AUCD Network Narratives

Creating Space for Diversity, Inclusivity, and Community-Based Conversations

January 26, 2022 AUCD Season 1 Episode 8
AUCD Network Narratives
Creating Space for Diversity, Inclusivity, and Community-Based Conversations
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

George Gotto has experienced the network from many phases and positions. Today, he is the UCEDD Director of the University of Missouri Kansas City's Institute for Human Development in Kansas City, Missouri. He is trained as a medical anthropologist with an emphasis on community-based research and cross-cultural perspectives on health and discipline.

For most of George’s career, he has experienced several positions within the network as he worked as both a trainee and an employee in Arizona, Kansas, and Missouri before taking his role as director. In today’s episode, Jeiri is chatting with George all about his experience growing within the network.

Jeiri asks George about his top focus as a director from removing barriers from programs to increasing diversity within the network’s leadership. George shares the obstacles he faces in his pursuit of creating a more equitable process. He talks about the challenges that come with diversifying staff and how working closely with human resources made things easier.

If you’re interested in growing within the network, this episode with George is for you. Tune in as George shares his story, what motivates him, how he fell in love with community-based research and the impact that comes from it, and his advice for youths who are working towards being more active.

View all episodes and transcripts at http://www.aucd.org/podcast

This episode was funded by the Administration for Community Living through technical assistance contract # HHSP233201600066C. The contents do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Administration on Community Living, US Department of Health and Human Services, or the US Government.

Produced by Adode Media; a full-service podcast production agency.

Welcome to AUCD network narratives, where we share real stories from our members. I'm your host, Jeiri Flores advocacy specialist at the strong center for developmental disabilities, and the co-chair for the council on leadership and advocacy. Join us as we hear from inspiringly within our network working to make a change.

Jeiri Flores: Today we are here with George Gotto Ph.D., who is the director of the University of Missouri Kansas City Institute for human development and Kansas City, Missouri. George is trained as a medical anthropologist with an emphasis on community-based research and cross-cultural perspectives on health and disability. The bulk of George's career has been in the UCEDD network as both a trainee and an employee in Arizona, Kansas, and Missouri. Thank you for being with us today, George.

 George Gotto: Thank you for inviting me. This is exciting. 

Jeiri Flores: Oh, you've been all over the place. Arizona, Kansas, and Missouri? 

George Gotto: Yeah. I started in Arizona as a student at Northern Arizona University. There was an advertisement in the, you know, the student newspaper. We actually had the physical newspaper back then for a research assistant at a place called the Institute for human development. And I applied because they needed a Spanish speaker. So I was able to go in and use my language skills. I didn't realize it at the time, but my career began on the day that I walked there. 

Jeiri Flores: Do you remember the date? 

George Gotto: I don't remember the exact date, but I do remember that it was in late August of 1994.

Jeiri Flores: I only asked because, so it took me a long time to start my position here at the UCEDD, this is technically my first big girl job. And so I called them my career's birth date. So my date is July 22nd and that was my first official day as the UCEDD. And so that's why I asked because, you know, that's when it kind of all fell into the fold for me like, oh, like this is where my career started. So it's my career's birthday. And I had been waiting so long for it to happen. I was out of college for six years before this even came to an opportunity for me.

George Gotto: I love that, it makes it more meaningful and personal. It really is a career when it has a birthday.

Jeiri Flores: For me personally, it took so long to get a job, life is just difficult. Sometimes the systems just work against you. So to navigate and pick a position that works for you. And that you're kind of gets to the pursuit of your passions, right? So I'm an advocate. So I get to tell stories for a living. And it was just so important to celebrate that and for people to understand the significance. I'm actually pursuing a master's in human development right now, my question to you is how does disability fit in human development? 

George Gotto: I feel like it's embedded in, it's a part of human development. We don't, it is a part of the human experience. I'm hoping that your coursework, I assume that they are including disability. If they're not, they need to be because this is actually what you're touching on maybe something that drives me crazy is the lack of emphasis that so many programs really do not have a good emphasis on disability and disability culture and the impact and the meaning of disability in the United States.

