Vocational Rehabilitation holds Open House on Disability Mentoring Day

On Tuesday, the Oconee-Pickens Area Office of South Carolina Vocational Rehabilitation held an Open House to celebrate Disability Mentoring Day. The local office of Vocational Rehabilitation welcomed over 250 people to the event at their office on Wells Highway in Seneca, explains Area Supervisor Sheila Ford. “I think that it was a fantastic day. We wanted to serve the students and we did that through Disability Mentoring. We had the businesses in line to help them with the job shadowing experiences. The speaker, Mr. Mike Keasler, was dynamic. I love the fact that he focused on ability and not his disability or inconvenience as he calls it. We have an excellent team put together here and we’re a best kept secret and we don’t want to be, so we just encourage people to come out and see us and if they have a disability need, have them reach out to us and we will see if we can help them.” The contact number for the South Carolina Vocational Rehabilitation Department’s Oconee-Pickens Area Office and Work Training Center is 864-882-6669. The celebration also coincided with National Disability Employment Awareness Month, says Vocational Rehabilitation Business Development Specialist Dan Alexander. “We had a great turn out and a great speaker, Mike Keasler who does customer service with Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative. He shared his story of overcoming disability and like he says it is not really a disability, it is an inconvenience. It was very motivational. In addition, we had over 100 students in Oconee and Pickens counties that went out and job shadowed. To our business partners that allowed them to do that, we had 19 business partners from manufacturing to restaurant to retail, just really thankful to them. Also we thank all our business partners with Vocational Rehabilitation for all they do in the community and how we are able to work together.” Last year, the South Carolina Vocational Rehabilitation Department placed over 7,000 people in competitive employment across the state.