In 1951, a group of parents decided to start a school for their children with developmental disabilities rather than having them institutionalized. As those children grew into young adults, the school evolved into a workforce training organization. That organization — now known as Relay Resources — is still creating employment opportunities for people with disabilities more than 75 years later.
The nonprofit provides janitorial, landscaping, document imaging and other services to businesses throughout the Pacific Northwest. They also offer individual career counseling for people with disabilities and help pair those job seekers with employers who are interested in inclusive hiring.
Jennifer Camota Luebke is the CEO and chief disability inclusion officer of Relay Resources. She joins us to talk more about the organization’s work.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 1951, a group of parents decided to start a school for their children with developmental disabilities. A common alternative at the time was to put them in an institution. As those children grew into young adults, the school evolved into a workforce training organization, and 75 years later, that organization, now known as Relay Resources, is still creating employment opportunities for people with disabilities. Dr. Jennifer Camota Luebke is the CEO and chief disability inclusion officer at Relay Resources. She joins me now. It’s great to have you in studio with me.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Jennifer Camota Luebke: Thank you for having me.
Miller: I mentioned this briefly, but what motivated a group of parents 75 years ago to start their own school?
Luebke: I think that parents of children with disabilities did not want an institutionalized situation for their kids. I think that many parents thought that this was a terrible thing, and they really wanted their children to be a part of society and to experience things that everyone else experiences. In 1951, I really think that this was a bold move by parents to buck the system, to buck the trend and say my child will not be institutionalized. My child will also not just stay at home and do nothing. They really thought that their children could learn and deserved to experience everything that everyone else experiences.
Miller: What were the standard options for people or kids with disabilities at the time? You mentioned staying at home or being in an institution. What would that have meant for their lives?
Luebke: That would have meant a life of seclusion, isolation, really not having a fulfilled life. And I really felt a kindred spirit when I took this role on with the parents who started, even though I don’t know them and didn’t meet them, obviously, they’re now deceased. But when I took it on, me being a parent of an adult son who has an intellectual disability, I really felt that motivation of wanting more for my child, and thinking how unfair the world is and how broken the systems were in society that kept children and anybody with a disability from being out in public life. I think that’s why the parents really wanted that, and I don’t think that there were a lot of options at the time.
Miller: To what extent has your own experience as a parent with a child, in this case with an intellectual disability, shaped your career?
Luebke: I didn’t know anything about disability when my son was diagnosed with global developmental delays when he was 4 ½ . I didn’t know anybody who was disabled. I didn’t know anyone in my family who was disabled, so I had to do a lot of learning. The doctor said to me, when my child was 4 ½ years old, “Your son will never live a normal life. He’ll never live apart from you, and he’ll never go to college.” And when he said those things, I thought to myself, “How do you know that? He’s 4 ½ years old.”
Miller: So, even though you didn’t have too much experience, you had a kind of… was it anger or an intuition that, “How can you know this?”
Luebke: Yeah, I was pissed. I was just pissed that people were already putting limits on him when he was just 4 ½, and I thought, that might be true, but why don’t we find out? Why don’t we give him opportunities that he deserves so that he can live life to the fullest? So, my son ended up living in Atlanta, Georgia. He went to Georgia Tech. He was in a four-year college program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and he graduated after four years and lived apart from us, about as apart as you can be, since we were in California.
Miller: A thousand miles away.
Luebke: He was in Atlanta. So all those things the doctor said for him were not true. And I think that it’s sad when people predestined your child or anybody for any reason. How do you know that? So this has really shaped my career. I started off not knowing anything. My job was just to get him the right therapy that he needed, the right interventions, and later on I would take every single vacation that I had from corporate life, because I was working in the business world. I worked for Fortune 1000 companies, I led large accounting departments. I took every vacation to attend disability conferences so that I could learn everything I could. Even when I pursued my doctoral degree, I did my dissertation on private schools that educate students with disabilities, because private schools are not required by law to educate students.
So I just filled myself with knowledge and education and learned everything I could, talked to everyone I could, and when I got a call from a previous organization that I worked for that said, you know, we’re looking for someone to develop employment programs or to modernize employment programs for disabled people, I thought, that is my dream job. I’ve got a business background and also I have all this disability knowledge from lived experience, academically, serving on boards, and I thought this is amazing.
Miller: You talked about modernizing work development programs. So let’s hear about what they were like before modernization efforts. I mean, first of all, what was what’s now Relay Resource? What kinds of job training work were they doing in the ‘50s or ‘60s?
Luebke: In the ‘50s and ‘60s, and even up to this day, there are many states that have sheltered workshops where they pay subminimum wage. These are segregated environments for disabled people with significant disabilities that are paid for their “production.” Oregon is no longer running those programs. Relay Resources did participate in those programs many years ago, but today we have actually two specific avenues for people with disabilities in employment.
