Pre-episode Intro Marc: Like all services at Guide Dogs for the Blind, O and M training is absolutely free, which includes all associated costs, such as air fares, meals, accommodation, the instruction, and even a cane itself. Chris: This is the Penny Forward podcast, a show about blind people building bright futures one penny at a time. I'm Chris Peterson, ... Liz: I'm Liz Bottner, ... MOe: I'm MOe Carpenter, ... Chris: And today, we are going to be talking about orientation and mobility. And how investing in our orientation and mobility skills can carry over into other aspects of our personal, professional and financial lives. Our guest today is Marc Gillard. He is the current director of orientation and mobility services at Guide Dogs for the Blind. He is originally from Australia and is currently based in San Raphel California, and he will tell you much more about himself in just a moment. Marc, thank you for being here. Marc: Hi there. Thanks, Chris. Great to be with you. Chris: Well thank you again, and, uh, tell us about yourself, and your connection with the blind community if you would. Marc: Yeah. So, I've been involved with the Guide Dog O and M field for thirty-two years now, and I've, uh, I've loved every bit of it. I'm originally from Melbourne Australia, where I started work way back in 1992, at then World Guide Dogs Associations of Australia. I trained up there as a guide dog mobility instructor, and later on as an Orientation and Mobility specialist. So, I worked in Australia for a number of years, and, uh, I was still pretty young at the time when I finished my training, and, uh, I wanted to travel and see a little bit more of the world. So, after reaching out to some guide dog schools in the Europe and also the United States, I found my way across to Guide Dogs for the Blind in California, and fortunately for me, they were interested in having me come on board as a dually certified guide dog O and M specialist. So, that was my starting point in the United States, and um, I had a three-year work visa at that point. After about three years, I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue for another three years, so decided to return to Australia. After six years back in Australia, I had then become engaged to my now wife, who traveled with me from the United States, originally from California, and we decided to come back to the U.S. and marry and settle down. So that brought me back to Guide Dogs, uh, back in 2006, and then, in 2016, that's when I started off as our uh, Orientation and Mobility services manager in those days, getting our O and M immersion program started, which has carried forward to the current day, where I'm now the director of the program. Liz: Tell us about Guide Dogs for the Blind and its mission. Marc: Sure. Well Guide Dogs for the Blind has been around since 1942, and it was originally, you know, in place to serve returning veterans from World War Ii. And it has grown to be the largest guide dog organization in North America, and second largest in the world behind Guide Dogs for the Blind Association in the U.K. Our mission is, we harness the power of partnerships, connecting people, dogs and communities to transform the lives of individuals with visual impairments. We are based in California, as uh, had, we have said already, but we do have another campus, which is up in Oregon, just outside Portland, and that's been in existence, uh, since I believe 1995. We're led at the moment by our Chief Executive Officer Christine Benninger, and she's been our CEO for about ten years, and has really done a wonderful job, uh, steering Guide Dogs to where we are today with a more all-encompassing service philosophy, which I'm really excited to talk about soon. MOe: now that we learned about Guide Dogs for the Blind, can you tell us about the OMI program, who it's for, who is, what makes you eligible, and then what the students in the program learn? Marc: Sure. So, access to orientation and mobility service, and also blind rehab, in this country has been getting more difficult. And there are various reasons for that, from funding, from, I think another big problem is orientation and mobility instructors being in a real shortage in the country, and there's also issues with people having eligibility for services. So for example, if you, uh, don't have a vocational rehabilitation goal, in your state, and you are relying upon your department of rehabilitation for example, then it's very difficult to tie in orientation and mobility without a job goal. So if you're, for example, retired, and you happen to lose your vision and become legally blind, and you don't want to get into the work force again, then you are not going to be able to get O and M very easily, except for, funding from the Older Individuals who are Blind program, for 55 and over, which, uh, is designed to make independent living goals feasible, so kind of around the house, it's that kind of thing, but not really set up for in depth mobility training. You could be in a service desert, or you can be fortunate and have a number of government and private agencies to apply to and get services. So to put this in perspective, around about forty percent, that's four zero, percent of all people who are denied for a guide dog initially, in that phone consultation that we have as an entry kind of, uh, requirement, forty percent of all denials, the reason was lack of orientation and mobility training. And by extension, um, another category was lack of independent travel routes. So what happened is, Guide Dogs for the Blind thought, "Well look. If this continues, we are going to start to see the consequences of a lack of qualified applicants who would like to train with a guide dog. So we thought, "Not only is it in the organization's best interest to try and do something to help in that O and M service problem, but also, it's gonna be of great assistance just