Pre-episode Intro

Jeremy: We talk a lot in probably the first two or three sessions of the course, "What is your why?" And so, the first thing in the course that you'll see is just this whole section on understanding you. Your strengths. Your personality. Your leadership style. What is driving you to want to be in a job? Right? And, and, more importantly, what do you need to do in your own professional and personal development to be able to put yourself on a course that's gonna help you make that why a reality?

Chris: This is the Penny Forward podcast, a show about blind people building bright futures one penny at a time. I'm Chris Peterson. Liz Bottner is not able to be here today because she's having technical difficulties. Today is the start of National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Or at least it is when we are recording this. We will be part way into NDEAM by the time this podcast drops. Because of NDEAM, we wanted to focus this month on Penny Forward's employment programs. So, we brought on Jeremy Grandstaff, who leads our youth employment and advocacy programs, and is also the author of our Employment Essentials course, to talk about those things. In addition to his work with Penny Forward, Jeremy lives just outside Washington D.C, with his husband Jerry and their Seeing Eye dog Ozzy. He works for CurbCutOS as the VP of business development, focusing on bringing in new customers to help them develop accessible digital assets. And he is a strong champion of learning in the workplace about DEI initiatives, and I'll let Jeremy, uh, introduce himself more fully now. Jeremy, thanks for being here.

Jeremy: Well, Chris, thank you so much, for having me on. I am just extremely honored to be going on this journey with you. And it's an interesting, uh, road that I get to travel down. So currently, I am working as VP of business development for CurbCutOS, and then on the side, I get to do amazing work with Penny Forward, and, and help Penny Forward as you guys are implementing the Career Climb programs, and even launching the Employment Essentials course. And so, I'm both honored and humbled to be in the position that I'm in today. So, thank you so much for having me on.

Chris: So, Jeremy, before we get into the uh, employment programs that we're gonna talk about, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your blindness?

Jeremy: So, I was born blind, forty-eight years ago. I've been blind my whole life, and some of the things that I always talk about when I'm asked this question is, I, I grew up in a very small town called Maringo Ohio, um, just north of Columbus. I've kind of always been a guy who had this desire ingrained in me that I was going to overcome barriers. Whatever those barriers may be. And so, Chris, I remember being eleven years old, and sitting in my IEP with my teachers in sixth grade, and teaching them, or helping them design a process that we were gonna use, for me to be able to assimilate into the regular school system. Right? And, and nobody trained me on how to do that. I just kind of made it up, as I was going. Right? Um, when I went to college in Bowling Green, my freshman year of college, I felt this amazing independence that I had never growing up where I grew up. Um, I had a Seeing Eye dog, so that played a roll in that, um, that I got when I was eighteen, but I think it was also that, for the first time in my life, I lived in a place where you could walk places. And that really, I, I would say began a journey of independence for me that was extremely centered, in my core. But I think throughout my career, up until this year, as I was saying before, I was always, usually the only blind person in the room, or the only blind person at the company. So, I distinctly remember working for a company that, the vender we used for our task management system was completely inaccessible, and my boss at the time telling me that I had no right to fight that vender for access, and if I was gonna do that, I would lose my job. And I always felt a little helpless in those situations. Right? That, I didn't know how to tackle that. I had spent so many years just trying to make me normal, that the idea that I would have to fight for my own access, I would just figure out ways around it. And, so, you know, I'll come back to what I said earlier. It's kind of neat to be in a place now where I can help other people not have to fight for that access, or at least give them the tools that they need to be able to fight for that access in general. And that's pretty amazing.

Chris: It is. And it takes a lot of confidence. Especially, you know, thinking back to being an eleven-year-old, going into public school and being the first. And training people. I mean that's, ... not everybody has that in them, or, for a lot of people, it's got to be something that they work at, really hard. And, I, I think you have, a lot of that comes naturally to you, and, and you, you are very lucky in that regard. So let's then talk about the employment essentials course, which is the first time that you started working on employment stuff for Penny Forward. And, um, how did you take that confidence that you have, and build it into this course? Um, and, and maybe talk a little bit about what people are going to experience when they take the course?