Jeiri Flores: I would say that when the class is specifically related to disability, I think they try, I think they miss the pieces of people who have intersecting identities, but when the class isn't necessarily focused on disability, it misses a mark. And so I have to remind folks of my existence. And so that's why I asked that because it frustrates me that we're talking about human development. And then, you know, it's like, I don't exist. Like I'm not human almost. It's been a rough road for me, personally was in the program as I'm trying to navigate and get to the end. 

George Gotto: You are probably having a big impact on that program by being there, by advocating and pointing out to them, Hey, this is missing from your curriculum. If I had to guess, I would bet that they will be more open to it, to disability as a topic, and begin to include it more. That's really great. And I'm really happy that you are in a position like that in a higher education institution impacting the way that they teach about those intersectionalities. 

Jeiri Flores: As we transition and we start in this conversation, I want to talk about your experience as UCEDD director. When you started up as a trainee. And what was that like to grow within the UCEDD?  

George Gotto: That growth has been pretty amazing to spend my adult life, essentially in this network of people who really have a mission and really do meaningful work has been a real gift to me, that I didn't even recognize for the longest time. So I’ve come across so many amazing people through it, both with disabilities, people who were just great mentors to me in a variety of different ways, and the whole experience, both in Arizona and then at the University of Kansas, put me in touch with really amazing people. And I feel like then when I came to Missouri, I was prepared to be a researcher within UCEDD to run my own programs because I'd been around so many really dynamic and very good leaders over my career. You know, when I then stepped into the director's role at my UCEDD in Missouri, you know, I was prepared. I knew, oh, this is how Mike Waymire did it. I know that that's how we do it. This is how a variety of different people I worked with. By the time I became a director, it felt like sort of a natural progression and not completely overwhelming.

Jeiri Flores: When you looked at the UCEDD and you were getting ready to step in as director, what were your top five things that you were like, well, this is what I think we'll focus on. This is what I think needs to happen so that this UCEDD is successful?

George Gotto: Well, for me, there were a few things. One, we had some programs that were just outstanding. I mean, really tremendous. And I wanted to begin to remove any barriers that were preventing those programs from being everything that they could be. One of our actually associate directors now, her name Shelley Reynolds, she and her team, and a whole slew of community partners developed something called the charting the life course framework in terms of getting that out and really rolling it out, working with states, not just Missouri, but multiple states. There were just some things within our university and within our UCEDD that were making that more difficult than it needed to be. So my first priority was to try to get rid of any barriers that I could, so that framework and that group of people could begin to really impact our state and the state, you know, the other states who were interested in it. And then there were two other things that I was really interested in. One is that over the years, our UCEDD had become pretty siloed, kind of around different areas. And so I really want it to begin to have people working across projects and working together and not being quite so siloed because I feel like that doesn't lead to the absolute best product for people with disabilities in Missouri. And that's what we want to have. We want to be able to impact lives positively. In order to do that, You need a lot of voices and you need to be hearing from a lot of people and silos I don't think are always the best way to, kind of as an extension of that idea is increasing the diversity within our UCEDD. You know, we were pretty monocultural in our makeup. For a long time, we had one African-American leader within our UCEDD, and that was kind of our diversity, at least within leadership. That gentleman, Derek Willis is now the director of the Iowa UCEDD. We lost Derek before I even came. And so we were a super monolith. In addition, we didn't have a whole lot of folks with disabilities working at our UCEDD at that time. And so we put a real big emphasis on increasing the number of people with disabilities, who were employed at our UCEDD and we continue to work on that. And then we begin to really look for ways to make us, you said more diverse culturally, ethnically, racially. Because again, I think the more voices you have, the more perspectives you bring to an issue. And in our case, developmental disabilities, the better product ultimately, the better research, ultimately we're going to be able to do. We have made significant strides in all of those areas. So I'm pretty happy, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Jeiri Flores: So when you were trying to create this equitable process, right, when it was on your to-do list, your mission, what were some of the obstacles that you had to navigate through to make sure that, you know, you were true to what you wanted.

