The Truman Charities Podcast
Truman Charities is the only podcast that donates $250 to each of our guests' charity of choice.
Jamie Truman, connects with individuals who are making a significant impact in their communities. From New York Times bestselling authors to innovative farmers, we share the untold stories of those who are shaping the world around us. We feature trailblazers, influencers, and innovators who are driving positive change, such as the lawyer who fought Dupont for two decades to protect our water and the vital work of an organization dedicated to supporting women who have been trafficked within the United States.
Jamie Truman is the co-founder of Truman Charities, an entirely volunteer-run organization. Since its inception in 2010, Truman Charities has successfully raised over $2 million for a variety of charitable causes.
In addition to her work with Truman Charities, Jamie is also the author of the bestselling book "Vanishing Fathers: The Ripple Effect on Tomorrow's Generation." This book has generated over $80,000 for charities supporting at-risk youth, as 100% of the book's proceeds are donated to these vital organizations.
The Truman Charities Podcast
How SEEC Helps People with Disabilities Find Housing, Jobs, and Purpose | Ep. 151
Independence isn’t about doing everything alone. It’s about having choices. That’s exactly how Seeking Employment Equality and Community (SEEC) supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, providing lifelong support but letting them lead the way.
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In this episode, CEO Karen Lee shares how this philosophy has helped people ease into adulthood, build connections in the community, and feel like they truly belong. You'll hear why their employment program has more success than traditional job placement, how they personalize housing to every individual, and how families are supported every step of the way.
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Want to support SEEC's mission? Listen to learn more about the programs and partnerships making their work possible — and how you can join in!
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Email: info@trumancharities.com
This episode was post produced by Podcast Boutique https://podcastboutique.com/
What if the key to independence isn't doing it all alone, but having the right support to truly thrive? Welcome back to the Truman Charities podcast. I'm your host, jamie Truman. Today I spoke with Karen Lee, the CEO of SEEK, an organization that's been transforming lives by helping people with intellectual and developmental disabilities live with dignity, choice and purpose, from first departments to fulfilling careers and even entrepreneurship. Karen shares how SEEK is building supportive communities, one person at a time. Before we talk with Karen, please take a minute to rate and review our podcast. We are 100% volunteer-based organization, so our reviews are essential to growing our podcast. Make sure to click on the subscribe button as well, so you don't miss any future episodes. Now let's welcome Karen to Truman Charities. So you're the CEO of SEEC, which is Seeking Employment, equality and Community since 1990.
Speaker 1:So you've been there for a while, a long time. I started when I was 12. There for a while, a long time, I started when I was 12. Obviously, on your website, you talk about how you help people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to direct their lives with dignity, choice, authority and responsibility. Yeah, and I really want to talk a lot about how you're doing that and helping people within the community. But first what I want to do is talk to you about why you're so passionate about this particular organization. Obviously, like we said, we've been there since 1990. So what makes you want to be so involved within this particular organization?
Speaker 2:I think it's really the space of disability, equality and opportunities. I feel like everybody should have opportunities to what we say here is live, work and thrive. And I feel like everybody should have those opportunities, whether you're a person who has a disability or somebody who has issues around mental health support needs, whatever it is. And in the space of disability is where I found my home when I did my internship back in college and really found that the equity issue really relates well for me, and I've really found here at SEEK a group of colleagues and families and a community that also share that thinking, certainly a really strong board of directors who works closely with us to make sure that you know we're aligned and working together with our community to create these opportunities so people can be fully involved in their lives.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so you had mentioned and I saw this on your website that you really are focusing on live, work and thrive, and when I saw on the website which was amazing you have a lot of different examples of how you guys have helped different individuals within the community, and so you had one. I've read about Amanda on your website and how you helped her move into a first apartment, something that her mom thought was something that was unobtainable for them as a family and I want you to describe a little bit about your LIVE program and some examples of how you've been able to help different individuals.
