After more than a month of working from home, some APH staff has returned to work in the APH building. In today's episode we briefly explain the steps APH has taken to ensure essential staff are safe, and we dig into how customer service is still working hard to ensure you get the products you need. We know a lot of summer camps have had to cancel plans, so we're also sharing about learning opportunities for the summer. If you hang on until the end of the episode, we'll even have a special message for our 2020 Seniors.
Guests:
Arthur Vaughn - Chief Quality and Safety Officer
Jim Kreiner - Director of Customer Service
Leanne Grillot - Director of National Outreach Services
Mike Hudson - Director of the Museum at the American Printing House for the Blind
Links:
https://www.aph.org/virtual-excel-summer-camp/
After more than a month of working from home, some APH staff has returned to work in the APH building. In today's episode we briefly explain the steps APH has taken to ensure essential staff are safe, and we dig into how customer service is still working hard to ensure you get the products you need. We know a lot of summer camps have had to cancel plans, so we're also sharing about learning opportunities for the summer. If you hang on until the end of the episode, we'll even have a special message for our 2020 Seniors.
Guests:
Arthur Vaughn - Chief Quality and Safety Officer
Jim Kreiner - Director of Customer Service
Leanne Grillot - Director of National Outreach Services
Mike Hudson - Director of the Museum at the American Printing House for the Blind
Links:
https://www.aph.org/virtual-excel-summer-camp/
Welcome to change makers, a podcast from APH. We're talking to people from around the world who are creating positive change in the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired. Here's your host.
Jonathan Wahl:Welcome back to change makers, a podcast from American printing house. My name is Jonathan Wall. After more than a month of working from home, some APA staff has returned to work in the building. We're focusing on critical staff in the factory that are needed to make important products for students for right now, any APH staff that can work from home are going to continue to do so. I know the pandemic has changed how we've had to interact with you. So today we're going to take some time to update you on. What's been happening to APH. We'll highlight some of the learning opportunities that we'll be continuing into the summer. And if you hang on until the end, we'll have a special message just for our 2020 seniors to start. We couldn't send any employees back to work without a lot of preparation. Joining me today is Arthur Vaughn, chief quality and safety officer at APH. Arthur, thanks for being on the podcast.
Arthur Vaughn:No problem. Glad to be here,
Jonathan Wahl:Arthur. I know you had to go through so much to get APH ready to allow some employees to come back into the building. Walk me through a few of the things you've had to do just to make sure we're following guidelines and keeping all of our employees.
Arthur Vaughn:Well, I'd say first of all, we had to create a team because there's so many different things that had to take place. And we had to have a group of people working on different aspects of it. Uh, one of the first things we had to do is to make sure that we had supplies. We had adequate PPE, which is the face mask, the gloves face shields, and those sort of items. And, and, you know, as anybody who's been involved with this knows a lot of these things were really difficult to get, especially early on. But fortunately, we had a great folks in our purchasing department. Um, Scott and Kathy were able to go out and procure a lot of these items for us and, uh, to get those up in house. So we'd have them ready come day one, we had to order things, um, such as cleaning items, you know, sanitizing items we'd to make sure that we had plenty of hand sanitizer, but also the, the cleaning items to be able to clean up and sanitize the area. So there was a lot of PPE that had to be procured and, uh, Rodney who's over housekeeping. He was instrumental in getting a lot of these items on board. That's kind of the basics. Uh, so the basic supplies that you have to have, but then we had to start looking at individual areas because we had to create separation. You know, you're looking for your social distance in which is six feet of between employees. There's a lot of processes that you can't necessarily get six feet. So we had to look at these particular operations create like shields barriers, plexiglass barriers between employees and a lot of our operations. You know, a lot of what we do here at APH is kind of low quantity. We may build 50 kits on and then turn around and build 200 or something different. So it's constantly changing. It's constantly evolving. So these shields had to be made where they could be moved so we can move in and out of process as quickly. So we can create that barrier between employees or cafeteria. We had to create a one way in one way out for a cafeteria. We had to have some shields in there. Uh, we had to do the same thing, a translation, you know, translation. We've got to watch people that work in there and we had to create some separation. So we moved some cubicles around kind of a recreated that situation put in a one way in one way out, uh, to enable separation there. But fortunately, something we've been able to do. And it's what everybody's trying to do is create, uh, as much work from home as possible. You know, what better separation can you have than, than have the ability to have people doing their job home? So you don't have them all congregated here at one place. And unfortunately, fortunately, we've had a lot of people to be able to accommodate that, done some wonderful, wonderful work and getting that set up. And we're trying to even look further, we're looking at some of our translators and some of our periphery and teams being able to have this work done from home just to create that even better separation. So it's a multi faceted approach that we've had to take. Uh, just yesterday we got in, uh, to, um, really sophisticated camera systems and this works off infrared. So we were, we're now able to take our employee's temperature, the instant that they walk in the doors. There's no more walk up to them and using the touchless scanners. And, uh, um, now at a distance we're able to take our employees, temperatures and instantly have that information is a constantly evolving and, uh, something we're monitoring daily to see the changes, uh, to see how we have to modify our processes. And, uh, uh, it's something we have to stay on top of.
