Founded in 1980, Whatcom County nonprofit Cascade Connections provides residential and vocational services to individuals with disabilities.
One of their most successful vocational programs is an interviewing skills workshop, which provides a six-session course to build social fluency and self-confidence for obtaining employment. Since beginning in 2009, more than 40 groups of students have completed the workshop, with at least 75% of those students going on to join the workforce.
The workshop recently received a much-appreciated boost from the First Fed Foundation, a private charitable arm of First Fed, in the form of a $5,000 grant. Since its 2015 founding, the foundation has donated more than $7 million to community nonprofits across multiple Washington counties through its twice-a-year grant cycles.
The foundation’s mission, says Executive Director Jan Simon, is to improve the lives of low to moderate income individuals and families, as well as typically marginalized groups. Those with disabilities — particularly those with intellectual and developmental disabilities — as well as their caregivers are often among these marginalized groups.
In past grant cycles, the foundation has donated to other local organizations that help community members with disabilities, including the Max Higbee Center. Simon says the foundation’s grant to Cascade Connections will help an additional 40 or so people utilize the workshop.
“Five thousand dollars is a small amount to pay in terms of the difference that it will make in those people’s lives,” she says. “Now they’re working outside of the home, now they’re learning how to communicate with colleagues as well as managers. The self-confidence and the self-esteem that gets built, there’s an extraordinary opportunity for that person’s well-being as a result of this grant. It really speaks to so many things that this foundation is committed to supporting.”
Doing a Lot With a Little
The $5,000 is incredibly helpful for Cascade Connections due to the way the nonprofit must structure its budget, says Lan Totten, program manager and creator of the skills workshop.
Participants in Cascade Connections’ programs come either from Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) referrals, or from their current caseloads of clients who receive Developmental Disability Administration (DDA) funding. While Cascade has tended to focus on those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, programs like the interviewing skills workshop is open to anyone with any disability. As a result, some of those who participate may not have the funding that other clients do.
“The extra funding that we get from community resources like First Fed is particularly impactful,” she says, “because some of the people we serve don’t even have DDA support.”
Because a significant waitlist currently exists for Cascade Connections’ services, grant funding like First Fed’s provides opportunities for people to join activities they’d otherwise be unable to participate in while waitlisted. Without grants, Totten says, some groups of people could not be served at all.
To those who participate in the interviewing skills workshop, she adds, the impact is huge.
The six sessions are divided up into five instruction sessions and one mock interview session. The latter is filled with questions generated by surveying real employers, and students practice asking and answering those questions with peers before their official mock interview.
These final interviews are commonly proctored by volunteer members of local employers, providing them valuable networking while helping them understand what it’s like to hire someone with a disability. Sometimes, Totten says, the mock interviews translate into real hiring soon after.
Workshop students also learn to become proficient with their past work and volunteer history and are educated about their rights as disabled persons. Totten says that informing students how and why they can ask for certain accommodations often makes a noticeable difference in their ability to self-advocate, building assertiveness and agency.
For First Fed Foundation members like Jan Simon, seeing their grant recipients make a difference in peoples’ lives is profoundly satisfying.
“These organizations do such good, day in and day out,” Simon says. “They are in the trenches with people who need support, and they do it with such grace and thoughtfulness and smarts and heart. It’s a real privilege for us to be able to support them in delivering on their mission.”
All photos accompanying this feature were taken during a recent mock interviewing session in which local employers Karla Booker from the Lakeway Fred Meyer, Christina Murray from Mountain Pacific Bank, Rhea Booth from the Edward Jones on Bellwether Way, and Kaitlynn Gilmore from Archer Halliday interviewed ISW participants to give them realistic interviewing practice.
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