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Home > Archive > Jul 12, 2007

Easter Miracles All Year Long
By Cami Cox
Staff Writer
A hand up is available to senior citizens who are below the poverty level in Southern Utah. Easter Seals, a national organization, has been providing subsidized, on-the-job skills training for disabled seniors in Southern Utah since October 2006, helping them gain the skills and confidence necessary to reenter the workforce in their advancing years.
“People at this age, especially in their 60s, are often caring for elderly family members and often caring for younger kids, too,” Easter Seals job developer and employment specialist Barbara Howard said. “People will come in and say, 'How am I going to do this? I need a job, but I can't be the kind of person who can't be available to my family.' We take that into consideration, and we make a real effort to help them find an unsubsidized job that understands that.”
Easter Seals is a Department of Labor program authorized under the Older Americans Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lindon B. Johnson as part of his Great Society programs to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. The name Easter Seals was derived from an initial fundraising effort by the organization's founder to sell little stickers, or seals, to be put on Easter cards.
“They sold them for two or three cents apiece,” Easter Seals project director Kent Koopman said.
The name stuck, and Easter Seals have been so called since the 1930s.
The Easter Seals national program serves both adults and children with disabilities, providing a range of services, from medical rehabilitation to job training and employment. The local chapter of Easter Seals focuses on the job training and employment aspect, serving disabled individuals 55 and older in 14 Southern Utah counties.
“Easter Seals is the administrator of this program, which we call SCSEP, and that is an acronym for Senior Community Service Employment Program,” Howard said.
“It's aimed at low-income seniors age 55 and above, and it's a training program where they're paid a stipend, an hourly late, while they're in training at a host agency,” Koopman said.
Local participants in the Easter Seals program must have incomes at or below 125 percent of the poverty level (currently $12,763 per year for a family of one in Washington County, according to information from Easter Seals). If individuals are married and their spouses are earning an income, if they have a doctor-acknowledged disability and the desire to go back to work, they can still be eligible for the Easter Seals program.
“They can qualify as a family of one, even though they're married,” Howard said, “because Easter Seals focuses on older Americans with disabilities. We want to service them. We want to provide a way for them to get back into the mainstream.”
Participants must have some sort of disability that has impaired their capacity to work in order to qualify for Easter Seals, but the term “disability” has a broad definition.
“A lot of people, when you say “disabilities,” they think of somebody with a wheelchair or somebody without an arm, or some major disability,” Koopman said, “but really, you could have an arthritic condition or you could have a bad back or anything that a doctor would say, 'This doesn't allow the person to perform what they were doing' or 'This person can't sit for more than two hours at a time or can't stand for more than two hours at a time.'”
“(It's anything) that limits their ability to do a broad range of tasks,” Howard said.
When individuals are no longer able to perform the work they used to do, or if they need or want to go back to work but aren't qualified for the jobs they're physically capable of doing, Easter Seals steps in to help them.
Individuals who qualify for the Easter Seals SCSEP program are enrolled, evaluated and then placed at a host agency that fits with their individual needs. They spend 20 hours a week at their host sites and are paid a minimum wage stipend through Easter Seals. While at their work sites, the individuals receive one-on-one training to help them gain new job skills, such as computer, clerical and customer service skills, and eventually qualify for and find work. They can stay in the program, receiving payment for their work and training, for a maximum of 48 months.
“The host agencies where we find positions are either governmental agencies or nonprofits,” Koopman said.
Some local participating agencies that take on Easter Seals trainees are United Way, the Fifth District Court and the Department of Workforce Services. Many libraries and senior centers throughout Southern Utah also participate as host sites.
In addition to providing training for its clients, Easter Seals also supplies needed equipment to help them adapt to the workforce. For an individual with hearing disabilities, for example, Easter Seals would provide a special phone for them to be able to answer calls while on the job.
While many individuals who come to Easter Seals for assistance are lacking in job skills areas, some are already qualified but are nervous to reenter the workforce, Howard said; those individuals simply need the confidence to get out there and try, and Easter Seals helps with that.
“We find there's so much fear in older folks getting back into the workforce because they look at younger people and how fast they do everything,” Koopman said.
“Statistically, the studies have shown that once the person is trained, they do compete equally as well,” Howard said. “Their strengths lie in their dependability, their work ethic and their loyalty to the company. You must expect a 20-year-old to be planning to move up and out, but older workers are not interested in that. They're not going to move, they're not going to transfer. They want to stay where they are, generally speaking.”
Though the compensation participants receive through Easter Seals isn't a great deal of money, it does help them as they seek to better their situations through learning new job skills, Koopman said.
“You're making somebody that may be receiving benefits into somebody that's paying taxes. And it makes the people feel better,” he said.
Once an individual has completed their on-site training, Easter Seals goes to work to help the person find a job. The Easter Seals SCSEP Fast Track program will pay prospective employers the cost of up to four weeks of on-the-job training for taking on an Easter Seals participant as a potential employee.
“How could you turn that down if you were an employer?” Koopman said.
Someone who is looking to hire but is hesitant to take on an elderly employee can try out an Easter Seals candidate at no financial risk to their company. Quite often, Koopman said, the Easter Seals client ends up being a great fit for the job and gets hired.
Individuals who are seeking job training or acquisition help and think they may qualify for Easter Seals assistance should not hesitate to apply, Howard said.
“If someone even thinks that they may be interested or may qualify, they should always come in and talk to us about it,” she said.

To contact Easter Seals, visit them at 40 S. 200 East in St. George or call 688-3109. Additional information about the Easter Seals national program can be found online at www.easterseals.com.

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