ethically and morally to try and give people more access to service, regardless if they want a guide dog. So that was the initial kind of catalyst for the program. From that point, the evolution has been quite extraordinary. In 2006, Guide Dogs didn't have any orientation and mobility instructors who were able to provide O and M. We certainly had them, uh, as dually certified guide, uh, mobility instructors working in the field as field managers, or in our training departments training dogs, uh, but they weren't able to be released for the purposes of providing orientation and mobility training as a stand-alone service. So what did we do? Well, at that time, um, there was a very innovative person working for Guide Dogs, and she was in charge of our alumni, Outreach, and Admissions department. Her name is Theresa Stone. And Theresa had an idea of partnering with a agency in the Bay area, that was the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco, who did have orientation and Mobility specialists already working, providing those services. So we thought, "What if we were to partner with them, and they could provide O and M, to folks who needed that in order to become qualified to be accepted and work with a guide dog." And then we had to set about actually training the orientation and mobility specialists, and designing a curriculum, with the objective of having them trained up to, not just provide O and M, in terms of cane training and all the fundamentals, but working with people particularly on those travel skills and concepts which are very important for guide dog travel. So that was the start of development of a curriculum, and also training of them to kind of have a, a second skill set if you like. As being experienced and knowledgeable to work on skills that are largely non tactile skills. It's mainly auditory skills, for example, that are very important working a guide dog when you don't have a cane in contact with the ground surface as you travel. So, first year, we put through fifteen people in a pilot program, who were a mixture of first time applicants, and, something we didn't expect, current guide dog users, or former guide dog users. Who were retracted to the program because they wanted to refresh their O and M skills to be more capable guide dog handlers, or indeed to set themselves up for a greater chance of success of qualifying and being successful with a successor guide dog. So, we didn't anticipate that demand, and uh, it's great. That uh, we're also able to assist those people in the pilot. So after fifteen people went through, our board of directors and senior management looked at the results, and thought, "This program really works. Let's make it permanent." And then that kicked off the arrangement which continues to this day of partnering with the Lighthouse for the Blind, having their instructors work with our, with our clients, but also was responsible for other partnerships with other agencies in the Bay area in terms of training up their O and M specialists to do the same thing, and then giving us a greater amount of capacity to have people come through the program. Chris: You obviously and, and Liz and MOe, and many of our listeners, know that I was just in the OMI program, and someone's going to stop me and tell me I didn't define that, at some point. So that stands for the Orientation and Mobility Immersion program. If somebody was wondering that earlier in the discussion. I wrote about my experience in the OMI program on our blog, so you can go and check that out, but I'm curious to know, now learning some of the history of the program, what were some of the challenges that you've had to overcome over the years to really get this program to be what it is today? Marc: So, some of the challenges were, when you develop a partnership with an agency, that agency is affected by the retention of their staff, and there's nothing I or Guide Dogs can do about that. So, for example, the training and investment still one O and M specialist to be qualified to teach in this program, they have to first observe a full O and M immersion class. That's five days in duration. Then after the observation, they also need to learn Juno. And Juno is the, the name, of course, that we give to simulate a guide dog in harness, so there is that component of their training, and then they go into their first year of classes. And depending on which partner agency we're talking about, let's stick with the Lighthouse, that agency is, uh, providing six classes per year. Now, with that background, what if that instructor leaves that agency? All that work, all that development from Guide Dogs for the Blind, has basically gone. They're not available to our, to our O and M immersion anymore. They may take that knowledge and apply it elsewhere, which is still good, but I think the point being, we would like to see that investment continue at the agency they work at, and indeed, in our O and M immersion classes. So we have unfortunately lost a number of instructors over the years, ... they've decided to move somewhere else, what have you, and that is obviously a big loss of investment. The other challenge is that, if someone is doing a class every second month, for example, like at the Lighthouse, they're only with us for one week. And then they return to their agency caseloads. So, what could happen is that, there could be, you know, a learning kind of gap for them, and that delay can sometimes affect them when they come back for a class two months later. Particularly in their formative years. So, part of my job is to oversee each class, and to help each instructor maintain standards, and to keep them developing, and remind them if, uh, they've forgotten something, particularly in their early days, as I said, but that can be a challenge, to make sure that the quality of service is maintained from one class to the next. And then I'll finally, one thing