Speaker 2:So we recognize that everybody needs different levels of support. Some people might need somebody who just drops in and sees them and helps them to do menu planning or does shopping or grocery shopping or budgeting or money management, and other people might need 24-hour support. They might need somebody to help them in their bathroom and they might need somebody to help them when they eat or whatever they need. But everybody gets an opportunity to still back to that original mission you were talking about to have choice and control in their own lives. So even if you're somebody that has really significant support needs, you still have a right to choose who you live with and where you live. And what we find is that when you give people those kinds of choices in their lives, that oftentimes their need for support goes down because of the routines that they have, because of the. It's kind of like if you think for you and I, you look in the refrigerator and if it's kind of the same stuff every time, you know you have maybe 10 recipes that you know how to make and you have all of that. So I think that when you support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to choose who they live with and where they live with they're happier. And when they're happier they have greater independence. They need less support, and then you also make sure that their environment is conducive to being successful and you know families are a really, really big part of that. They have to be on the journey with us. And in regards to Amanda's mom, you know she put a lot of trust in us because the support that Amanda needs was pretty intense and to be able to say, you know, if we make sure that the shelves in the house are lower, then maybe Amanda could choose whatever she wants to eat, or if she's got the ability to decide who comes in and out of her house, she can push a button and open the door to somebody that she sees that's coming. And those are really big steps for families who have been providing care and pretty significant care and support for their sons and daughters to see them as people who are independent and can contribute and are a part of the community, that they're neighbors and that they have friends and all of that. And so I think that the work that we do really helps people to thrive in a way that maybe a lot of people didn't think they could.
Speaker 2:So we worked with David, who lived a lot of his life in an institution and when he decided he wanted to move out into his own place and he was we used to have some institutions here in Maryland that don't exist anymore and he was in an institution where he really had no control over his life and he made it really clear to us that he wanted to live in a neighborhood where he could walk to things.
Speaker 2:He wanted to walk to the grocery store, he wanted to choose what was on his walls, he wanted to choose what his own bedroom looked like and what his living room looked like and he has words to tell us that, but also his behavior tells us some of that. And so when we helped him to leave the institution and move into the community again, like 30 years ago, a long time ago we started to see him become more independent, make more choices, develop relationships, all of that, and as a result, we were able to decrease his dependence on paid staff because he had more choice, more control over his own situation. So, again, whether it's just drop-in like that we do for some people, where we might meet somebody at their home and help them to plan their weekly menu, help them to budget for that, maybe go to the store with them and then check in on them and, you know, maybe help them to find how to use technology to find recipes, all the way to that 24-hour support, so really just meeting them where they're at.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, for instance, with David, how were you able to find a place that worked for his particular needs?
Speaker 2:So, just the same way that we would with anybody else, we had kind of an interesting situation with him as he started to leave the institution. We brought him, as he told us it needed to be near places that he could walk, it needed to be. He didn't have a lot of community experience, so we needed to make sure that he was learning how to cross streets safely and that it was in an area that had these resources available to him. Really, that narrowed down our focus of where we could look. So, right, we're not going to go in downtown Bethesda, that's, you know, got lots and lots of stuff going on. But there are some other neighborhoods and communities that still had a grocery store walking distance. So, using a realtor, finding a couple of those places and then taking him in to those different places and seeing how he felt and what he thought, what he felt about the neighborhood, We'd come back again again because he had very little life experience. So we would go back, bring him back again, maybe walk around the neighborhood in the evening, introduce him to some people in the neighborhood, just kind of a little bit of a transition. And then it became clear to us from his behavior and his words, exactly which place that he wanted to be. So he ended up in a place that was exactly what he wanted in a home and I think he probably lived there for about six or seven years and then he said, hey, I want to live somewhere else, I want to try something else. And he actually moved in with somebody else that he wanted to.