Jeremy: That is a great question, Chris, and I think, you know, to your first question, I do tend to come off, at times, as very confident. And there's an interesting piece about me that when people actually get to know me, what they really find is, I'm confident, but yet I have no problem telling you I don't know. And I have no problem also asking for forgiveness if I misjudge something, or my confidence makes me a little arrogant, 'cause that's never what I want to be. When I began this journey, looking at Employment Essentials, there was a couple things happening for me. First of all, I had ran my own company and hired people for twenty years, and then building on that, I also served as a recruiter and account lead for a small management consulting company. And, at the same exact time, as I'm serving as that recruiting and talent lead, I also began an exploration with myself, really diving into, "Where do I want to be? Do I really want to be in recruiting?" And coming to the answer of, "No," I didn't, where do I want to be and how do I want to get there?" And so, there's an irony, that as I'm writing this course for Penny Forward, I'm also going through my own job search. And learning from what I would loosely call "the experts." Right? So, we refer people to Ruth Vicvits in the course, as a career coach, or a career strategist. We call her a career search strategist. And Ruth was my career search strategist at the time. And so it gave me the ability to really take that step back, grow more in my own career search, but to ask the questions that needed to be asked. Both from, as a recruiter, what would I want a candidate to be doing, in order to make them a better candidate, and as a job seeker, what could I be doing, that would make me a better candidate? So, that helped us go down a road I think in the course that really started first about getting to know oneself. Right?  We talk a lot in probably the first two or three sessions of the course, "What is your why?" And so, the first thing in the course that you'll see is just this whole section on understanding you. Your strengths. Your personality. Your leadership style. What is driving you to want to be in a job? Right? And, and, more importantly, what do you need to do in your own professional and personal development to be able to put yourself on a course that's gonna help you make that why a reality? The next thing that we get into in the course really has to do with putting your materials together. And really, when we're talking about this, we're getting into things like writing your resume. Um, writing a draft cover letter, or a cover letter template that you can use, um, to make yourself stand out when you submit your resume. But we take it a step further in this course. Which is really digging into social media, and how to leverage sights like LinkedIn, and videos, and graphics, and text, and content, in a way that really helps to demonstrate your professional brand. Um, we also dig into interviewing techniques. I like to talk about it as "interviewing and networking with confidence." So, it's not just about interviewing and how do you walk into that interview and demonstrate capabilities and your confidence in that interview. But it's also about, how do you network with the right people, and how do you do that in a systematic, and purposeful way, that relates back to your why? Now, of course, Chris, we also talk about things like discrimination, and when to disclose, and other aspects of the hiring and on boarding process, so that people can be really aware of what they're walking into. But it really starts with the why. And, and I think that that's, you know, what makes the course so successful.

Chris: Text and graphics and videos and, oh my. These are kind of scary things for a blind person. Can a blind person be successful at, at these kinds of things?

Jeremy: I absolutely believe that we can. Now, do my pictures always come out perfectly? Not really. Sometimes. I think the key is to really think about, what tools do you have that can help you make sure that things are as good as they can get, and let's also keep in mind something else. I may be wrong, Chris, but I would almost bet you, that not all sighted people's videos and pictures come out perfectly either. And so there is an aspect to posting, and to getting your brand out there, that we have to be conscious of, and balance. And one aspect of that is making sure that it's good enough, but the other aspect is not being so perfectionistic that we get in our own way. I think that there are little things we can do. I use a ring light behind my computer. That means that every time I center myself for even a video conversation with a perspective client or employer, depending on, you know, what we're talking about, I have the ability to center myself within that ring light. Um, there is AI tools that are just coming on the scene more and more every day. For example, uh, when I'm doing my mail, I use Seeing AI. When I'm, you know, checking my face to make sure that it's within the view of my computer, I can bring up Jaws. And I can use Face In View. And it, it does a really good job of telling me where I'm at. Um, but I think with the tools that are out there, Aira, Be My Eyes, they are all making advancements in a way that gives us the ability as blind people to really just transcend some of those barriers, to what we could and couldn't do in the past when it comes to videoing and, and pictures and, and content. And I think the other piece of that is, be courageous. My friend Martin Stark, uh, he's one of the people that we refer to, uh, in the course for LinkedIn assistance, and he has a really good course on how to tap into the power of LinkedIn. Um, but one of the things that Martin talks about is being courageous. When I'm at an event, and I am really inspired with what's happening in that event, I won’t just take a video of that event, I'll grab someone in the crowd, and I'll say, "Hey. Would you do a video with me?" And we'll do a quick video. "What are you taking away from this?" And, And, I have found that those type of videos really tend to also promote the event, but they're promoting, for me, the genuineness that I have in really wanting to find out, what are other people getting from this? What are we all getting from this? And how can we share that with other people in a way that's accessible, and gets their attention?

Chris: So before we get into the other things that you're doing with employment at Penny Forward, let's talk a little bit about disclosing your disability. Or disclosing your blindness. How does confidence play a part in the way that we disclose our blindness and land the job?