I'll say, finally, is that most of the time, they're operating as O and M specialists with people who don't necessarily use, or desire to have, a guide dog. And what can happen is, O and M's are concentrating on different skills, and, and different techniques for example with the cane even, that emphasizes tactile information. Now, when we come into our O and M immersion, we want to de-emphasize tactile information because it's not really available with a guide dog. So what can happen is, sometimes it can require some adjustment on the part of the O and M to start thinking about information in the environment available to a blind person, through their hearing, though, uh, olfaction or smell, things like time distance estimation, very important with a guide dog, mental mapping, so a lot of non-tactile stuff which is more, uh, readily, I think, useful to a guide dog client compared to a cane user. They're the challenges off the top of my head, yeah. Liz: Do you have any favorite success stories from students who have gone through the program that you would be willing to share with our listeners? Marc: I certainly do. So the first client was a first time, that is had never had a guide dog before, O and M student, and I believe he worked at a well-known chain around the country, Walmart. And his job, before the O and M Immersion, was to be a greeter. And, you know, he was kind of stuck there for many years. But after, probably around about six months if I recall, he contacted us, us back at Guide Dogs, and was so pleased to report, that he'd been promoted. He said that since coming back from the O and M program, and these new found cane skills and overall confidence, it changed the way that he was interacting with the public. And this was so pronounced, that his boss was able to see this, and that prompted his boss to think, "You know what, this person has more potential," and that prompted the promotion. The second story, similarly confidence, but also, I think an understanding from a, a technical point of view, was a woman, once again, first time applicant, no guide dog history, went through the program, and at that time, she was quite sheltered at home. You know, before she came. She wasn't traveling with her husband, mainly human guide, and, going through the program, she just blossomed, and a couple of years went by. But she came to Guide Dogs for the Blind to get a guide dog. Which, uh, almost half of our first time applicants do, by the way. They, they go on to get a guide dog. But she was that taken by the instruction, and the support that she received, she decided to enroll in study, and become a counselor. Specializing in counseling for the blind and visually impaired. So she wanted to give back. So there's two great stories which I think show upward mobility in terms of socially, and also vocationally, that, you know, I'm really excited to share with you and your listeners. Chris: I did want to take a pause and ask, because you've focused on guide dog travel as being kind of an end goal for many OMI students, and, that's understandable, you know, coming from Guide Dogs for the Blind. Are you open, though, to students who just, can't figure out how to get O and M training anywhere else, and want to get that training through GDB? And, maybe they have no desire to get a guide dog? Marc: Yes. We absolutely are, and thank you for raising that. Because that's part of the evolution of the program. Where, we absolutely started off with the key objective of people getting skills to qualify, or requalify for a guide dog. But what we found is as word of the program spread through the community, people were applying to us in desperation because there was nothing available for them in their local or regional communities. So what we used to say is that, "Look, we're not really a program where if you've recently lost your vision, um, we're not really the place to start. You know, we've got a five-day program, and, you know, basically twenty to twenty-five hours of instruction is all you're going to get." Well, twenty to twenty-five hours is a lot more than many people are going to get ever in their home cities or states. So then we started to think, "If not GDB, then who? And we don't want to see anyone effectively unable to continue with their lives and develop independent travel skills. We're gonna do what we can to help. Liz: As a follow-up to that, how much does this cost someone? Marc: Well I'm happy to report, it costs absolutely nothing. Like all services at Guide Dogs for the Blind, O and M training is absolutely free, which includes all associated costs, such as air fares, if someone has to fly from another state to our campus and back, meals, accommodation, the instruction, and even a cane itself. We will provide a free cane to every O and M client, which is a cane which has been recommended by their O and M instructor, and one that they've worked with in the program that they really like. So, nothing at all to participate in the program. MOe: Is there anything looking to the future that GDB is looking into for the OMI program? Marc: Yes. So I, I just hinted a couple of times on other services. I mentioned uh, independent living skills, assistive tech training, counseling, so, what we have recognized is, if someone's lacking O and M skills, it's highly probable that they're lacking other things as well as part of their journey. So, looking at the blind rehab programs that I talked about, and those two allied health programs, what Guide Dogs for the Blind has done is partnered with an agency called the Earl Bom Center, which is based in Santa Rosa California, and with that agency, in some of our programs, we can provide independent living skills training, assistive tech training, and counseling. Mind you, not comprehensively. We can only provide a couple of hours of each within the context of a five-day program. We've also started to branch out and