Speaker 2:Originally he was alone and just had 24-hour staffing, but then he moved in with somebody who was a roommate that was paid to be a roommate with him. So he'd still had some staff that were there in the morning and at night, but the roommate was there overnight. And then, as a result, the roommate would invite their friends over, and David, who really had a struggle with making friends and meeting people, this gave him the opportunity to meet people who were on a basketball team and he'd say can I go watch the basketball, Can I go to the basketball? And then the basketball team would like go away for a weekend tournament and he'd go with them on the weekend tournament. And so even when the roommate left his life he still over. They did a Friendsgiving event.
Speaker 2:But sometimes they work out really well where wow, that really worked out well. And sometimes those relationships don't spawn that way. They don't turn out to be long-lasting relationships, but in his case he ended up having some people in his life that helped him to make decisions about the next place that he went to live and people that he spent time with. So I think there's it's like lighting a match, right. We hope that it gets the whole room lit up. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but if it doesn't, we don't stop. We keep trying to find what it is that next light is.
Speaker 1:The other type of work that you're doing is that you have a community employment network department, so basically a job placement type of program, which I really enjoyed reading about exactly how you're helping so many people. So why don't you dive a little bit into that and tell us exactly what you guys are doing?
Speaker 2:So I would say one of the things that makes us unique between the work that we do and maybe many of our colleagues, is we partner with a lot of universities. We right now are partnering with probably about 13 or 14 universities on best practices. So we're a part of national communities of practice. We're a part of research studies. We've asked them to help us do some research because it's a fairly new field. I mean not all new, but it's a fairly new field where we're looking at people with disabilities as contributing to the workforce, especially right now when entry-level positions are very difficult to fill, and looking at the people that we work with as folks that want to be a part of making a contribution. I mean, I think you know you look at some of the research around happiness and belonging and all of that, and what you'll find is is that giving back like what you're doing is a great example is really important to people. And it's important because it gives us structure, it gives us feedback and it gives us money to be able to make choices. And when you're a breadwinner, you know, when you're somebody who earns money, people give you respect. And so what we find is that when people with intellectual and developmental disabilities move into, transition into adulthood, from school is that they have these unique gifts and talents to be able to contribute to the workforce. And again, very much similar to what we were talking about with David, who had very little experience in his life around where to live and who to live with Oftentimes people with disabilities. They might not have been asked at home to do the laundry or to contribute in the house in any way because they're the person with the disability, or to contribute in the house in any way because they're the person with the disability. And so we have to do a lot of work, a lot of baseline work, at trying to figure out what it is their unique contribution is. And that's really how we look at it. Right is, you're here with me now and you obviously have a lot of skill around interviewing and research and all of that, so you have some really important unique contributions. Well, how do you find that with people who might not use their voice to speak or who may have had very, very limited opportunities, and so we do this process called discovery, and with some people that might mean internships, it might mean that we do some different job tries, it might mean that we do informational interviews and all of this is our kind of research-based practices. Customized employment is the strategy that we most rely on for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and we're part of a national practice around customized employment and helping to kind of set national policy and standards for what that means, and we've been doing it here since 2003. So we've been working with folks to learn what their gifts and talents are.
Speaker 2:But on the other side of that equation so as we're starting to learn about the gifts and talents and abilities and ideal conditions of employment for people with disabilities, we have to be doing that same thing on the employer side. We have to find out what employers out there have needs. What are their? Not just looking at the want ads, but what are they saying in their business meetings, what are they saying in their chamber meetings? What are they saying at the rotary? What are we saying? And so, while we're doing this work with people with disabilities to learn about what their contributions are, we're doing the same kind of work with employers to find out what their needs are. And so ultimately, when we get to a place where we're pretty sure he likes to work outside and he likes to work in places where he gets really messy. He doesn't mind that, he likes to work in places that have lots of people around him and he's really good with his hands. What are the employers that need somebody like that right and trying to make that match between what the contributions and ideal conditions are for people we work with and then what are the needs of the employers and what does the culture in that employment situation look like? And so we spend a lot of time and we do that in a variety of different ways.
