my WKU pride there. And I got. I got some new comfy pants to lounge around in at the house. And I will admit that I also got from Santa a bottle. And I will drink responsibly, Pete, so don't worry. But I got a bottle of Rivertown single barrel bourbon from a local. It's about to be a local distillery when it opens fully, but it's. It's called Rhythm River Distillery in Henderson. A couple friends of mine.

Oh, cool.

Couple friends of mine own the place and so Santa Claus supported them and I got some, some goodies out of it. And what I've had so far, it's. It's really good. But, you know, a little bit of that goes a long way, so I'm going to make it last for quite a while. I've got a feeling.

But.

But yes, Santa definitely did me right there. And you know, our buddy Eldon was asking me the other day that. About your son and if he got his electric guitar. He did, didn't he?

He did. Santa brought him an electric guitar.

I thought I remembered us talking about that, but I couldn't remember for sure. So, yep, I'll. I'll report to Eldon that he did get it.

He did get it. He did.

And I'm sure he's been, you know, I know your whole family's kind of been under the weather, but I'm sure as. As he's been feeling up to it, Ian has been playing the fire out of that thing.

He has been.

He's.

He's been. Been playing it and we got a cool. We got him an amp that has like headphones that you plug in so that you can play and only you hear it, you know.

So.

Yeah, so that's pretty cool. He's.

Yeah, that's the rest of the family a lot of misery, especially when they're ill.

Yes, right. Right. True. So.

So yeah, I know Santa Claus, in addition to the, you know, the good is obviously the electric guitar and things. I know he also brought a few things around your household that weren't necessarily welcome.

Yeah. I texted, texted Sam and said Santa brought us the flu.

Yeah. So.

And I told her I Said any Santa that brings the flu is definitely a dirty Santa.

Yep.

But anyhow, no, we did play dirty Santa at the, at the family get together Christmas night and.

And you did not get the flu from dirty Santa, right?

Did not. Knock on wood. But I came out of that actually with a, a spice bucket. It was a bucket of spices that you can use on different meats. One is, one is a beef rub and one is a barbecue rub that you can use when you do like pork or ribs or what have you. And you know, I eat a lot of meat, so I figure I might as well enjoy the meat that I eat. Wow.

So that sounds awesome. That actually sounds really good. What kind of, I mean, what, what, what brand of spices?

I don't remember the exact brand right off, but the, the cousin of mine who contributed that the spice bucket said he got it from a tractor supply up there in the, in his, in his, in his hometown. So just go show if any of you folks. I think tractor supply covers, you know, most of Kentucky. So you know, you never know what you're going to find at the tractor supply. I'm pretty sure you've got one down there in Bowling Green.

Okay, listen, Tractor supply is, honest to God, one of my favorite places to shop. See, I'm telling you, even kidding, you.

Don'T know what you're going to find there.

I mean, if you don't have a tractor supply. There's also a rural king I think.

Is kind of like we have in Henderson. We don't have a tractor supply, but we do have a rule king.

Now they're kind of alike, right?

They're similar in nature. I think my farming cousins may tell you that they are more different than we think. But they are similar and I see they are similar in nature and in concept.

You can buy everything from like lawnmower parts to baby chickens at our tractor supply.

I mean if they ain't got it, you almost don't need it.

I got my mom, I bet you 20 years ago I got my PA. My mom a pair of pink polka dotted rain boots like Wellington's that she still swears by. So. And I got them from tractor supply. She loves them to this day.

She loves for 20 years. In fact, you've probably got multiple tractor supply locations down there.

There may be two. I know there's one in Bowling Green, there may be two. And I believe there's some one in like Glasgow, you know, so yeah, probably.

Franklin, some of the surrounding. Especially since there's those, you know, a lot of those are big farming communities over there.

And now we know you can buy a spice bucket there. So.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or you can at least buy the spices and put them in a.

Put them in a bucket.

Put them in a bucket.

But.

But anyway. Yes, it was a great Christmas, all told. Pretty darn good New Year's for me as well. And you were telling me off the air here, Kimberly, that you all had a. A very enjoyable New Year's Eve celebration, didn't you?

We did.

I.

Since Christmas was kind of. No one felt real good over Christmas. We. We actually did something for New Year's. We just went to my mom's. But, Sam, I played poker.

You played poker?

I did. I played poker. Not for money, because I'm a cheapskate. I'm not gonna give away money. But, you know, I had learned to read braille over the past year, right? Oh, yeah.