Jonathan Wahl:Thanks so much, Arthur. I know you're known as the safety guy around work and you're, you're busier now than ever, but we all appreciate the work you're doing. And uh, all right, buddy. I appreciate that. And take care while working from home, our customer service team has worked really hard to ensure you could still get the products you need. Joining me today for an update is Jim Kriner our customer service director, Jim, thanks for joining me. Hey
Jim Kreiner:Jonathan, it's great to talk to you again,
Jonathan Wahl:You know, your customer service team has been very busy and diligent working from home to ensure people could still get the tools they need for their students throughout all of this work from home and learn from home that we've all been doing. How have you all been able to, to meet those needs from
Jim Kreiner:Home? Well, I think like a lot of folks we've been adjusting to work from home and it's taken a little creativity and have had a few bumps along the way, but I'm really excited to share that we are still entering and processing orders and supporting customers just as we were, if we were working in the office and even more excited to say that we are staffing our phone lunch from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM. Now
Jonathan Wahl:That's excellent news. Um, you know, now the APA is moving some employees back to the building. Is there going to be any kind of change in customer care at all?
Jim Kreiner:Actually the one good news to report is that we are planning to resume shipping. So if you were one of the customers whose orders were held, um, know that we'll be contacting you to locate shipping those orders. And then as of next Monday, the 18th, all new orders will be shipped as well. So we are working hard to get product out the door and to students. So please call us or email or fax those who carry a pigeon and place that order with
Jonathan Wahl:Everything going on. You know, information is changing a lot. It can be tough to keep track of everything, you know, related to APH or not just just life, but for people who have questions or need help, or just want to double check on an order, what's the best way to do that?
Jim Kreiner:Absolutely. The best way to reach us is always via email at C S N a P H dot O R G. But you can also give us a call at+1 800-223-1839. And like I said, we're excited because, uh, we have folks from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM who can take those calls, assist you with your order. And, uh, and now with our shipping and production team is back. We're really looking forward to moving into a summer and getting those orders taken care of.
Jonathan Wahl:Thanks so much, Jim. I look forward to when we can all be in the office again together.
Jim Kreiner:Thanks Jonathan. I'm looking forward to working with you again here real soon
Jonathan Wahl:On our very first podcast, we told you about the virtual Excel academy and while we've been blown away with how many hundreds of people have attended the virtual learning events. Now we know many summer learning opportunities may not be available this year. So APH has decided to offer virtual Excel summer camps to tell us more Leander. Lot. The director of national outreach services is joining the podcast. Thanks for being here, Leanne,
Leanne Grillot:Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here,
Jonathan Wahl:Liam. The Excel academy had just been going so well. There've been so many people attending. Tell me a little bit more about just how everything has been these last few weeks.
Leanne Grillot:It was a brainchild to just provide something like Mr. Rogers neighborhood. You could always know that there was going to be something possible for you as a kid to go every week, day, day. And so that was really the idea. And we really were expecting, oh, 25, maybe 30 students being able to join us during this time. And what we found is we have probably 50 students that come and join us that we can tell. And many adults from parents, uh, college students, teachers since the visually impaired orientation and mobility instructors, and then even general education teachers joining us, witnessing a classroom environment virtually, which has really been this fabulous part of our community coming together and doing something specifically for students. That was what has been really unique about this situation is it really is for students, a majority of the webinars or activities that you're seeing live right now are meant for adults, which was fine, but we knew as soon as the virus hit, we were worried about what students would have. As teachers we're really kind of gathering what they were going to do. That's what we wanted to do is provide something for students to do during that time it's happened. They are, they are coming and joining. We have over 2000 people who have registered to get information, to know what's happening each weekday to see if it's an activity that they would like to join in. And so that has really been this great part. Another wonderful part is it is involving people from all over, not just all over America, we are making sure we're reaching our, uh, outlying territories, Puerto Rico, American Samoas, but we're also getting an international reach. We have the Russian Federation, Ireland, all sorts of places.
Jonathan Wahl:And what has the feedback been on the different classes and activities.
Leanne Grillot:It's been really interesting. We don't get as much feedback specifically from the students after the lessons. We hear lots from them inside because they're really participating and giving feedback in the chat and communicating after the fact, we hear a lot more from teachers and parents, things such as, I didn't know that they could do these things or wow, you can use these tools this way, or, oh my gosh, I have so many tools now in my own toolbox to be able to work with my own students or my student is really excited about this lesson coming up. So we're hearing those types of things. Yeah, I understand.
Jonathan Wahl:It's been going so well. I know the school year is wrapping up, but you have plans for a kind of a summer camp version. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about that and how they can be involved?