Speaker 2:As you acknowledge, we do have a lot of different strategies for how we do that.
Speaker 2:We have kind of a traditional employment program.
Speaker 2:We have a project search program, which is for mostly people who are transitioning from high school into adulthood, who have very little experience. They might not ever have taken the bus by themselves or they might not have ever spent a day without a teacher. They may have had very limited life experiences. We do this through customized employment and that strategy. And then we have a brand new project we're using called Learn to Earn, where we're combining kind of community engagement and how people live in their community and where they exercise and where they go to their faith group and all of that. And so we have a lot of different mechanisms that we're using and a lot of different strategies we're using to really figure out what people's gifts and talents and contributions are. And on the same side we have the employers. So we have a business advisory council, we have a employer outreach team, we've got job developers, so laying a lot of that infrastructure and base work so that when we get to that point where we're ready to make a match, we know it's a good match for people.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like a matchmaking service.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:I love it. Do you have any examples of people that you've been able to find their unique skill and make a good match with an employment opportunity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a couple of really great fun stories. There's a young man that we work with who cleaning? I mean, I know we sometimes stereotype, oh, people with disabilities can clean, but this guy is like above and beyond that right. But this guy is like above and beyond that right, like he can do cleaning and detail work to the extent that you know, far beyond what my ability was, and he's very, very focused. That's a part of the disability, but it's also a part of who he is. So, learning about that skill of his and exploring that skill of his, at the same time we go to his house and we do a home visit and we do a home tour. We find out he's like in love with cars, Like he loves cars. He's just obsessed with cars. And mom says, oh yeah, he's always going to clean our car. We've got the cleanest cars in the neighborhood. All of our neighbors are saying, right, so he's got these the cleanest cars in the neighborhood. All of our neighbors are saying, right, so he's got these, these skills, he's got these likes. But he's somebody who some days he has good days and some days he does not have good days, and so some days he's ready to work eight hours and some days maybe only an hour or so or maybe he's knows that today's not a good day to work. We found an employer to our employer outreach team and the work that we did there that has cars and needs these cars cleaned and it's not on a specific schedule. They just kind of all need to be cleaned throughout the course of the month and they've got people coming into the car place and people are touching them and so they have to be cleaned afterwards and it's kind of a showroom and so being able to put together on the employer side the need to have these details detailing done on these cars and the person who is focused on detailing coming together is just a really incredible, was an incredible job match for us. So that's a good example.
Speaker 2:We've started to do something new now with entrepreneurship. So there's a number of people we support who have some very, very specific skills and talents. Like they're really wonderful artists, but maybe art teacher or those kinds of things are not something that they're really good at, but they want to keep producing their art and they need some money to produce their art. So we've started an entrepreneur program where we have a six-month program where we're helping people to learn about what it takes to own a business. We're giving them the supports to set up an infrastructure around a business you know, to create a whatever type of organizational, llc or nonprofit or whatever it is that they want to work. How do you market? What are your strategies for marketing? And then how do you do the bookkeeping? Who do we want to hire to help you with your bookkeeping? How do you do that? What kind of support do you need?
Speaker 2:And so we've been working with some people who have these kind of unique gifts and talents but it might not fit into a traditional wage job, and so they're starting their own businesses, and one of the women that we work with has written a book. She's a woman who has some lived experience with epilepsy and with some traumatic brain injury and she has written a book about that and she would like to tell people about that so they can see that their life will can also be thriving in a way that she is. But she really, really wanted to tell people the story. So, besides the book that she wrote, she wanted to tell people the story. So, besides the book that she wrote, she wanted to tell people that story. So the entrepreneur program hooked her up with somebody who is also an author and that person is now mentoring her in. How do you get your name out there, how do you tell your story, how do you tell it in a way that is compelling to other people that they want to have you come back again? And so matching her up with this mentor in this entrepreneur opportunity, that's a great example.