George Gotto: One of the obstacles for us and back I might even say the biggest obstacle to really diversifying our staff, our researchers, and trainers was just a lack of understanding about how to do it and how to really go about recruiting and bringing in people from different backgrounds. And what I found was that our university had processes in place. And so we began to partner, we went and met with HR, human resources department and laid out for them here's what we would like to do. We don't want to diversify for just, just to diversify. We want to bring in really strong people, but we want that to make sure that we're recruiting from a broad pool of applicants and they were great. We did not realize how many processes they had in place to make that possible for us. And so we began to work closely with human resources, talked directly with, you know, our different recruiters and people telling them, you know, kind of what we wanted in each of our candidate pools. And they made sure it happened. So as a result, we've been able to hire just, you know, high quality, amazing, and also young researchers, and trainers. It's just a really diverse group of employees that we have now. Something I just mentioned there that is also kind of neat is we were getting, I don't think of myself as old, but a whole lot of our staff when I became the director was over 40, you know, or approaching 40. And so one of the really cool things is that we brought in all these people who are under 30 and have just a totally different perspective and a really fresh perspective on our work, on disability, on ways that we can approach our work. It's just been a breath of fresh air. I think all of us have been who are the over 40 crowds have been really happy to see the changes that have occurred as a result of that.

Jeiri Flores: And there's a meme that says, you know, working at a job sometimes has you having a best friend that's over 40 when you're in your twenties? And it's so funny because then you're looking for that person. And for me, I'm one of the youngest in our UCEDD, I'm not under 30, but I did start in my twenties at the UCEDD, and it is cool to be in that space because you're like right at the cusp of things changing, right. Sometimes I'm too extreme in my beliefs, a conversation I wouldn't say it's heated, but it's a lot different than, you know, than what it be or actively working together to understand where I'm coming from and where they're coming from. You know, sometimes this is a challenge because I look at stuff differently and I'm really extreme in what I think. I really stand tall in a lot of things about, I don't know if that's the right way to be, but that's how it works out for me personally, especially like in the advocacy realm, when we're having conversations of intersectionality or even diversity or inclusion, or even equity in operating and transparency. There's so much work to do, especially in academia.

George Gotto: Even, you know, language, the language that your generation and folks younger than you use is so different than language we use, ways of communicating and disseminating information. It's just been so great to have people who actually really understand how to use social media and make an impact. It's just things like that have just really been beneficial to our UCEDD. 

Jeiri Flores: You've gotten to see the UCEDD through different phases, right? You got to see it as a trainee. You got to see it as a worker bee. And then, you know, now you're a director and your focus has been community-based research and really intersectionality, at least this will how I read it. When you think of that, and you think of all that you've done, what kind of motivated you to really push those envelopes in the spaces that maybe those conversations weren't happening?

George Gotto: A lot of it goes back to my youth. The first is that you know, I grew up in a relatively small town in Colorado and my dad was the owner of a hardware store at the lumberyard in our little town and one of his employees, I mean, who I just grew up with, you know, so as a small business, I worked in that hardware store, in fact, my whole life until I left home, I couldn't wait to get out of there. But I realized what a huge impact we had. But one of the employees that he had was a man named Mel Hendrickson and Mel was a man with down syndrome. He was just another employee. Came in at 8:00 AM, punched in work till five. He was a part of the community. He was the person in basketball games who would always be their kind of sweeping the floor at halftime. And he always volunteered to do in the community. It was just a big, huge part of our community. And you know, it was, we were isolated and it was a small community. And I just kind of thought that's the way it was. It seemed completely natural to me. So then fast forward to starting at the UCEDD in Arizona and all of a sudden it struck me within my first few months there, like, wow, that was rare. That is not the kind of thing that you would be really is normal outside of our community. And then I developed friendships with people who had disabilities and saw a lot of their struggles to find full-time employment, to just find inclusion in any kind of community, you know, whether it's a volunteer opportunity at the local community center or whatever. And I had this model from my hometown. So I knew these things were possible. And then when I had these really close friendships with people who at that time in the early nineties were really fighting. So those were just after the, you know, the ADA was passing and people were really fighting to begin to make sure that that law was going to impact their lives the way they wanted. I just got kind of passionate about it. And I realized that I was able to do a lot of the things like community-based research with really interesting communities that I love and it felt meaningful. That whole experience of growing up in this very inclusive way. I now I’ve since learned that, you know, our community, it wasn't always that way and that other people didn't have the same experience as Mel. There was a lot of work on the part of his family to make sure that he had the level of inclusion that he has. I of course didn't know that at the time. All I saw was, wow, here's this guy and just a fellow coworker. I knew a friend, I didn't know about all the stuff back behind on the other side of his life that was in place. And that his, how hard his family was working to make sure that he had all the opportunities he had. But anyway, I had that model. And so I know, and I always fall back on that like, well, I know that this is possible because I’ve seen it work. 