With one hand.

Yes. So. And I got some braille poker cards, and I could read them. So I played poker and I kind of won.

You can't. You. You halfway won anyway.

Well, I mean, I think that I didn't. I think if we'd have been playing with money. Put it this way. I took all Michael's chips, I had all his money. And we were ending up the night we were going to leave. Sayer came in, and we were betting, and Sayer said, good job. All in, Mama. So I just said, okay. All in.

And.

And, okay, so I'm reading braille and I'm pretty good, but I'm not great. So I wasn't sure what I had. Turns out I had a straight.

Oh, absolutely. But, yeah, I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to play a little poker. Although I better practice before I play against you because.

Oh, yeah, you better practice, I tell.

You, because you're already off to a hot start, apparently.

I am.

I am. I'm on a streak. I'm. I'm on a winning streak after one. So we are happy to start 2026 with our friend Milton Tyree. Today, I am joined by Milton Tyree. And Milton has been working in the disability services field for a very long time. And I'm going to let him tell you all about that. Welcome, Milt. How are you?

Thank you. Kimberly. Yes. It's really nice to be with you this afternoon.

Wonderful. We are glad to have you tell me about your work and kind of why you chose it.

Well, so I've had a good long career in the field of supported employment, and I got involved because somebody recommended it to me. I never would have envisioned when I was thinking about careers in high school and when I first started at Western Kentucky University, it never would have occurred to me that I would have this incredible career getting to know people with disabilities and helping provide access to jobs. So it really happened. I grew up in Virginia, and back in the day, I was a decent trumpet player, and they needed trumpet players at Western Kentucky University. I had a music teacher who'd gone there. I auditioned, I got a little scholarship. Then I went there as a music major.

I did not know you went to wku.

I am a hilltopper just like you. I know that from your other podcast.

How exciting. I did not know that. Well, see up in Ivan Wilson.

Yeah, Ivan Wilson. As a matter of fact, Ivan Wilson was built my first year there.

Really? Wow. Okay. Yeah, that's the Fine Arts center there on campus.

And so I spent a good number of years there playing trumpet, studying music. But here's the point. I love it. And I loved teaching and I loved performing, but I just decided I didn't want that to be my major anymore. And most people discourage this idea of a career change. And. Except One music professor, Dr. Morris. Ruth Morris. And she said, I think you'd be good in special education. And I said, what's that? And so, anyhow, that got me involved. Sure enough, I changed my major to special education. And she was absolutely right. I became a special education teacher in Alden County High School. I loved it. She was right. It felt purposeful, meaningful. But I got really frustrated because all of my students were going home to sit after they finished school. So I got really interested in employment. And in the time, in the day, the only kind of employment this is in the 70s, late 70s, the only employment I knew of was sheltered workshops. So I got a job in the sheltered workshop. And my students who'd finished school, this was in Louisville, and my students who'd finished school went with me to the sheltered workshop. And I was really disappointed. It just wasn't what I'd expected. The jobs were too easy, the pay was awful.

And Sheltered Workshop, just real quick, is.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So it's a entity that's established to provide work for people with disabilities. They've been around for people with intellectual disabilities since the 50s and started primarily by parent organizations. And so started with the best of intentions, no question about it. But you have, like, a big room full of people with disabilities divided into crews, and you do piecework kinds of things. Just subcontracts you get from business, businesses, kind of arbitrary jobs that was one of the problems you see. And so I had a crew of about 15 people, including my two students who, who went there with me. And, you know, the work wasn't a fit. Often it was maybe a chance that it would be a fit. People got paid on pro, on productivity. And if it wasn't a fit and they weren't interested in doing it, you know, they, they earned really low wages. And it was just, you know, what I came to understand was that even though it was founded with the best intentions in mind, understanding that work and contribution, purpose, all of those things that are important for everybody were important for people with disabilities, and there weren't other options that were understood that this is what was developed. But I was really fortunate that there was a new regional director of Disability services who come to Louisville, and his name was Jeff Strelley. And I was describing to Jeff my frustration with the sheltered workshop. And I wanted to make it better. I wanted there to be suited, fitting jobs and well paying jobs and challenging jobs. And he said, you know, don't you think everybody wants that? He said, you know, it's not that the sheltered workshop isn't trying hard enough, just like you're not trying hard enough. Everybody's trying hard enough. It's just a fundamentally flawed model. But he said, and this was 1980, he said, would you be interested in learning about some programs that are helping people now in sheltered workshops to get jobs where everybody works? And I said, well, of course, and I belong to a parent teacher group in Oldham County. And he paid for a bunch of us to travel around and visit, visit some of the early iterations of supported employment.