Speaker 2:I mean, I probably have hundreds of examples of how we've supported people to really find their best skill to put forward and the wonderful employers that are like I've got this need.
Speaker 2:And sometimes these unique needs of the employer are small, right. So there, maybe the job description says you have to drive and you have to have a college degree and you have to have all this. But when we really get down in it with the employer, what we find is oh no, we actually just need somebody who can take the things off the shelf and bring them to the mechanics. Or we really need to find somebody who can walk around the campus at NIH and get the interns to sign this paper, because we really struggle to get the interns to sign the papers they need to sign. So we find that working with employers to change those job descriptions to be what they really just need not all of the stuff that they thought needed to be in there, because the job didn't really match the description. And so we work really closely with employers on that side as we find these unique gifts and talents of the people we work with. Wow.
Speaker 1:So another component of your organization is Thrive. So you talk about that, you embrace like person-centered thinking and planning and you have behavioral support services, so can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's. Another one of those components that makes us incredibly unique is we have an entire department called knowledge management. They're always doing research and development themselves, and so there's aspects of the life that people who don't have disabilities have access to and that may not necessarily be available with the level of support needed. And so this group put together there's a wonderful national curriculum about relationships and sexuality and dating and all of that kind of stuff, and our staff got trained on it. And then they brought it back to the organization. They met with families to say is this something you think that you'd be interested for your son or daughters? And the families are like oh yes, I would love to have somebody talk to my kid about this. I really, you know that's a difficult thing for a parent to talk about and they don't really have peers that can talk about it with them.
Speaker 2:And so we brought this curriculum back and it just changed how people were able to be in relationships. As a result, a men's group was formed they call it the man cave and then a women's group they call it powder puff was formed, and it's where men with intellectual and developmental disabilities can get together and say I don't know how to ask somebody out. What about that woman? I don't know what I, you know. I don't know what to do. What do you do on a first date?
Speaker 2:When is it okay to kiss somebody I don't really know, and how soon is too soon to call? Should I be texting every five minutes or not, you know? So, learning those kinds of things we also have in that group, we also are teaching people to use technology. As you know, technology today just it's in everybody's lives. We use it to get jobs, we use it to communicate, we use it to plan our meal, we use it for our banking, we use it for everything.
Speaker 2:And if people with disabilities have not had access to technology and knowing how to do that, and they're living in an analog world, they're really not able to thrive in the same way that you and I are. And so this department, we have something called person-driven technology, and they start with wherever the person is right. So, wherever they can, can they just pick two pictures on an iPad of do you want to do this activity or this activity? We might not even use high tech, we might use low tech, we might use a schedule, a picture schedule. Here's who's coming to work with you today, and then this person's coming, and then here's the thing that you're going to do, or when they're making a weekly schedule, they might have a list of or a picture of all the things they like to do, and they take their picture and they show you what it is that they want to do. They don't use their voice for those kinds of things, and so we have this technology group, and the person-centered planning is again starting with what people's hopes and dreams are, and, as I'm sure you can imagine, very few people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are ever challenged with the question what do you want in your life? Right? We're asking our young people all the time and I think you have some children in your family and you know what do you want to be when you grow up? And I want to be this. Well, we tend not to ask people with disabilities that kind of question. And so being able to engage people in those kinds of things with technology and low tech and high tech, and helping them to explore a world that they might not have had an opportunity, to connect with friends, to use social media, teach people how to use social media in the right way. We use a technique of creating resumes called visual resumes, and so, because their skills might not be traditional, you know, they might not be the college degree, the driving, the past experience we might need to show what somebody can do. So a visual resume is taking pictures of somebody while they're doing something, so we can kind of get in the head of what we're doing. That happens in the person-driven tech world as well that piece of technology.
Speaker 2:We're doing some work with families.