We have our social enterprises. That is where we hire people with and without disabilities to work alongside each other in inclusive environments. We have a janitorial business, a landscaping business, we do document imaging, and we have a warehouse where we do packaging and light assembly work and light manufacturing. We hire people with and without disabilities to deliver services to our customers. Our largest is at the airport. We clean the airport at PDX and we also work with Portland State University. So those are some of the contracts that we have. We also have commercial contracts. Danner Boots, Bob’s Red Mill, these are all customers of ours where we do work.
The second, that we started last year, is supported employment. We work with disabled people in the community, and help them develop their resume, gain job skills, find a job in the community, and then we provide support. We also have a program called AbilIT, which is a program that Melwood – another organization that does what we do on the East Coast, it’s actually their program – we deliver it here in Portland, where we train people who are neurodivergent. That might mean they’re autistic, they might have ADHD, traumatic brain injury, an injured veteran, and we train them on cybersecurity and technical skills, and then help them find jobs.These are the different ways that we do the work that we do.
Then, the one thing that we are launching this coming October is really exciting. It’s called DisabilityNext, and we have an annual summit. Our second annual summit is this October 6 and 7. But we’re almost finished developing research-based, evidence-based, lived experience reviewed curriculum and tools, technology tools, so that we can train organizations, employers, on how to be accessible and disability inclusive.
Miller: I’m curious, to follow up on that and go back to the first model, and I think the longest running one that you do now, where instead of secluded workshops where everybody has some kind of disability, it’s more melded together. Some people do have disabilities, some people don’t. What kind of training do you provide to people without disabilities that make it more seamless, that helps them know what to say, what not to say, how best to work with people with very different skills than they have?
Luebke: A lot of that right now is on-the-job training. We do have an orientation when people first come into our organization, and we talk about what we believe in and we talk about things like the medical model of disability and how that differs from our disability justice model that we practice today.
Miller: Actually, maybe you could even help us by explaining what you mean by that. The medical model versus disability justice. What does that mean?
Luebke: Medical model, it means, when we think about the history of disability prior to the 1940s, we used the deficit model, which was that people with disabilities are broken human beings and they don’t deserve to be integrated in society. There’s something wrong with them. There’s a deficit. We don’t even want to deal with them.
With the return of veterans from WWII, we then shifted to the medical model of disability, which was, how can we fix them? That’s where you get the term rehabilitation. Even today, we have departments with the word rehabilitation in them, because the very definition of that is returning someone to their original condition. That was the medical model.
Then you go into the identity model where, in the 1960s, disabled people fought for rights and fought to be known as individual people, human beings, and that’s where the rise of “people first” language started. You know, it’s not like “the handicapped,” it’s people with a disability.
You move on and we then go into the social model. This was probably in the 1980s, 1990s, and now we’re looking at the disability justice model. What that means is that we want people who are actually disabled to be the people who lead in language, in what services are needed, and how they would like to be known.
When you look at disability justice, many disabled groups in the community, specific disabled groups, want to be known as identity first, and have language that identifies them as, instead of “person with autism,” it’s autistic person. Now, again, each community has a specific way about how they’d like to be known or what they’d like to be called. And really, words create worlds. So when we think about the way that we talk in language, we also are projecting what type of society and world we’d like to be in.
Miller: What are examples of how you practice this? Just really, resources itself. I mean, I’m thinking maybe this is more the chief disability inclusion officer side of your job than the chief executive officer side of the job. What does it look like in practice, just at your own organization?
Luebke: We start first with our vision, mission, and core values. So our vision, we redid a strategic plan recently, and our vision is, all disabled people belong, period. Everywhere, period. That is what we believe in and what we strive to be. And when we say the word “All,” we’re talking about the intersectional identities of people. Many times when we talk about the disability community, someone in the disability community is going to get left out. We want to make sure that we’re looking at the LGBTQIA+ folks who are also disabled, people of color who are also disabled. We want to make sure that we’re getting to everyone.
Then, our mission is we transform workplaces and communities by championing disability inclusion. Many times organizations are focused on serving the person with a disability. We believe that we work alongside people with disabilities. I’m a disabled person myself, so we want to make sure that those voices are heard and that the intersectional voices, people with intersectional identities are heard. And then we go to our core values and that’s how we begin.
What we’ve been working on over the past, I would say a year and a half, is the specific curriculum that encompasses people with as many disabilities as possible, representation on the disability pride flag, for instance; and ensuring that we look at research, academic research, and lived experience, take that together so that we can create this curriculum. We are going to be rolling it out to our employees this coming fall, and we will also be looking at training and educating other companies and also providing implementation and consulting services to companies who’d like to do the same thing.