Okay, so that's how supported employment as we understand it here in Kentucky, that's how that evolved.

That's how that evolved, because it wasn't a supported employment program. There weren't very many of them anywhere. And Jeff sponsored us to start a private nonprofit based in Oldham county in Crestwood, Kentucky. We called it Oldham County Community Employment 501C3 private nonprofit. And he helped us get initial funding to start that.

Okay, and you said you traveled around, so where, where were some of the places you went? And what did you see?

One of the places we went was to Virginia Commonwealth University in Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. Paul Wayman was one of the early people to have this vision of people with disabilities working where other people work. So we visited his program. We visited a duplication or replication of that in Washington, D.C. we visited a program in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania called Ahead and a program in Omaha, Nebraska. So we had A bunch of trips and we took lots of notes to find out how they funded, how they trained staff, all of those sorts of things. It was really in its infancy. It was not called supported employment in 1980 and 81. When we got started, it didn't have a name, but it got a name by 1984 and there weren't a lot of people doing it. So we were kind of in on the ground floor.

Okay, and so, so tell me, tell me what you did when you got back to Kentucky. Tell me how you built this supported employment model. Kind of what you did and what is supported employment?

We started off by wanting to replicate what we had observed. And so we were real small. I was the only employee, I was the director and only employee. And we had a part time administrative assistant. And then after six months we hired another full time person. And the idea behind the work we were doing is similar today, although the practices have thankfully evolved significantly. But the idea is that some people need support to envision what a good job would be and then to find that job and then to be sure they're getting the instruction and support they need to be successful in that job and then to stay in touch with that person to see how things are going. So that same basic approach of getting to know people, getting to know businesses, getting people together who could, who are compatible in terms of mutual benefit and providing the support that's needed and then following up to see how things are going, those same things, I mean, that's still basically what supported employment is. But the look of what services look like and how you get to know people and, and how you negotiate jobs and all of that has gotten a whole lot more sophisticated in the 40 plus years that I've been involved.

So it sounds like though the fun, the fundamental idea is that you want to match and match, well, a disabled person with a job.

That's it.

That's it.

And be sure that they have what's needed. This is where the supported came in, that they have what's needed, which sometimes involves external support. They have what's needed to become successful in that work. Okay, so support is provided to the individual with a disability and to the business. And that still is true today. Thus the term supported.

Supported employment. Right. So let me ask you to walk me through it. So let's say a person recently at a high school with let's say Autism Spectrum disorder comes in and they say they, they want a fulfilling job. So tell me, how would that, how would that process start? What would you do?

Well, they Would need to find an organization that understood supported employment to serve them, and that would understand had some background or experiencing serving autistic people.

Okay.

And so typically that referral nowadays would not go directly to an organization, but that person in Kentucky would become a client of the office of vocational rehabilitation, and a counselor then would refer that person to a supported employment program in their area.

In their area.

And then the supported employment program would go about getting to know that person and proceeding with employment. So when I was at community employment, we would take referrals and from vocational rehabilitation, and we would help people get jobs and support them in those jobs. It might be helpful if I give some distinctions about what that looked like in 1981 and what it looks like in 2025.

I think you could be helpful in so many ways, Milt, so go on ahead.

Yeah. So, you know, looking back, some of the early work we did, we. We would talk about job placements, and we would start by looking a lot of times at who's hiring. You know, we. We would ask people what they wanted to do for sure and try to get to know them a bit, and then find a job opening that we thought might work. Okay. And, you know, talk to the business, talk to the person, help them get hired. And then what we would do in 1981, in the early 80s, is that we would go in and learn the job, and then the person with a disability would accompany us, and we would be entirely responsible for teaching that person the job. And then we would gradually fade our support, and the person would work on their own, and we would check in with that person in the business to see how things were going. That's what that looked like.

Okay. Huh.

