The Journey

Big news! We have a new CEO at KIT. You may have seen the announcements that our beloved Jan Giacinti retired as of June 30. We were excited to welcome a new CEO to the KIT team (and a man, at that!). It has already been so fun to have an outside perspective on our work, with new questions and a fresh set of eyes on how we do business. At our recent staff meeting Jeff brought up the subject of quality, and how it’s not a destination we arrive at but more of an on-going practice. Yes!

What this brought up for me is related to how we teach organizations about inclusion. We are fond of saying that inclusion is a process and not a product and that the journey to inclusion really is the destination. There is no point when an organization crosses a finish line and can throw their arms up in the air and say “We did it! We are now officially inclusive!” It’s something you are constantly striving for, always refining and forever enhancing. Just when you think you’ve mastered it there will be a new challenge or you will find a new, better way of ensuring that your services can be accessed by everyone. And there is so much value in the journey. The exploration of an organization’s values, and the concept of working through the process of ensuring access is what actually leads to the organizational transformation.

When we deliver our services we are committed to what we call a “parallel process.” We want to model the behaviors that we hope our learners will adopt. We do this in our training modules by teaching the way we hope participants will teach others. We also strive to conduct our organizational business in this manner as well. This is why I saw the connection to quality so strongly. Achieving quality is also a journey, and going on the journey is what leads to better quality. There are some benchmarks along the way, but the finish line is ever changing. I know that at KIT we are so mission-focused that we keep moving the finish line farther and farther away from where we are now. It’s something I have always loved about being a part of KIT. The constant examination of what it means to have high quality (or be inclusive) is what makes it happen.

To all of you, my incredible KIT colleagues and those who engage with KIT at any level, I say let’s enjoy the journey!

Our Future is in Good Hands!

Mentoring young people has always been something that has given me great pleasure, and added a lot of value and meaning to my life. This past year I had the opportunity to serve as the Project Advisor for an incredibly gifted young woman's Girl Scout Gold Award. I first met Jordan Moore, who recently graduated from high school, four years ago when we were paired up for a Girl Scout job-shadowing event. Jordan fell in love with KIT and we fell in love with Jordan. Subsequently, Jordan interned at KIT for a summer, served as a featured speaker at our National Conference on Inclusion and became one of the founding members of the I Am Norm campaign. Jordan, who lives with a disability, is a passionate advocate for inclusion.

The Girl Scout Gold Award is the highest achievement in Girl Scouts, and requires significant, individual effort on behalf of the candidate. Jordan's project, Inclusion Made Easy: How to Bring Everyone to the Table, focused on inclusion of high school students in and out of classroom environments. She identified and organized a group of teens, living with and without disabilities, and created a National Youth Council on Inclusion. They created a resource guide and website to encourage inclusive environments in high school clubs and extracurricular activities. They sent the guide to 38 schools, potentially reaching more than 67,000 students.

I am incredibly proud of Jordan and so honored to have had the chance to work with her in her high school years. She's headed off to Yale in the fall and has an incredibly bright future ahead of her. It really does my heart good to see young inclusion advocates like Jordan. This mission will take some years to fully realize, so it's important to have dedicated people following behind us and coming up the ranks. Love you, Jordan!

This year I will be supporting another young inclusion dynamo, Malia Rappaport, as she uses her Gold Award project to promote inclusion.