offer a two-week program, occasionally, through the year, that's something that we're building on, to fit in those services. With counseling, we've also brought on, at GDB, our own professional, it's Dr. Jason Durish, who is our psycho social support specialist. The audiology, and the now what we call physical support, we are providing a free hearing, uh, screen, when orientation and mobility immersion students arrive for training on a Sunday. It is optional, but someone can sit down, get their hearing checked with a doctor of audiology, and they can get a really up-to-date, understanding of, of their hearing, including an audiogram, which is a pictorial representation of one's hearing, that they can take with them, and provide to their doctor, or an audiologist, uh, when they get home, if they so choose. With the physical support, uh, we're actually working with a industrial sports medicine company called Briotix. They've been providing services to our staff at Guide Dogs, particularly our instructors training dogs, to prevent injury, 'cause it's such a physical job. But we have started using them to see our O and M immersion clients. To work on their bodies, and develop um, programs that can assist them, and maybe some of those things, like posture, uh, are affecting one's ability to travel in a straight line. Which is often an issue with people who are blind and visually impaired, particularly with a cane with no dog to assist. So, uh, our sports medicine professional can work in the O and M program with our instructors and with the client, to help someone improve their body's overall health and well-being, and apply that directly to their O and M. So we want to continue to expand these, these services, offer them, uh, in a greater way, maybe one day, our guide dog clients can tap into these resources as well. So, that would be the future. Continuing to expand our services, and use the philosophy of working with the whole person. So a, a whole person mentality. Chris: And, again, I just went through this, and I can attest to all of you that this is a, a fantastic program, and I really appreciate you coming on today, Marc, to tell us all about it. Is there anything that we didn't think to ask that you'd want our listeners to know, and can you give out any contact information that people can use to get in touch with GDB and apply, or maybe just ask questions if they want to? Marc: Yes. There's, there's two things. I mean the firstly is to apply, there is our web site, and you can directly apply through there under the O and M immersion, if you click the button when you first go on to the home page, and that's guidedogs.com by the way, to reach our web site. You can apply for the program directly. You can also call our admissions department, on 800-295-4050, and you can select the menu option on the phone to get to admissions, and they can take an application over the phone with you. The other thing that I guess we haven't talked too much about, I can quickly do it, is these O and M skills. I have mentioned some of the non tactile skills, but we will train people to use a cane from scratch if needs be. So we're talking about cane technique, ark, width, being in step with the cane, those cane users out there know exactly what I'm talking about. We will cover street crossings, how to analyze intersections to make safe street crossings, determining configurations and traffic controls of intersections, so anywhere we need to start. Even if it's basic stuff like human guide, left and right, angles, clock face directions, cardinal directions, north south east west, we will start there if someone needs those building blocks, because there's no point progressing to more advanced travel if the foundations aren't in place. Chris: And again, I would like to emphasize the web site guidedogs.com and there's a link to the Orientation and Mobility immersion program right on the front page. So, it's very, very easy to find and very easy to apply. Mark, thanks again for being here. Marc: Thank you, Chris. It was a pleasure. Chris: Well, we're out of time, and I want to point out to all of you that Guide Dogs, as Marc said earlier, is a nonprofit organization that does not receive any government funding, that's all based on donations, so please, consider helping them out. If you possibly can. Again, you can find out how to do that at guidedogs.com Penny Forward is also a nonprofit organization, and we hope you'll consider helping us out, either by sponsoring the podcast or some other Penny Forward program, or by making a one-time or recurring donation, or becoming a member of Penny Forward and taking advantage of our financial education programming. You can learn more about all of that at our web site, pennyforward.com and thank you to our sponsors, the APH Connect Center, and Wells Fargo. And also Thrivent. We appreciate all of you for your support, and your help with allowing Penny Forward to grow as much as it has up until this point. We don't want to stop now, so if you can help, please take the time to do so. The Penny Forward podcast is produced by Chris Peterson and Liz Bottner with help from MOe Carpenter, audio editing and post production is provided by Brynn Lee at superblink.org transcription is provided by Anne Verduin, and the music is composed and performed by Andre Louis. And all of those people are blind, by the way. Penny Forward is a nonprofit organization founded and led by blind people. Together, we help each other navigate the complicated landscape of personal finance through education, mentoring, and mutual support. Check out our self-paced online courses, our weekly and monthly workshops, and our one on one financial counseling, all at our web site pennyforward.com Now, for all of us in the Penny Forward community, I'm Chris Peterson, ... Liz: I'm Liz Bottner, ... MOe: I'm MOe Carpenter, ... Chris: Thanks for listening, and have a great week.