And sometimes that worked pretty nicely, sometimes it didn't. And looking back at it, one of the things that became apparent was that this thing of the job coach going in and providing all of the training was really kind of weird when you get right down to it. I. I think part of where that came from was part of my orientation to the work again. And that was. There were some remarkable people in the field then, one of whom, Mark Gold, who was one of the people who inspired me to be thinking about capability because my background was with people with intellectual disabilities. So he came along in the 70s and early 80s with this try another way approach, which just stood on its head. What I had learned about the capabilities of people with intellectual disabilities, Demonstrating that people were capable of learning complicated performance tasks, Just really setting the stage for people with intellectual disabilities taking their rightful place in the Work world. Okay. So all of that is to say we knew some really powerful teaching techniques and we went about using them. Right. We were going to go teach. I mean, I think that's where that idea came from. I said it was kind of a weird idea in a way. It was, but that was the foundation for it. Kimberly we thought the reason this is the thing, we thought the reason people with intellectual disabilities are stuck in sheltered workshops is they're not getting adequate training in work. And so that was part of it. And we thought, we've studied teaching, we know how to do this, so we'll take care of it. And we did with a vengeance. And so, on the one hand, people got pretty good instruction. At least a community employment they did got pretty good instruction, but it was all from us. And what we were not paying attention to at all was the social context of work.

Okay, can you talk about that some?

Yeah, sure. So. So it's like, what are people in the business thinking when I show up and start teaching somebody that they usually would teach, you know, what messages are we sending? And inadvertently we were saying maybe what we even believed that we know how to teach this person and you don't. And so that's not good. You know, that's a problem right off the bat. So just fast forward to the. To the later 80s, 1988, Jan Nisbett and David Hagner, to early people in supported employment, wrote a paper called the RE Examination of Supported Employment. And they looked at, they introduced this term natural supports. And what they studied was the idea of who is it who typically teaches in a business? And let's study that. Let's find out how people teach, and then let's use all of that as much as possible. So that was a huge breakthrough. And so now a lot more has been learned since 1988, as you would imagine, about how to negotiate and develop typical teaching as much as possible for people. So nowadays, if I was supporting somebody to get a job, my approach would not be go in and say, show me how you teach the job so I can teach the job. It would be, I want to learn how you teach the job so we can think about what that teaching is going to look like for Robert, whose job it is.

Okay?

And so in doing that, it's like you're supporting the business to teach if they need that. And it could be that the way they teach will work just perfectly fine. It could be that there need to be some adaptations or modifications. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It could be it needs to be shared Teaching. But we go in now with the idea of studying the business, their typical practices, their culture, being sure that it's really a good fit for the person. And then we use everything that's typical and ordinary and valued as much as possible. So what happens then is the person is much more likely to be perceived as an employee of that business rather than as Milton's client. Like, people aspire to be employees. They don't aspire to be a human service client. And so that's a really big shift, how people learn their jobs. That's one of the really big shifts. Another thing is we used to work primarily from. I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

No, go ahead, go ahead.

Okay. So we would go look for the job and put a person in it. And this was another development again around the late 80s, around 1988. Michael Callahan, who'd taken over from Mark Gold and Associates after Mark's untimely death in the early 80s, Michael was a student at Syracuse, same place as Jan Nisbett and David Hagner. And he developed a process that came to be known as discovery. Because one of the other things that Mark Gold, his mentor and the person who inspired me to get involved in work when I was a high school teacher, I thought, look at that. People could do all this stuff, you know? And so Mark. One of the things Mark Golda is really opposed to was standardized testing, IQ testing, any kind of standardized testing. He thought, this is nonsense. To give people with intellectual disability standardized tests to supposedly tell us what people can and can't learn. That's not how we need to be spending our time. We need to be spending our time not assessing competence, but developing competence, finding out what people. What are their intrinsic interests? What kinds of things are people interested in? And so what Mike did was build on that and say, well, so we're not going to test people, but how do we find out what people want to do other than asking them? Other than asking them or in addition to asking them? Because the reality is so many people with intellectual disabilities have had such limited life experience that if you ask them what they want to do, they don't understand the universe of possibilities, you see.

Right, right.

