Milton Tyree
Thursday, May 8th, 2025
9:15am - 10:30am
Argyle Suite
Biography
Milton Tyree’s work is centered on people with disabilities having access to participation in valued aspects of everyday life. A particular area of interest over the last 40 plus years has been the ongoing struggle around people with disabilities having good employment. He is a retired project director of the University of Kentucky’s Human Development Institute where his focus was on supported/open employment leadership development in Kentucky. Most of Milton’s career has been within his home state of Kentucky, but includes additional consulting opportunities in other US states, Canada, Ireland, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
His SRV background includes serving as a PASSING report writer and team leader, as well as an SRV co-presenter, and group leader. He’s written about SRV's implications for employment services and developed an SRV derived supported employment leadership event. His employment efforts have also been strongly influenced by the work of the late Marc Gold, and he’s an associate with Marc Gold & Associates.
Separate but equal? A retrospective examination of social devaluation, lessons learned, and relevance to people with disabilities pursuing the valued social role of employee
Growing up during turbulent times of social change in the U.S. set the stage for early lessons about who’s perceived as important, who’s not, how to tell the difference, and the impact of social judgment. Decades later, opportunities for studying SRV theory provided a retrospective examination of the prejudice and discrimination I’d witnessed as a child -- establishing a framework for understanding the nature of the relentless pushback people with disabilities face seeking employment.
Despite decades of disability vocational service effort, rates of unemployment remain embarrassingly high. Tracking the evolution of employment services from the ‘50s onward provides a window for SRV analysis and considerations for addressing the impact of social devaluation. What are the benefits of taking a certain course of action? What are the costs (to people’s image and competency)? What does SRV tell us would increase the likelihood of people with disabilities having access to fitting, suitably challenging, socially valued employment?