Dale Verstegen talks with Karla Lynch of the King County Department of Community and Human Services and Cesilee Coulson and Chisa O’Quinn from WISE about diversity and inclusion in employment services and how to elicit input from people across cultural barriers.
Serena Lowe, TASH’s interim Executive Director, talks with Cesilee Coulson, the Executive Director of WISE, the Washington Initiative for Supported Employment. They have the sort of conversation you might expect from two people with such depth of experience in these issues: high-level, broad-ranging, big ideas. But mostly they talk about the necessity to not letting ourselves be limited by systems, processes, the way things have been done in the past during this unprecedented COVID-19 crisis. They discuss the importance of fostering people’s creative thinking and never losing sight of our person-centeredness.
Cesilee Coulson is the Executive Director of the Washington Initiative for Supported Employment (Wise). She brings 22 years of experience in competitive integrated employment training and technical assistance to her position. Cesilee uses her experience to assist with organizational transformation, employment systems change and community employment capacity building.
Serena Lowe is the Founder & Principal at AnereS Strategies and the interim Executive Director of TASH. Prior to this role, she was a Senior Policy Advisor with the Administration on Community Living’s Office on Policy Analysis & Development, focused on CMS HCBS implementation. Before her work for ACL, she was employed in a variety of roles in the field of federal government relations, including for the U.S. Department of Labor, a Fortune 100 global biopharmaceutical company, a top 20 national lobbying firm, and two former Members of Congress. She holds a B.A. in International & Public Affairs from Westminster College; an M.P.H. in International Health Policy and M.A. in International Development Policy from George Washington University; and a PhD in Public Administration from American University.