Jeremy: Well Chris, that's a great question. I first want to acknowledge, things have changed significantly since I started looking for a job, when I was twenty-two years old and fresh out of school. Right? One of the things that I love to talk about is, my first job that I got, I happened to hear a commercial, this was in 1999. I happened to hear a commercial on the radio for a company called Alternative Resources, I think it said something like, "Let Alternative Resources begin your career!" And I, I don't know, maybe I was feeling a little overconfident that day, so I picked up the phone, and I called, and this lady named Katie answered. And I said "Hi, Katie. This is Jeremy Grandstaff, and I hear Alternative Resources is gonna begin my career." Right? A little snotty if you think, but to her it came across as confident. Right? And then I asked the question, "How does that process work?" So, I talked with her for a little bit, this was a phone interview, um, obviously, and she said, "I'd like you to come into our office the next day." Now, back then, I was taught, you don't disclose your blindness until you have to. And so, I did not mention anything about me being a blind person in that phone interview. In fact, I made my mom drop me off one block away from where I had to do my interview the next day, and me and my Seeing Eye dog went and found that building together. I walk into the office, Katie comes out to talk to me, and you could tell, me and my seeing eye dog Hamlet completely caught her off guard. We went through probably twenty minutes of the interview, Chris, and she kept stumbling around, trying not to ask me about my blindness, but needing to so that she could understand, how was I gonna do the job. Right? But she knew legally she couldn't ask that question. And I think finally, at some point, I just kind of sat up in my chair, I kind of squared up a little bit, and I go, "You know, Katie, you've been trying for ten minutes to ask me about how I'm gonna do this job as a blind person. Why don't we just say that I have the technology and the tools to do that, that's something you and I can figure out once you've decided that you want to hire me. But I want you to make that decision of whether you're gonna hire me not on whether I can use your tech or tools but based on me. And what I can bring to the team." And so, the real answer to your question, Chris, is that we've jumped ahead thirty years. I disclose my blindness usually at the beginning of every video chat that I do. But I do it in a playful, and fun way, which makes it easy for people to see my confidence. And so, I'll say things like, "Just wanted to let you know. I do happen to be a blind person, so if it ever looks like I'm not looking you in the eye, I promise you, that's the only reason why." Now why do I go about doing that? Because you know what? We live in a sighted world. And in the sighted world, people build trust because they can look you in the eye. And if I'm trying to have a conversation with someone, and they can see, and I'm not looking them in the eye, no matter how much I don't want them to think about that, they will unless I've addressed it, and taken the objection off the table. So, my recommendation is you have to address disclosure when it feels right for you. Um, the other aspect of that is, talk about it. Try it. And if you ever get backed into a situation that you’re feeling really uncomfortable about it, I recommend stealing a line from my favorite author Chris Voss, and the book that he wrote "Never Split the Difference," which is, "Find a way to take that objection off the table." So, if I'm feeling uncomfortable about it, I might just say, "Wow. Got to tell you, I'm feeling a little bit of uncomfortableness talking about me not being able to see. I don't think that's your intent, I just needed to own it with you, and let's figure out how to move past that." And sometimes, someone will look back at you and be like, "Oh wow! I, I don't want you to feel that way at all. I just have some questions." "Oh. You're curious? Well, let's dig into what you're curious about." And, And I think the more you can turn it into a dialog, and a discussion, that lets people see how you're going to engage with them, and how you're gonna interact with them, then you have helped them see more about you, and the breadth of capabilities and skills that you're gonna be able to bring to any position that you have. And the, the last final thing I'll say on this, Chris, is, if the lack of confidence in yourself is getting in your way, talk to someone about that. Practice it. Take the strides that you need to take in order to help yourself eliminate that barrier of lack of confidence. Because as soon as you do that, your world will change drastically. And I can tell you that from personal, and professional experience.

Chris: The Employment Essentials course is available to paying Penny Forward members, uh, via
pennyforward.com
but it isn't the only employment related thing that you've done with Penny Forward, or with our partners. Can you talk more about the other things that you've done?

