Cesilee Coulson is the Executive Director of the Washington Initiative for Supported Employment (Wise). She brings 22 years of experience in competitive integrated employment training and technical assistance to her position. Cesilee uses her experience to assist with organizational transformation, employment systems change and community employment capacity building.
Announcer: You’re listening to YES! To Employment, a podcast series that seeks to improve competitive, integrated employment outcomes for transition-aged youth and young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Today Serena Lowe, TASH’s interim Executive Director, talks with Cesilee Coulson, the Executive Director of WISE, the Washington Initiative for Supported Employment. They have the sort of conversation you might expect from two people with such depth of experience in these issues: high-level, broad-ranging, big ideas. But mostly they talk about the necessity to not letting ourselves be limited by systems, processes, the way things have been done in the past during, this unprecedented COVID-19 crisis. They discuss the importance of fostering people’s creative thinking and never loosing sight of our person-centeredness.
Musical interlude
Complete transcript forthcoming
Announcer: You’ve been listening to YES! To Employment, a podcast that seeks to improve competitive, integrated employment outcomes for transition-aged youth and young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Today Serena Lowe spoke with Cesilee Coulson, the Executive Director of WISE. For more about WISE, visit gowise.org.
For more about YES! To Employment, including show notes, links to the resources discussed, a complete transcript and a schedule of episodes, visit www.yestoemployment.org/podcast. You can subscribe through iTunes or your favorite Android podcast app to have the series delivered automatically to your device so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please give us a rating on iTunes. Ratings will help us get the series in front of more listeners.
YES! To Employment is a production of the Youth Employment Solutions Center, the national Training and Technical Assistance Center that serves as a hub of information and expertise for the Partnerships in Employment (PIE) state projects. The YES! Center is a collaboration of TASH and TransCen. You can learn more about TASH at tash.org and more about TransCen at transcen.org. You can receive updates from the YES! Center on this podcast and our other activities by following us on Facebook or on twitter at @YEStoEmployment.
Partnerships in Employment is a series of seed grants funded by the Administration for Community Living’s Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, made to states for the purpose of transforming state disability support systems to competitive, integrated employment. AIDD is dedicated to ensuring that individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families are able to fully participate in, and contribute to all aspects of community life in the United States and its territories.
Music for YES! To Employment is an original composition and performance by Sunny Cefaratti, the Co-Director and Autistic Self Advocacy Mentor at the Musical Autist. You can learn more about the Musical Autist at www.themusicalautist.org.
Be sure to keep YES! To Employment on your list: we’ll have another episode on competitive integrated employment for you in the near future.
Musical postlude
This interview was originally recorded 12 August 2020.
The audio of this interview and the transcript have been lightly edited for clarity.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute or adapt it for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, provided you adhere to the terms, including that you attribute the original source.
The post Proceed Until Apprehended: WISE’s Innovative Thinking on Supported Employment in the Midst of a Crisis appeared first on YES! Center.
