Power Grid Blog
Disability Mentoring Day
October 18, 2012 | Dana Fink
Yesterday, a few members of the AAPD team had the opportunity to travel to New York for one of my favorite days of the year: Disability Mentoring Day. There’s a good chance you have heard of Disability Mentoring Day (or just DMD for short), but you might not know how it came to be and why it is so important to all of us here at AAPD.
Disability Mentoring Day was started by AAPD in 1999, with just eleven jobseekers with disabilities participating in a job shadowing day in the White House. Today, thanks to our passionate and motivated grassroots networks across the country, DMD has grown to become the largest job shadowing program for people with disabilities, serving over 16,500 students and jobseekers in over 250 locations across the country. That’s a big number and we are incredibly proud of it and grateful to all of our DMD coordinators. The majorities of our coordinators take on this role in a volunteer capacity, but yesterday was not about focusing on the numbers.
Yesterday was our DMD National Launch in New York City. Every year, we pick one local program to focus on as the DMD National Launch, which serves as a kickoff event for programs across the country. We picked New York for their incredible program model, dedicated staff, and diverse career focus, but what we got to celebrate was beyond all of that. We had the opportunity to meet with and hear from mentors and mentees who had just finished life-changing job shadow days in businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies across the city. We heard from Jasmine, whose experience with the New York City Commission on Human Rights now has her considering a career in immigration law. We heard from Nazir, whose experience at Bank of America was the first time he had ever reflected on what he wanted to do for a living because nobody had ever asked him before. We heard from Louis who wants to participate in the program again, only next year he wants to do so as a mentor, someone who has a successful career path, and can show other people with disabilities how to achieve it. We also heard from mentors, from folks at Citigroup, Swiss Post, and CUNY schools; all of whom now know what we know: that people with disabilities are a significant asset to America’s growing and diversifying workforce. Thank you to the New York Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities and DMD coordinators across the country for spreading that message.
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Submitted by VTop 100 Website at 04:21 AM on August 5, 2013