And so this process that he developed, which, again, has evolved quite a bit since 1988, but it came out the same year, or it started being developed right around the same time. And so it's an idea of devoting time with people to get to know that person. Who is this person? What kinds of things are they intrinsically interested in doing? What kinds of conditions does this person need to have in place to be at their best? Like who are the co workers, what's the nature of the task, what's the environment like, how do people relate to each other and so forth. And, and what do they have to contribute to businesses? So these are the three primary things we study with people in discovery. What are your interests, what are your conditions for employment and what do you have to contribute? And so that is a lot better than what we used to do. What do you want to do? You see? And so then that arms us when we're going to talk with businesses. We have a pretty good idea what contribution could look like. And so we try to find businesses that need what that person is good at doing and competent at doing. The other big shift is that just looking at typical job descriptions, which is what we used to do, we learned that for lots of people. And again, my background is people with intellectual disability. That for a lot of people with intellectual disability in particular, if we're stuck with job descriptions, that a lot of people are going to end up being underemployed, that is you got to do everything on the checklist, then it doesn't really have to do with your interest or your contribution so much because you just have to do the available job. Again, you're kind of back to that. And so. Or you'll be perpetually unemployed. Like there's not a job description that you can do. So what we started developing, and this is around 2001, was a. That's when the Office of Disability Employment Policy was developed within the US Department of Labor. And one of the early ideas that came out of the ODEP Office of Disability Employment Policy was something called customized employment, which also has evolved significantly in 24 years. But the idea there is let's find out what people are good at doing, interested in doing businesses that have in place what needs to be there for the person to be at their best, think about tasks that the person would be good at doing that a business needs and negotiate a mutually agreeable job for the business and for the job candidate. So we call that customized employment. And so that's another, another approach. So it's like we've gone from asking to getting to know, right? We've gone from overwhelming, you know, like pushing other people aside, you get out of the way, I know how to teach and you don't, to knowing people well enough to know what good instruction looks like and working with the business to provide that as much as possible and filling in the gaps as Needed. And we've gone into being limited by job descriptions to designing jobs with business and with the person we're representing.

So is it fair to say you were kind of on the ground floor of a helping industry? Sort of as it evolved, I really.

Yeah, community employment was. We were. I got to be. And, and it really put me in a. Just a really fortunate, incredible position to be able to get to work with other people who were developing and thinking about the same things. So that's a lot of where my other work came from. Just getting to know people like Mike Callahan and you know, Carrie Griffin and David Mank and David Hagner, these people on the ground floor of designing all of this stuff. And I got to learn from them, which was remarkable.

And what year did you retire?

I retired completely in 2024. July.

Oh, wow. So pretty recent then, huh?

Yeah, right. Yeah, just a year and a half ago. But, but I'd retired mostly like seven years prior to that. I continued doing some professional development with, through the University of Kentucky, just a number of events and with mentoring and technical assistance for people. Some really small, small based, specific trainings for them. But, but I really retired about eight years ago. And I think the biggest challenge is what has always been there and probably always will be and that is mindsets. You know, mindsets of professionals like me, mindsets of people with disabilities, their family members, business people, everyday people walking down the street. You know, the mindsets that there are certain people who don't have anything to contribute. And that's not true.

Right. What, what we really need is someone to come in and start a, a non profit group that says, okay, we're going to change people's minds and that's what we need. And you know what, take 40 or so years, I think they can do some work, don't you?

I think so. Well, you know, and so that's. That actually is, is what I've always thought of is my work is mindset realignment my own, starting with me. And then, you know, the more that I can learn with people with disabilities and their families and business people and other professionals just trying to. And so you need a context to change people's mind. Work is a really good context for that. You know, look, look at what's possible here. This is, you know, there is not a downside to this. It's good for you, the business person, it's good for the person you're hiring. It's good for society. There is not a downside to doing this.

Well, yeah, I mean, you Know, I, I am a disabled person, and now I am an expert, but I'm only an expert on me, that's all. And nobody else, Nobody else's experience, no other disability, nothing. And I think that is definitely one of the things in terms of mindset, is just overall, as a society, we have to start seeing people as individuals. And that's true of people who are disabled or who aren't.

It's absolutely right.

It's, it's hard because that takes a lot of work, knowing people.

It does. It's good work. It is, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's invigorating, you know, to feel like you're doing something that's beneficial to other people. I mean, it, it's just part of how we're wired, I think, as human beings to contribute and to, to open the door for people to contribute who otherwise haven't had that door opened, you know.

Yeah, it's, it's true. It's, it's exhausting. I think it's working like that where you're, you're building those interpersonal connections. I think it's exhausting. But it is the best kind of exhaustion.

Exactly. It is. You know, I'm a pretty introverted person, and so people wear me out.

Same, same.

