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Jim Hasse is a writer, editor, marketer and publisher who is the author of 14 books about disability awareness and disability employment.
He's the author of a comprehensive series of five developmental guide books that show parents and counselors how to help youngsters with special needs prepare for meaningful careers as adults.
Hasse is accredited as a Global Career Development Facilitator.
His central premise as a career development facilitator is this: Disability, when framed with insight, can be a competitive advantage in today's job market for job seekers with special needs.
A 1965 honors graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Journalism, Hasse is one of the few individuals with a disability (cerebral palsy) worldwide to earn the credentials of Accredited Business Communicator (ABC) by the International Association of Business Communicators, San Francisco, Calif.
He developed an award-winning corporate communication function for Foremost Farms USA, Madison, Wisconsin, during his service of 29 years at the cooperative -- 10 of which were at the vice presidential level for the Fortune 500 company.
He decided to retire from Foremost Farms USA in 1994 and start his own business for helping college students with disabilities prepare for the mainstream job market.
In 1996 (before blogging became commonplace), he wrote "Break Out: Finding Freedom When You Don't Quite Fit The Mold," a paperback memoir of 51 short stories about disability awareness, and used that material to develop a now discontinued website where people with disabilities shared their personal-experience stories.
That first book and website helped him find a full-time telecommuting job with The Associated Blind, Inc., New York City, as senior content developer for eSight Careers Network.
Between 1999 and 2009, he was responsible for all the online content of eSight Careers Network. He wrote, assigned and edited more than 1,300 articles about disability employment issues.
That helped Hasse get the attention of AMACOM, the publishing arm of the American Management Association (AMA) in New York City. He compiled and edited "Perfectly Able: How to Attract and Hire Talented People with Disabilities," a disability recruitment guidebook published in 2011 by the AMA for hiring managers that highlights disability's competitive advantage in today's job market.
His mission continues to be this: show parents how to cultivate self-esteem within their son or daughter with special needs so their youngster can confidently say, "My life matters."
Only then, Hasse points out, will that young person with a disability be able to reach out and start living the life Dr. Martin Luther King envisioned when he wrote:
"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity."
Hasse is currently offering his insights about how to make peace with newly acquired limitations for a new audience: older adults.
Every week subscribers to his “52 Shades of Graying” service receive by email a short story (fiction but based on Hasse's real-life experiences).
Each new story is about a mature adult who uses hindsight and foresight to offer a takeaway tip and a discussion question that can guide members of the “52 Shades of Graying” community toward a new understanding about how to handle newly-acquired limitations.
Hasse describes “52 Shades of Graying” as an uplifting, mutual-mentoring community where where ageism meets ableism.
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