Age: Adult

Regional Center: Inland Regional Center (IRC)

Job: Outreach Specialist at Disability Voices United (DVU) and microenterprise owner-operator

Tina is a woman of many talents who is passionate about changing the world for the better. She is the human half of a service dog team and passionately fights for access rights and to dispel misconceptions for those who utilize service animals. Those who know her understand she is a powerful disability rights advocate who started working at Disability Voices United after completing our Self-Advocates Speakers Bureau training. She has applied to serve on, and actively participates in her regional center’s Board of Trustees, and Local Volunteer Advisory Committee, to ensure the voices of people served by Inland Regional Center are heard, respected, and centered. She is on the Applied Self-Direction Participant’s Council, which is working to ensure Self-Direction on a national level and has applied to several work groups and projects that help write training for Independent Facilitators and shape the Masterplan for Developmental Disabilities. But outside her advocacy work, Tina’s also a vibrant and creative artist who has a thriving crochet practice. She plans to start a micro-enterprise selling her first line of cute and cuddly toys, “A Friend for Everyone,” by the end of 2024.

Where Tina started: Prior to Tina’s Self-Determination Program journey, like so many people, she did not receive meaningful assistance in finding employment that is meaningful to her or that uses her considerable public advocacy skills. In fact, the only “employment” service she received was a placement at a sheltered workshop.

What wasn’t working: Sheltered workshops are segregated – except for supervisors, they only employ people with developmental disabilities. Opportunities to advance and learn new skills in sheltered workshops are almost nonexistent. People perform the same tasks over and over without much interaction with each other or people without developmental disabilities. In addition, sheltered workshops do not pay their disabled workers the required minimum wage in California, and they will not be required to do so until 2025. This kind of limited, repetitive work was not Tina’s dream for her life. She knew she was capable of so much more – she just needed the appropriate support to get there.

What works for Tina in the SDP: Now that Tina is in the SDP, her life is very different. Before, she was not challenged by her work, and her considerable skills were not being recognized, much less cultivated. Now, her workdays consist of working on her micro-enterprise, reaching out to and educating the community through her work with DVU, giving speeches to audiences like legislators and voters as well as her own community, and changing minds and hearts. Using her SDP budget, Tina was able to hire her own staff. Her staff helps her during the workday by taking notes during business meetings, completing paperwork for her, transporting her where she needs to go when she needs to go there, and even proofreading the speeches she is paid to give. As Tina herself will tell you, her current life is possible because the SDP is based on a presumption of competence and helped remove the barriers to her success. In her own words:

“I would like the world to know that words have power. Tell someone they are worthless enough times, and they will believe you. Tell us we are rockstars and we can conquer the world, and just might…Create an environment geared for success by believing in us and then step out of the way and let us surprise you, and ourselves, by doing more than anyone thinks we can. The fact that we survived in the first place proves we are strong. Presume competence and help us believe in ourselves. If we are not succeeding change the environment or conditions, we are in. Eliminate the barriers.”