1st Quarter Spotlight Award Winner - 2021
Virginia Chiacchira
Senior Employment Specialist & Pre-ETS Coordinator, at New Horizons Rehabilitation
We are proud to announce Virginia Chiacchira as the recipient of our 1st Quarter Spotlight Award.
This award honors an employment support staff who goes above and beyond for individuals every day!
The winner of this quarter’s award is Virginia Chiacchira, also known as Ginger. She loves her work at New Horizons Rehabilitation as a Senior Employment Specialist and a Pre-ETS Coordinator. She help train the new employment specialists that are hired at NHR. She is also a coach for the Level Up! Indiana ESI Coaching program to help employment specialists in the state of Indiana. She works with VR FSSA with the Discovery Cohort B to review the discovery process with several committees has been an ES for a little over 3 years and is CESP certified.
Ginger’s favorite part is working with the participants and seeing the joy on their faces when they discover that they truly have abilities no matter what others have told them all their lives. Her advice to other Employment Specialists is to never stop believing in your participants. Find their interests, strengths, dreams, and skills, and then help make those dreams come true.
“My advice to other Employment Specialists is to never stop believing in your participants. Find their interests, strengths, dreams, and skills, and then help make those dreams come true”
She asks her participants what their dreams are for their futures and goes from there. One person whose mother told her that her son should work in a library because he loves reading picture books did not have the aptitude for library work after doing work experience and trying it out. Ginger asked him what he wanted to do and he told her that he wanted to make salads.
So, Ginger set up a job shadow at a hospital where he learned about making salads, but this was too much of a challenge for him as he could not read the tickets. Then, they tried cutting tomatoes and vegetables at Subway. They use photos for how the tomatoes and vegetables are to look and photos for writing the labels on the containers to assist him with his tasks. He really got the hang of it. She told him what an awesome job he was doing, when the manager overheard her, he came over offered him a job on the spot. He works from a prep list and recognizes the words for the items he preps. He has now been working there for 2 years and loves his job!