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COMMUNITY BUILDER Community Builder: Roger Hassenpflug, retired CEO of Living Opportunities Comment By Interview by Steve Boyarsky MailTribune.com By Interview by Steve Boyarsky Posted Sep. 4, 2016 at 12:01 AM By Interview by Steve Boyarsky Posted Sep. 4, 2016 at 12:01 AM --> About Roger Hassenpflug Roger Hassenpflug retired in May 2015 after 27 years as the CEO of Living Opportunities, an organization that provides services for people with disabilities and... » Read more X About Roger Hassenpflug Roger Hassenpflug retired in May 2015 after 27 years as the CEO of Living Opportunities, an organization that provides services for people with disabilities and their families. Living Opportunities is a leader in its field for innovative job development strategies that allow people with developmental disabilities to work for local businesses in mainstream jobs. Hassenpflug is a 1972 graduate of California State University at Long Beach with a degree in sociology. He moved to Medford from Minnesota in 1979 with his wife, Janice. He has served on a variety of local and statewide boards of directors and continues to work with Living Opportunities as the lead consultant for job development with similar organizations throughout Oregon. He also serves as interim executive director of ACCESS, a community action agency that provides food, shelter and services that help people deal with poverty and homelessness. » Social News Editor's note: Community Builders is a periodic Q & A series providing perspectives from local individuals who have been involved in significant change in Southern Oregon. Today's interview is with Roger Hassenpflug, retired CEO of Living Opportunities. Q: How did you come to live in the Rogue Valley? RH: I was from South Dakota and moved to Southern California. After college I took a vacation to Minnesota, or what I thought was a vacation, and I ended up staying there for eight years. Typical for a 22 year-old, I had enough money to get there but not enough to get home. I needed to get a job, and within a 12-month period I got a job that turned into a career, and I met my wife at an institution. The joke is: I was lucky enough for her to get me out of there. We had some friends who lived here, and we visited and loved the place, so we ended up in the Rogue Valley. We moved here permanently in 1979 and have been here ever since. We were looking for a place to raise our kids, and it’s been great. I get to travel around a lot, and every time I come back home it is like, “AHHH.” Q: You were executive director of Living Opportunities for many years. Were you always interested in working with individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities? RH: I really stumbled into the work. I had some connections early on. My sister had a friend who had a brother with Down syndrome. In the '60s I met him. The kind of general philosophy for people with developmental disabilities at the time was “they couldn’t learn, so we didn’t teach them anything and therefore they didn’t learn.” Which was kind of an interesting bit of logic. It was thought that they didn’t have a life worth living, so a lot of people with disabilities were in institutions and didn’t get their medical needs met. It was really unusual for that family to have their son at home. I had another friend who volunteered for Special Olympics and took me along a couple of times. After eight years of living and working in Minnesota, we got tired of January, so we moved to Oregon and I got a job driving a forklift. Then a job came up with Jackson County Mental Health for a developmental disabilities program director, and I ended up getting that job. I worked there for eight years, and then joined Living Opportunities in May 1988, and now here I am 27 years later. Q: Living Opportunities has been in Southern Oregon for many years. Can you tell me about its origin and growth? RH: Living Opportunities started with parents sitting around kitchen tables thinking up an organization and what they wanted for their kids and applying for grants. They started creating a nonprofit in 1973 and got their first funding in 1975 for a house on Beatty Street. Then they started a small “supportive living” service where people lived in their small apartment with staff. This was way ahead of the craze for that. So when I took the job at Living Opps, they had about a $650,000-a-year budget and about 40 staff serving 45-50 people. When I left in 2015, we were serving 300 people, we had a staff of 150 and an annual budget of almost $9 million. Q: What services have you developed at Living Opportunities that benefit adults and their families with disabilities? RH: We stuck pretty close to the knitting over the course of time. The creative part of the work that we engaged in was really innovating within a small group of services. The trend when I took over was group homes. We have moved to “supported living.” People pick where they want to live, within what they can afford. They decided whether they wanted to have roommates, and the creative part of the work was figuring out how to help people be safe and healthy and happy and successful in a pretty independent living environment. Q: That was the housing part. What about supported employment? RH: I went to a seminar in 1981, not too long after I moved here, that ARC put on in the summertime. There were two presentations, one from the northeast