Speaker 2:We're doing some training and support with families, sometimes people.
Speaker 2:I think there's been a lot of information in the news lately about people with autism and the supports that they need to survive and to thrive, and so they might need a little bit extra behavioral support.
Speaker 2:They might need somebody to help them with a calendar to be able to plan and predict what it is they're doing, because that might be something that makes them nervous or anxious to not know what's next. So we may use technology with that. We may have a behavior support staff that works with the family and the other staff, people in their lives to teach them that. So, besides our kind of our primary services of helping people to live in their own home or home of their choosing and support them there and help people to work in jobs that they can thrive in, as well as be members of their community and whatever that community looks like, there might be some additional supports that we bring in besides all of that, like the relationship and the technology, the working with the families, financial planning for families in the future, all of that. So we also support those kinds of things as well.
Speaker 1:Wow, you guys are doing so much, for so many people Say I'm a mother and I have a young adult and I am looking to hopefully become part of your organization and see if there's something that you guys could do to possibly help my child. How would I go about that?
Speaker 2:So we have an intake specialist here and she is a social worker and she works with families to talk through. What is it you think that you want? What is it that you're looking for? We always try to steer people towards things like employment and people growing up and living in their own place. That's sometimes a really big leap for families. So sometimes we might start with just well, what do you think about them being a part of a class? Or what do you think about them maybe hanging out with a friend and spending the day learning about how to do banking or something like that, or taking a class together or volunteering at someplace local. So we might start that way. And so she really meets the families where they're at, goes to the home, comes to the office wherever they feel most comfortable, and really learns about people and we call that the intake specialist, and so they come in and then she puts together what she thinks would be a good plan of action for them. Here's what we're thinking that might help we also, because we are funded by Medicaid primarily, we also get some vocational rehabilitation money, but long-term services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is a Medicaid-funded program, and so she would help them with the benefit side, learning more about how to enroll in those benefits, learning how to get the benefits if they don't have them yet, making sure that they're connected to those kinds of resources so that the family has the opportunity to access services like ours and others. The school systems do a pretty good job at that and so generally when people come to us, they've already got that access They've already got are connected that way. So we work through you know what it is that that's in their plan and where would it make sense that we support them? And where do we start? And generally we always start with either employment or community engagement.
Speaker 2:That's kind of a family's transition, especially young adults. They tend to live at home till they're about 25, 26. And then the families start to think, yeah, he's got a job and he's got to work it, but we want to go on vacation. Or, you know, I want to go to my own jazzercise class, but I'm worried about him being at home alone, and so we'd like a little more support. So we tend to layer supports.
Speaker 2:So we generally start with some kind of daytime employment hours, daytime hours being members of the community, and then we tend to layer on maybe some services in the home for a little while, a couple years, and then work with the family to transition to their son or daughter moving out and we have a program called Moving Out, again based on some research about what families need to support this kind of transition and working with the individual and their family on you know what's important to just kind of like what I was talking to you about with David earlier, like where's most of your family, Where's most of your activities that you like to do? What is the neighborhoods that you already know? Where's most of your activities that you like to do? What is the neighborhoods that you already know? So, rather than saying, find an apartment for him, we're really doing some more of that discovery about what it is you want your life to look like, what kind of services you might need to be able to live on your own, and then we put it all together in the end and say, okay, well, let's look at this geographic area, let's look at having this kind of a living situation, and then we work with the individual and the family to transition and so really not really the big boom in the beginning. That's pretty scary for people, but just starting little by little, and then adding on as we go through time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do love when you're talking and I'm learning about SEEK and all the things that you're offering is that it's very, very personalized, it's very tailored to that specific individual and then you progress over time so you're kind of you stay with them for such a long period of times. It seems like you have very long relationships. The lifetime. Lifetime relationships? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So how can we help your organization? Absolutely, absolutely. So how can we help your organization? What's the best way for people to help get involved? Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:So I think talent, time and treasure is always the best way. You know, in most organizations I'm sure that you talk to Certainly you know we have. We have boards of directors, we have a board of directors, we have a, we have multiple committees. We also have volunteers that support us in some of our work, certainly with their time and their talent. So we've got somebody who runs a cooking class for us and we have a longtime volunteer who runs a job club where he's once a week he meets with a group of people the same group of people and they create kind of personal goals and he's a retired person who's worked in industry for a long time. So he has a lot of insights and he helps people to think about career advancement and life advancement and how do you get better at your job and what do you do when you have a supervisor that's maybe not as nice to you as you'd like, or when you have a coworker you're struggling with and they work through that and he's a volunteer. We've worked closely with docents at local museums that have taught classes, fitness, music, all of that kind of thing. So certainly the time, the talent and the treasure of course is always.