Leanne Grillot:Sure. We had built so many actual friendships almost with our students and our participants that we wanted to be able to extend it into the summer. This was really meant to the academy was really meant as this place to help people along through this time. And we know that summer is different. So we decided to treat it as different summer is a time to do something a little bit different. And we know that a majority of camps that our students are usually able to attend are closing or changing and how they're going to work and, and, and provide this activity. So we wanted to join in and give people an opportunity to have a similar setup to the academy, the virtual environment you can join in. So we're going to have a course similar to the academy, but on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at the same time, but age grouped. So that students have some similarity between them with the academy. It could be everywhere from a kindergarten or to a high school student joining in. So this will kind of be more targeted. And then also we're asking teachers to provide five at home extension activities that go along with whatever theme the teachers have decided. So we're working right now on hiring the teachers and we'll be ready to go mid June.
Jonathan Wahl:That's great. And for anyone who's interested in signing up, I will put a link to that information in the show notes. And only in this kind of orange is new for APH, all this online focused warning. Why is it important for us to keep offering it as an option for parents and families?
Leanne Grillot:What's really interesting is my title is national director of outreach services. And outreach is that activity of providing services to any population that might not otherwise have access to those services. And so really thinking about how do we provide access to people who we can't reach. And so that again is what we're talking about. Maybe rural America, there's limited ability for students to interact sometimes even for our professionals to interact. And so this is a way to provide access to people wherever they are. And in some ways, even at whatever time they can,
Jonathan Wahl:Thanks so much, Leanne, I appreciate everything you've been doing for our students.
Leanne Grillot:Thank you for having me. This was great
Jonathan Wahl:To wrap up our podcast this week. We want to take a moment to talk to the graduating class of 2020. Usually this time of the year is full of fun graduation parties and commencements, but COVID-19 has meant that's not possible at APH. We are so proud of the many students with visual impairments who have used our products during their time as a student seniors. We want to end today's podcast with a message just for you from Mike Hudson, the director of the museum at the American printing house for the blind. Mike, thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you, Jonathan Mike, a lot of high school seniors right now are having to celebrate from home and I know you've prepared a message for them. So I'm not going to slow you down. Why don't you just go ahead and jump right in.
Micheal Hudson:Sure. Thanks. I'm really excited to be able to talk to all of our seniors. It's a big day. You know, it's easy for sighted. People who know nothing about blindness to see you doing something ordinary, like reading a book or eating your lunch or making a phone call. And I think it's a Marvel. They lacked the imagination perhaps to see that the way they do things might not be the only way to do things. And when somebody comes up with an alternative way, it amazes them. I'm you'll have to live with that kind of reaction all your lives, but I'm not here today to praise you for being able to put on your pants this morning, we're fine. The cafeteria area all by yourself, or even algebra and geometry. What I am here to praise you for is that you made it to this day in your life, your high school graduation. Now making it to your graduation doesn't necessarily make you a hero. But your journey through high school filled with twists and turns was a hero's journey. And as you begin the next phase of your own life, you will not need to be a genius or a hero either, but your journey is still a hero's journey. Life for you is about to get very interesting in ways that some of you, maybe all of you have not considered. And I imagine that each of you have approached your graduation with mixed emotions in this country. I think we do a pretty good job with our students who are blind or visually impaired while they're in primary and secondary school. After that, not so much. So you are going to have to learn to be your own best advocate. If you're playing to go to college or vocational school, you will be responsible for finding your own accessible textbooks. No one will be responsible for teaching you how to get around the campus. That will be on you to arrange with an O and M specialist. And if you need adapted computers or other equipment, it will be on you to reach out to the right office at the state level to see what is available. There are many temptations out there. There will be no one to automatically correct you. When you make a mistake, you will have to show self-discipline for yourself. If you're going to go to work right out of school, you will have to search the one ads, prepare a resume. Hey, send in your application, find an outfit that's appropriate for the interview and convince the interviewer that you are the right person for the job. That's a lot of details and you are responsible for all of them. And the truth is the system is tilted against you, just despite 190 years of education for the blind in the United States. Colleges and universities are still not quite sure what to do with you. You will have to convince each of them, one person at a time of your skills, your talents, and your abilities. Each of you on your own Odyssey, your own hero's journey is almost a missionary for every other kid, with vision loss, who will follow you. You must learn to stand on your own and be your own best advocate. Your parents and family, your teachers, your mentors, and your friends have all been preparing you for this day for this moment. But this last step, as you walk across a virtual stage to accept your virtual diploma, this step is the first step of many. That must be taken alone. And for yourself, as you step out into the world, you'll have decisions to make at every turn. You'll have to decide between the easy way out and the road less travel. I salute you class of 2020. You made it. The next step will be hard, but heck if it was easy, anybody could do it. And I look forward to reading your story all the way to the end.
Jonathan Wahl:Thank you so much, Mike, what a wonderful message for our seniors and from all of us that APH congratulations to the Class of 2020. And with that, we wrap up today's episode until next time. Be sure to look for ways you can be a change maker.