But, but I, I love the work because it is, you know, I understand it's mentally tiring, but it also is, it's such a privilege, you know, so for, you know, so you need to ask permission to let people let you into their lives a bit. And I really want to understand who you are and what has meaning for you. And part of discovery is not just taking what people tell you. It's discernment. It's thinking of possibilities previously unconsidered. It's like, man, you're so good at this. I wonder what this would look like, you know, in this sort of context. And so it involves talking with people and if people communicate through speech, and I've known good number of people who don't. And so you communicate however people communicate, and you get permission to interview and other people who have high expectations for them. And you devote time with people in their home and things that are familiar and successful for people. And then you say, how about we try these other things? And so all the time you're developing this relationship with people, you see, and then you get to a point where you think, you know, I think we've got a pretty good idea. Here's what I'm. You know what? Let's let's lay out some ideas about, you know, interest, conditions and contributions and let's get some other people together. So we have a process we call a customized plan for employment meeting. And you get people together who care about that person and you convene a meeting and you review the kinds of things you learned. You think about, learn about new ideas for conditions, interest, contributions. You think of tasks this person would really enjoy. Who are businesses that need that task? Do you know somebody in that business? And then you're ready for job development. You need to start contacting businesses that at least have a possibility of having something that would be a good fit for them and the person you're representing and you have a warm lead to get in the door. You know, Kimberly suggests that I give you a call. I get to help people with disabilities find good jobs and work to design jobs that are benefit to you, the business and to the person I'm representing. Kimberly thought you might be interested in this. Could we set a time for me to come out for 20 minutes and tell you about what I do and talk a bit about Robert, you know.

Right.

That's a heck of a lot better than knocking on a door.

Cold call, right?

Cold call.

Hey, will you have any jobs? I wonder if I have somebody who could do that, you know?

Right, right. You know, when I, I first started here at, at Cal, I was talking to someone who is a provider of supported employment and she explained it to me this way, is that she had a, telling me about a client, someone she had who had an intellectual disability and wanted to be a lawyer, which was going to be challenging nigh onto impossible. And so she talked with him and talked with him and talked with him. And what she found out was that the person that, that, that this individual admired most was like a family member who was a lawyer.

Right.

And so that, that was like this person's, this individual's favorite person. So they wanted to be just like him. And that person was a lawyer. And as, as she, she was telling me this, she said she talked to the individual more and more and more and found out what success looked like to him was getting able to wear a suit and get to meet and talk to a lot of people. And that was what success looked like. And over, over several months of meeting with businesses, she found this person a job getting to go wear a suit and go to like a fancy car dealership, right, where they have like a very friendly suit clad individual meeting them at the door, asking what their way, what, how they can help them, what Their needs are and got that person in job doing exactly what they wanted to do and fitting a need that the business had. So is that kind of what supported employment looks like when it's working?

That's very nice, what you've just described. You see, and you see, that's very different, Kimberly, than what would happen so often that people wouldn't be heard. They would just, you know, that, you know, back in the day, you know, we may have shut down. Somebody wants to be an attorney. Well, that's unrealistic, Right?

Right, yes.

Which. Yeah, that. That's what people want to hear, isn't it? Tell me what you want to do. Well, that's unrealistic. Tell me something else. And so instead of getting hung up on that, she said, well, I'd like to learn more about that. What is it that you like about, you know, the idea. Idea of being an attorney? And so she studied that and learned about it and then thought about what kinds of work conditions need to be in place for that. It's not the attorney, it's just what you said. So. Yeah, that's a really. A beautiful example. Very nice.

So, Milt, you did a lot of work in Kentucky, but I understand you have sort of gone international, is that correct?

I have had some international work, especially over the last three or four years. A lot of it has come through just people I've met who've studied the same things that I've studied. So one of those is the work of Mark Gold and the. And the evolving work through Mark Gold and Associates. So I'm an associate now with Mark Gold and Associates, and I get to do design, professional development designed on that work. And so that is provide. That has opened some doors for me. Another particular area of study that's powerfully influenced my work is work in understanding, teaching, social role valorization theory. And that social role valorization theory, along with Mark Gold, opened doors for international work. So Dr. Wolfensberger's work was centered on the idea of a social theory that's really rooted in the social sciences, sociology, psychology, role theory. And he was quite a radical guy in the 70s, just like Mart Gold, a contemporary of his, just promoting life possibilities that were unheard of in the U.S. you remember, I said I went to Omaha, Nebraska. That was one of Dr. Wolfensberger's programs that he had developed there.

Okay.

And so here we had people with intellectual disabilities, then referred to as mental retardation, you know, living in typical homes, working where everybody works. And so his theory explores the dynamics of social devaluation that is, how is it that groups of people come to be known as less than other people, worth less than other people? So social devaluation is a mindset, you see, it is not a reality. And so how do people develop the mindset that I'm better than you, in other words, along with principles for addressing social devaluation, and so addressing those principles, the way he would describe it, providing access to the good things of life for people who are perceived to be socially devalued. Good.

