Perspectives - Text Only

Perspectives

John Hager is Virginia's Lt. Governor. He chairs Virginia Commonwealth University's Charter Business Roundtable. The Roundtable is a forum for identifying and addressing factors that inhibit industries from employing workers with disabilities. Hager, a former business executive, lost the use of his legs due to polio in 1973, and uses a wheelchair.

Please read below or view the video about a personal experience that Lt. Governor Hager shared during the first Roundtable meeting.

Lt. Governor Hager --
"I had an overwhelming personal experience. About a month ago, I was down at an HMO in Virginia Beach, AmeriCare. They're progressive in that they do Medicaid programs in seven states, not in Virginia, but seven other states. They have a huge call center down there. They have lots of employees, about 2,000. When I went in and they took me on a complete tour, they started introducing me to the principles.

I noticed a tremendous number of women, African Americans, and some other ethnic groups. These people had been recruited from all over the country. They were not necessarily Virginia Beach natives. They were all working very well. Jeffery Waters is the CEO. He was very proud to show me what they were doing and their new approach to servicing these accounts and their people friendly attitudes. We did our thing that day,left, and went on to the next call we had.

Anyway, about two weeks later, he saw me at a dinner here in Richmond, and he said, 'After you left we got our management team together,' and he said, 'You know we're quite proud to have 46% of women and minorities in our professional and management group.' He said, 'What we had not realized until you visited, is that we have zero disabled employees. So we've re-written our guidelines and we're going to make a proactive effort to hire 8% disabled employees in our total operational and managerial roles.'

So that was a very interesting little personal experience. Because what it says is that there was no barrier there, they just never thought about it."