Speaker 2:Donations are always accepted. You can come to our website, which is seekonlineorg, wwwseeconlineorg, and there's a donate button. We have special events that happen. We also have a business advisory committee. Kind of going back to that time and talent, we have a business advisory committee of business members that advise our employment team and they also do things like they might host an intern at their site. They might bring somebody else who's an employer colleague to that. They might do some mock interviews for us.
Speaker 2:We have four times a year we do mock interviews for people who are learning about how to do interviews for the first time, and so we have multiple ways that people can give and they can go to our website, they can put in an inquiry, they can contact me or Katie and I think you have Katie's information as well and we can steer them in the right direction. But really, you know, the time, talent and treasure and the financial support is always welcome, especially now when we're in the process of trying to make up for some of the tremendous losses we've already had but we know are coming in the near future.
Speaker 1:And I'll make sure to have all of your information in the show notes for everybody so they can follow you and they can get in touch with your organization. Thank you, karen. Is there anything, before I let you go, that we haven't covered that you think it's important for people to know?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a great question. I think we all have somebody who's impacted by disability in our lives. It's a part of our everyday life, whether it's somebody who rides the bus with your kids, or it's a neighbor, one of your nieces or nephews, or whoever it is. But to remember that people with disabilities, they belong, they should have opportunity to thrive in the same way that everybody else does, but may need a little bit different level of support, and that there is that support out there and sky's the limit for people, right, we cannot limit people by what we see in front of us. We have to recognize that everybody has not only the right to thrive, but actually the ability to thrive as well, and that, together with bringing the supports in that we provide and seeing this limitless opportunity for people, that I think that we can have an opportunity for everybody to belong.
Speaker 1:Your organization is so needed and I talk to a lot of different individuals all the time and I hear a lot about there's a lot of services for children up until they graduate. I don't know if it's they graduate high school or if it's when they hit 18. But then all of these great services that they had are now gone, and so your organization is helping so many people really thrive, which is what you guys say on your website so much, which is true. So I really love everything that you're doing and I hope everybody just learns I mean, I know they're going to learn so much from you because I was looking through your website and it was just so much information and I want everybody to go on there to kind of read some of the stories of people that has been impacted by you guys. So thank you, karen, again, for coming on and speaking with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really appreciate it. I appreciate your work. I was on your site as well.
Speaker 1:It's incredibly thoughtful what you do and I'm really anxious to learn more about you and the work you're doing. Oh, thank you, and I want to thank everybody for tuning in to another episode of the Truman Charities podcast. If you liked this podcast, again, please make sure to rate and review it. Our reviews really do mean so much to us and I read each and every one of them, and if you'd like to follow us, you can follow us on Instagram at Jamie underscore, truman Charities. Facebook at Truman Charities. You can follow me on LinkedIn at Jamie Truman, and so you don't miss any of our future events, please go into TrumanCharitiescom and sign up for our newsletter, and so you will get all the notifications about our charity events and then also our Bethesda's Best Happy Hour. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Truman Charities Podcast. Until next time.