Miller: To go back to your vision, it’s short and to the point and also profound. All disabled people belong everywhere. What are the biggest challenges to making that happen?
Luebke: Well, I think that currently we’re seeing an unfortunate rollback of funding and services by the federal administration. And I do think that that has been challenging for not just Relay, but all disability groups, to have to go back to prove that, indeed, we deserve to be integrated in the community, included in the community, and that we belong. That’s definitely one obstacle.
I think, also, just a general misunderstanding of disabled people, especially in the workplace. During the pandemic was the only time where the labor force participation rate for disabled people increased, and it was the only time when we saw a significant shift in the unemployment rate for disabled people decrease.
The reason is because we all had to work from home and disabled people have been asking for that as an accommodation for decades, and not granted. But then when everybody had to work from home, we figured that we could do it. So with the return to office work, I think that has been challenging for many disabled people because it’s an accommodation to work from home.
Miller: An accommodation that has gone back down to close to where it was pre-pandemic?
Luebke: Exactly. We’ve seen the numbers for participation rate decrease for disabled people and we’ve seen unemployment go back up. So that’s unfortunate.
Miller: In the middle of the pandemic, did you think that you were looking at a permanent change?
Luebke: I was hoping for a permanent change, and I was hoping for a permanent change actually with many things. The way we do school, for example. The way that we design work. And unfortunately, I think that, while some organizations and companies and employers did capture those learnings for their company, I don’t think many organizations did. And I think that’s why we’re seeing the backslide on that.
Miller: The political pushback against DEI has largely focused on race and gender and sexual orientation, but what have DEI initiatives meant for inclusion, specifically for people with disabilities? I feel like it’s a huge group of people that’s often not talked about when we talk about DEI.
Luebke: You’re absolutely correct, 27.8% of the population are disabled. We actually think the number is higher than that, because many people don’t know that the condition that they’ve been struggling with and masking at work is a disability, so we think the numbers are higher. That’s pretty significant and it is the largest minority group, disabled people.
I think that, again, with society not really understanding how we can make our systems and our cultures more inclusive, I think that’s what hinders progress in this area. And this is something that Relay Resources is trying to change through our annual summit,and through this service offering, this line of business that we’re launching this coming fall, to teach organizations how to do that.
Miller: Has the pushback against DEI, has it had
measurable effects on people with disabilities?
Luebke: It definitely has. It has, although disability is often left out of the DEI conversation. I do think that we’re all in this together. Any marginalized group is in very similar circumstances when it comes to trying to humanize or normalize who we are and what we are in society. I think that I’ve seen a lot of situations where, because when one minoritized group loses, we all lose.
And I think with disability, what’s so unique about it is that it doesn’t matter what your race, your gender, or your religion is, it impacts all of us. Anybody can become disabled at any time. And we need to remember that. In fact, all of us are going to – well, hopefully, we’ll all grow old – and when our bodies get older, that then creates a situation where many of us will become disabled.
So I think it’s important to realize that this is a widespread situation. This is something that is a normal part of the human condition. And if we are not disabled ourselves, many of us know someone who’s disabled, so this impacts really all of us.
Miller: You know, we started by talking about the history of Relay Resources. You started 75 years ago, at a time, I think, before the term neurodivergent was being used. You mentioned it briefly, and I want to just come back to this before we say goodbye. How does neurodivergence fit under your understanding of this broad term of disability?
Luebke: Neurodivergence, if you look at the disability pride flag, there are five colors represented, and one of the colors is gold, which is neurodivergence. I say this all the time, when you think about the disability community, it’s like saying Asians. There’s 43 countries in Asia and six different regions. And just because I’m Filipina doesn’t mean I know the culture of what’s happening in Tajikistan.
With neurodivergence, even that group of conditions, if you will, someone could be autistic, someone could have an intellectual disability, ADHD, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, dyslexia, there are many things involved with that. And I think that many people, employees, have been struggling to mask at work because they are neurodivergent, and because they’ve had such a tough time in workplaces that weren’t built for them.
I think a lot of companies are recognizing that many of their employees are neurodivergent and that our practices and our systems need to change so that we can include this very talented group of people. And really, any type of disability, anybody who is on that disability pride flag and represents one of those colors, we all have talent and we all have skills, but it’s the world and the workplaces and society that was not built for that group of people.
So I think if we can open our minds a little bit more, and just open our attitudes, I think that we can make changes that really, I don’t even want to say that it’s disability specific. It’s good business. It’s innovation. That is what we are trying to start a movement on with the DisabilityNext Summit coming up in October.
Miller: Dr. Jennifer Camota Luebke, thanks very much.
Luebke: Thank you very much for having me.
Miller: Jennifer Luebke is CEO and chief disability inclusion officer at Relay Resources.
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