Jeiri Flores: I mean, I think those core memories are so important and those core experiences are so important as you push forward. I don't tell all the same stories when I go into certain places. Cause some of them don't work and I just think of my parents and the sacrifices they've made so that I could have the opportunity. You know, like my parents migrated from Puerto Rico here to Rochester and they bought a house and they have done all these different things to kind of just make life work for me. And so I get that, right? Like I get how much work you have to put in so that people can have a life that they're proud of. So my last question for you really would be now that we're looking to the future, right. And you've done all this work, you've put in work to build a strong foundation at your center. What are your plans for the future and what kind of advice would you give to other UCEDD who are actively working to be more equitable? 

George Gotto: Well, the first thing that comes to mind and it's strange to be at this point in my career, you know, where I probably have 10 to 15 years really of my career left. Because I'm thinking, what am I going to do with those next 10 to 15 years to have an impact? Particularly in our state, but you know, even on a broader level we've kind of touched on it. The thing that I’ve realized is that I can really do is to set up an organization that is built around mentorship of the next generation so that they have the freedom to become excellent researchers, become excellent trainers, educators. And I really am pushing hard for all of our senior staff to really think about how they're mentoring, you know, all those young folks that I told you are, have come into our UCEDD, and what they're doing to really work to mentor students and trainees and employees who have disabilities, you know so that they can begin to really lead this field. And then the other thing is what are we doing to make sure that we're hearing as many voices and including as many voices as possible. I don't honestly know what it's like in the rest of the country. I assume it's similar. But if you look at the people in Missouri, for example, who receive Medicaid services, or just about any service, those programs really aren't accessed to the extent that they should be or could be by communities of color. And so why is that? And how can we help our state change that? Here we don't have so many Puerto Rican immigrants, but we have you know, a lot of immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala. So what are we doing when those families arrive, whether they're legal or illegal, what are we doing to make sure that their children with developmental disabilities are receiving the services they need? Right now actually we're working with an organization that is receiving and helping to get Afghan refugees into the greater Kansas city area. We're talking about how do we reach out to those Afghan families and help connect them to a system of supports, whether it's for developmental disabilities or some other thing that would, what is our place in that? And there are so many other communities like that that just are not engaged in the system or receiving any services, receiving the supports, both natural and governmental that maybe they could have. 

Jeiri Flores: Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us. And thank you for being here with us. We really appreciate, you know, your vulnerability and you sharing pieces of your story with us and with our network, like you said, there's so much more work we got to do. 

George Gotto: There is, There'll always be more work.


Thank you for tuning in to AUCD network narratives. If this story has inspired you to make a change at your center or program, use the link in our show notes for resources and tools to help you lead on. We'd love to connect with you. So visit the AUCD website and click on the submit your story button at the top. We hope to hear from you soon.

 

 

 

How disability fits in human development
George’s experience growing from trainee to director within the network
The top things George focused on as director
The obstacles that George had to navigate in order to create an equitable process
What motivates George to push envelopes when it comes to community-based conversations regarding intersectionality
George’s plans for the future and his advice for youths who are working towards being more active