Can you say that again?

Involvement, contribution. Right.

Say that part again.

Oh, that was interesting. Oh, providing access to the good things of life.

To the good things of life.

To the good things of life, which he described as what everybody wants in life, you know, at home, friends, community, involvement, contribution, being known as an individual, being respected, all of that. And, and his insight was that one of the things that really helps that happen is having valued social roles, which are the chosen valued social roles, like homeowner or employee or faith, community member, and that what often so often holds people back are classical devalued roles, like people with disabilities being thought of as an object of pity or object of charity, or people with intellectual disabilities who are adults being thought of as eternal children. Like these are roles imposed on people, you see, and because they're devalued. And so there's a lot to the theory, but so I started thinking really deeply about the role of employee. Kimberly that's one of the reasons that when I started studying social role valorization theory, the role of human service client isn't devalued in the way that, say, being an eternal child is, but it's not a valued social role. At best, it's kind of neutral. I came to understand that my work was imposing the role of human service client on people. Milton's client, community employment client. Because the way we were going in and imposing ourselves, providing all of the instruction, you see, it was Dr. Wolfensberger that shook my mindset around. And, of course, I wasn't the only person thinking about this. Nisbet and Hagner were thinking all kinds of people were thinking about it. I didn't come up with it for sure, but the way that I started to conceptualize that is what can we do as much as possible for people to be solidly in that employee role? There is a human service component involved, and it needs to be, you know, kind of like you say, the bridge. But I want to make my role as invisible as possible so that the predominant role is the employee role. And he really helped me understand that. So all of that to say social role valorization theory is where I've gotten most of my invitations. So my first I'd worked some in Canada and in Ireland, both related to social role valorization theory prior to this. But I really started working a lot internationally in I guess it would have been pre Covid 2018. And I was on an evaluation team at a post secondary program for people with intellectual disabilities going to a typical college. And so I was on the evaluation team. It was an SRV based evaluation team. And the leader of that team, we were looking at student jobs as part of, you know, the, what they were doing. And, and the woman who was leading that team really liked what I was talking about, you know, about what I learned through Mark Golden Associates and how that aligned with social role valorization theory. And she said, I'm working in India, would you be interested in working in India? And I said of course, you know. So I made my first trip there in 2018 and I've been there seven times and have had a chance. Wow. With lots of organizations in India around these same principles. So one of the things about Mark Golden Associates and Social Role valorization Theory is that's been different in India versus anywhere else I've worked is it is the first non western culture that I've worked in. And so one of the things that's true for both of MGNA and SRV is that what we're doing needs to respect the culture in which you're working. So you talk about needing to learn a lot, you know, and just having so many wonderful people help me learn the work culture in India, you know, I don't go barging in. Here's how you find a job in Louisville. Well, New Delhi is not Louisville, thank you very much.

Right.

First of all, they've got like 30 million people living there. So, you know, and it's not. And so businesses, there are some similarities. And of course India is, you know, because of the British involvement, I guess the nicest way to say that there's, you know, it's a bit of mix of east and west and many, many people speak English. And so because I don't speak Hindi or any of the other many state languages, none of them. So because so many people speak English that I was able to do work there, I was the only person who spoke one language. Everybody I worked with spoke at least three or four because that's what they do in India, you know. But because of that I got just to work with really marvelous People. And it really stretched me to think about what good work looks like in another culture and negotiating that. So the principles, the basic principles, know the people, know the business, that's the same. But knowing the culture of the business and the country has been just life changing for me. Just beautiful and wonderful in so many ways.

Now, do you work with people with disabilities in India?

Well, I've gotten to know a lot of people with disabilities in India, having been there, and I work with people who are supporting people to get jobs. So the woman who invited me, they were doing some SRV based work around people getting typical lives like everybody else. A lot of the human services in India look strangely like human services. Here they're congregated and segregated. Right. And so their work was about helping people get homes of their own, the way that looks like in India, although it's not unusual and very common actually in India for multi generations to live in the same household. So all of that would look different too. Right. And so. But anyhow, just to have people, for people to have access to, typical life rather than special life, I guess is a way of saying it. Work being a big part of that. And she thought that the principles around designing work of mutual benefit, that, that would have resonance in India. And it has, but the look of how you go about it. You see, I've needed to do a lot of learning and study and listening to think about that.