part of the state, and he was talking about developing jobs for people with significant disabilities in regular businesses in rural settings. I thought, “Really?” I mean we are talking about towns the size of Prospect. And people getting jobs there. The other speaker was from the University of Virginia Commonwealth. He had a great big supported employment service going full blown in 1981. He had a much broader clientele. He was working with people with physical disabilities, mental health issues, milder cognitive disabilities and was just getting into serving people with more significant disabilities: intellectual and developmental disabilities. It knocked me out: “Really you can do that? Holy cow, you can do that?" Oregon bought into supported employment in the '80s and '90s, but then had to focus on closing state institutions as a result of a class-action lawsuit. During this time, supported employment for adults with disabilities was completely neglected for 20 years. I was frustrated with the whole state/county system in 1988 and came to Living Opportunities to help people get jobs. And we created a system to do that. Now Oregon is headed for exactly what Living Opportunities started doing in 1988, supported employment, which we got really good at. Q: Living Opportunities has been used as a model for other communities in supported housing and employment. What makes it a model that others would seek to replicate? RH: As it turns out, that is true. I’m not sure we knew that. I figured that out in the past few years, as I have been doing some consulting around the state to help other organizations learn how to develop supported employment programs. When I retired from Living Opportunities, we had about 120 people working for 85 businesses in Jackson County. As it turns out, we kind of just put our heads down and did the work and didn’t really realize at the time how few organizations in the state were engaged in this work. It turned out to be the future. Q: Where do you look for inspiration and support? RH: When I was with Living Opportunities, it was the work. It changed people’s lives. That was the big deal. Suddenly people could get a job and live in an apartment, and we could figure out ways to support them. People could have control and choice because they had options. Q: It sounds like the people you serve provide the inspiration. RH: First and foremost. Families were grateful that there is something out there. Some of the more important moments I have had with families is when they weren’t happy with us. Because they were pushing us to do something else or doing something a little further in. To think a little bigger. There were points where you kind of go, “Oh!" We were being pushed. So listening to customers is another source of inspiration. Families want great things for their kids. It doesn’t matter that your kids have disabilities, you still want great things for your kids. So at this point we are talking about careers as opposed to jobs. Families want their kids with autism or Down syndrome or whatever it might be to have the same life as their siblings, to be able to move out and be independent, to have relationships. One of the biggest challenges with people with disabilities is helping folks to develop meaningful relationships. Because we have this general fear, it is so much better than what it was, but still we have this fear of the unknown. If you don’t have experience working with people who are a little bit different, that present a little bit differently, it is harder for people to develop relationships. Especially if they don’t have real verbal ability, because we meet each other and learn to know each other verbally. Q: How has Living Opportunities made Jackson County a better place to live? RH: At the core, the community is everybody who lives within it. And that includes people with disabilities. We helped people get reconnected with their families. That was the early part of the work, bringing people out of institutions and having families reunited. It makes the community a better place. So many times we have heard from employers, “You know what, I’d do this — knowing what I know now about people with disabilities — I would do this in a heartbeat because of the positive way it changed the culture of my business. These folks raise the morale of the work group. There are other employees who might have missed more work than I wish they would have, now they don’t. They don’t because John comes in every day, happy about his job, excited to be here, and that is good for everyone.” Q: What could make our community an even better place to live? RH: This is such a great place to live. From the viewpoint of people with disabilities, they are better accepted. Businesses seek them out, they are being welcomed in their neighborhoods. In a lot of ways this community seems to be ahead of the curve, and maybe Living Opportunities had something to do with that. Maybe it did. This is such a great place to live. I’ve seen this community step up so many times. It’s easy to get around. It’s small enough that you can get to know people. Politics is local. You get outside the area and it seems so big and you don’t have a connection. You can make a difference here. By Interview by Steve Boyarsky MailTribune.com By Interview by Steve Boyarsky Posted Sep. 4, 2016 at 12:01 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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