Jeremy: Absolutely, Chris, and I have to take one moment to just say, my full-time job is the VP of business development with CurbCutOS. And I, I just want to reinforce that, um, and part of the reason that I'm reinforcing that is because it does tend to take up a lot of my effort and my time. But one of the things that I'm so excited about is that I have the time to engage more fully this year with Penny Forward, and really help drive the Career Climb program. So, this is a series of ten workshops. We designed it at, and can customize it to meet, agency needs, but our original design that we start with, is ten workshops, and five executive coaching sessions. Now, the workshops are built around the Employment Essentials course, and really digging into that and getting clearer, um, giving people that collaborative environment to feed off of each other and other participants in the course as they are working through building their own plan to Career Climb, whatever that may be for them. We've also introduced, as part of those ten workshops, some focus on teaching financial success, and budgeting, and the things that you need to be able to spend that money that you're gonna make. Uh, as you are, you know, career climbing. The five executive coaching sessions are one on one sessions, where we meet with each participant individually, we help them be able to apply what they're learning throughout the workshops in a more holistic way, we work directly with agencies to work on this, or with organizations that are connected straight to the agency. So, the pilot program on this was actually done under World Services for the Blind, and we worked, um, with the Arkansas agency for the blind to be able to deliver this for a number of students. So, we're gonna do a whole webinar explaining more about what that program does and how it can benefit various students within your state, so if you are a agency person that is working with blind people in your state, I encourage you to tune in on October twenty-second at noon Eastern, 9 Pacific, where we'll be diving further into that. That is happening this month, and then we will also include the link to register for those sessions, and if you're not a member of an agency, I recommend, and, and, you know, you're a blind person within your state, talk to your agency about it. Tell them that this is happening. Give them the opportunity to come and learn more about it, or give us a call, and we can help you start that conversation with, you know, the agency that is serving your, uh, blind and low vision people within your state.

Chris: Any advice you have for people who are blind or have low vision that you might want to share before we go, and uh, any ways that people might contact you if you're open to that?

Jeremy: Absolutely. So, first of all, the best way to get a hold of me is either LinkedIn, E-mail, or you can even text. So, if you want to find me on LinkedIn, I'm Jeremy Grandstaff, that's J E R E M Y, Grandstaff is G R A N D, S T A F F. E-mails, it's
jeremyg@curbcutos.com
or
jeremy.grandstaff@pennyforward.com
You also can text me on my office number at 202-810-5368. What advice do I have for blind people? I think it's threefold. The first is, drop the comparisons. And I don't know, Chris, that this would be limited to blind people. Don't compare yourself to others. Your situation is different. Your background is different. Your capabilities are different. Comparisons to other people are the quickest way to negatively impact your life. Now, I'm not saying don't learn. Or don't try to be better. Right? Because that's point number two. Always bring a curiosity and a thirst to understand, into everything that you're doing. So, instead of comparing yourself to somebody, ask yourself, "I see them doing XYZ. I wonder how they do that? I am curious, I want to know more." Really tap into what it is that you want to compare to see how they're doing that. Or what's driving them to do what they're doing. And the third thing, be understanding of yourself.  Try to figure out what your why is, right, make that definitely a, a high priority, but once you have that why, and you put your plans in place to get you there, be understanding with yourself that it may not happen quite as fast as you want. And the final thing, I know I said three, but I'm gonna tack on one more, Chris. Ask for help. As blind people, there is an inherent piece of us that, some of us are taught which is, "If I ask for help, that's admitting that I can't do it." And I don't subscribe to that philosophy. If I ask for help, it's because I'm not seeing the path. And if I ask somebody, "Hey, help me understand how I can do this better," they're gonna help me be able to see the path, or to see the technology, or the process that I need to put in place, so that as a blind person, I don't have to ask people to do things for me. Asking for help is asking someone to do something that I can't do.

Chris: Well, that's great. I, uh, again, I thank you for being here. I hope that people have gotten a lot out of this, and will check out the Employment Essentials course, and Career Climb.

Jeremy: Well, thank you, Chris, and I appreciate the opportunity to be with you, and to be part of Penny Forward's work, and the journey that y'all are taking, so thank you for allowing me to be part of that.

Chris: The Penny Forward podcast is produced by Chris Peterson and Liz Bottner, with help from MOe Carpenter. Audio editing and postproduction is provided by Brynn Lee, and text transcription is provided by Anne Verduin. The music is composed and performed by Andre Louis, and it's not really a coincidence that all of those people are people who are blind. Penny Forward is a nonprofit organization founded and led by blind people. We empower each other to navigate the complicated landscape of personal finance. We do that by providing self-paced, online financial education courses, weekly and monthly group workshops, and one on one financial counseling, all for an affordable price of $9.99 a month, or ninety-nine dollars a year. Join us by visiting our website,
www.pennyforward.com
and clicking on the "join us" link right near the top of the page. Now, for all of us in the Penny Forward community, I'm Chris Peterson. Have a great week, and thanks for listening.