Learning and unlearning.

Learning and unlearning. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the last thing they need is some Westerner coming in with all the answers. Right. And so, yeah, but, but just some beautiful, gracious, wonderful people. I've gotten to meet just some incredible people with disabilities. And a lot of the work that I got to ended up doing was doing workshops and then mentoring over Zoom. A lot of early mornings down on Zoom calls here because of the time difference and, you know, getting to meet people with disabilities I hadn't met when I was there, even over Zoom and working on discovery, the process of discovery with people and their families. And so it has just been really, really nice. So I have not been there for a year and a half. I don't know if I'll ever get to go back. But I am still doing some Zoom work in India and I hope I get to for the rest of my life. It's a so wonderful.

Yeah, listen, I, I despise having to schedule things with people in the eastern time zone, which is one time zone over. So I can't imagine what it's like to try to schedule a zoom with someone in India, right?

Yeah, it's 11:30pm There right now, so.

Okay.

Wow.

So that's, that's a lot of hours. It's. What, it, what time is it here? You're, you're in Eastern.

Oh, it's two. It's fine after.

Wow.

So it's like nine and a half hours difference.

Wow. Yeah, that's, that's. Yeah. I bet you have some late nights, early mornings then, right?

It was mostly early mornings.

Mostly early mornings, yeah. So now since you're talking about India, does the caste system come into play at all when people with disabilities are concerned?

There are remnants of the caste system in, in India. Even though, you know, it is illegal, I, I say there are remnants of the caste system the same way we have remnants of slavery here. Yeah, I see. It's, it's deeply rooted and, and yes, you know, it's like that's something I needed to learn a lot about. And in terms of people's expectations for work, their family's expectations for work, what kind of work do people, middle class people do? What kind of work don't they do? Because of the perception and the tie in with what cast, you know, what is your surname, you know. Yeah, so, so that's been, that's been a piece of it for sure, about learning, about learning the culture.

India. That's a long way away from playing trumpet in Bowling Green, huh?

It is. You know, so like, if you, if you were gone when I was a senior in high school, you said you're going to go, you're going to be getting to travel to India to help people with disabilities get jobs. I would have gone, what? You're insane. You know, what does that mean? So, yeah, it has been just, I just, you know, it's one of the things, Kimberly, that one of the points, one of the teaching points that I learned from Dr. Morris has stuck with me and that is sometimes another person can see something in a person that person cannot see in themselves. You see, so that's discovery, really, you know, being able to have insight, to share with somebody, not to impose on them, but to share with them. Have you ever thought about. So for Ruth Morris, that was. I think he'd be good in special education. What? You know, what do you mean? And so you see, it's the same with discovery. And so the same way that I had other people help me find work that has turned out to be just incredible for a lifetime for me, you know, I'm retired and I'm still doing it, because I love it. I don't have to do it. I love doing it. And, and so I think there is that same thing for other people. And, and, and so that, that just really is, that's the essence of my experience. You know, I got to live it too.

And I mean, you've really worked to change the, the landscape for people with disabilities. So are there things when you look around now that give you hope?

Well, what gives me hope in every place I've had a chance to work, I just meet the most wonderful people, you know, and that there are just really good, decent, hard working, dedicated people everywhere. And so that, that's what gives me hope right now, that, that there are more people like that than people who are tearing things down. And so, and I also have hope that what it is that we're undertaking, that there are, you know, I always like it when you see bright, committed young people, people with disabilities, their families, you know, young people, young family members, young people with disabilities, young people going into the work who are making it better, you know, not saying, well, this is what you said do in the workshop, but like, what would be better than what we said in the workshop? So I think there's tremendous room. We're still, you know, 40 years in. There's what it is that I teach now, you know, is going to keep getting better. And I, and I think that it will. So, so that gives me hope.

Wonderful. Well, this has been a hopeful conversation. Milton Tyre, thank you so much for joining me here on Demand and Disrupt.

Well, thank you, Kimberly. I appreciate having the opportunity.

Demand and Disrupt is a production of the Advocado Press with generous support from the center for Accessible Living, based in Louisville, Kentucky. Our executive producers are me, Kimberly Parsley and Dave Mathis. Our sound engineer is Michael Parsley. Thanks to Chris Ankin for the use of his song Change. Don't forget to follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode and please consider leaving a review. You can find links to our email and social media in the show notes. Please reach out and let's keep the conversation going. Thanks everyone.

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