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NEWS

Thursday, June 7, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Event honors community

Downtown festival 
celebrates African 
American businesses

By ROB DALKA

Daily Staff Reporter

On 
Saturday, 
the 
23rd 
annual 
African 
American 
Downtown Festival was held 
in Kerrytown on the streets 
of East Ann and North 
Fourth. Started by Lucille 
Hall-Porter, the festival is a 
celebration of African Amer-
ican culture and the local 
African 
American-owned 
businesses’ contributions to 
the community.
A grand stage was set up on 
the corner of East Ann and 
North Fourth. Live music 
and 
performances 
from 
many different groups con-
tinued throughout the day. 
Vendors lined the streets 
promoting their businesses 
and organizations, and many 
sold food, clothes, books and 
much more. These vendors 
came from Ann Arbor and 
the surrounding areas to 
share what they do with the 
people of the city. They were 
made up of both returning 
and first-time participants.
Charles Young, a Metro 
Detroit-area resident, runs a 
traveling bookstore. Charles’ 
Collectables and Books was 
among the many vendors 
that was represented at the 
festival.
“I wanted to give folks an 
opportunity to get books for 
themselves and their kids,” 
Young said. “We serve as a 
recourse for parents, teach-
ers, grandparents and any-
one who is interested in 
history.”
This year was Young’s 15th 
year bringing his bookstore 
to the AADF. He is a strong 
proponent of the festival.
“It is always a great festi-
val to come to,” Young said. 
“Ann Arbor is a great town, 
and people always come out 
and support.
Although 
the 
weather 
was cooler than earlier in 
the week, the AADF was 
warm and welcoming, with 
the smell of good food and 

sounds of vibrant music fill-
ing the air. Throughout the 
day, people from all over Ann 
Arbor and the surrounding 
communities came to enjoy 
the festival.
Mike and Kari Victor, Ann 
Arbor residents, came to 
spend some of their day at 
the AADF.
“Everybody should come 
out,” Kari Victor said. “There 
has been great entertain-
ment and food. It has been a 
ton of fun.”
The festival has grown 
each year, with this year’s 
festival being the largest 
one yet. The Ann Arbor Cul-
tural and Community Events 
Coalition works on planning 
the event all year to make the 
AADF come to fruition.
“We love that it brings 
everyone 
from 
the 
area 
together,” Teesha Montague, 
the events coordinator for 
the festival, said. “There is 
a lot of diversity. We appre-
ciate that, and we celebrate 
that. We like to celebrate our 
history at the same time.” 
Montague 
became 
the 
events coordinator in 2008 
and has helped plan the 
AADF each year since. Mon-
tague also just started a local 
business with her mother.
Ultimately, 
Montague 
hopes that the festival can 
continue to grow as the years 
go on.
“We need to extend the 
AADF,” Montague said. “We 
have been getting requests in 
the past few years, to expand 
the festival to a few days. 
Hopefully by our 25th year, 
2020, we would be able to 
that. We’ve talked with the 
city and they have totally 
supported us and we have 
appreciated that.”
Young says he is apprecia-
tive of how the community 
works together for the festi-
val.
“It’s 
a 
beautiful 
thing 
to see everybody coming 
together,” Young said. “I 
think that just seeing the 
smiles and responses is so 
satisfying and worth all the 
hard work.”

VR training helps the disabled find jobs

By RILEY LANGEFELD

Daily Staff Reporter 

Adults and children with men-
tal disabilities may soon have a 
better shot at finding jobs, thanks 
to a research project that uses vir-
tual reality job interview training 
to develop their skills.
The training has been in devel-
opment for eight years and is 
just beginning to be tested and 
applied in real-world scenarios. 
Matt Smith, an associate profes-
sor at the School of Social Work, 
joined the project in its early 
stages to help evaluate the train-
ing after a prototype was devel-
oped. Smith has been working on 
the project for seven years now, 
and its promise is only becoming 
clearer as his research continues.
At the center of the program is 
a virtual character named Molly 
Porter, who is driven by a living 
algorithm that determines her 
questions, responses and behav-
ior. The researchers refer to the 
training as the “Molly training.” 
An interview with Molly takes 
roughly 20 minutes, and trainees 
receive an overall score as well as 
eight scores for individual learn-
ing objectives when they finish. 
They use these scores to mea-
sure their progress over repeated 
interviews with Molly.
Smith and the team researched 
the effects of the Molly training 
on five disadvantaged groups, 
including those with severe 
mental illness, mood disorders, 
autism, addiction and post-trau-
matic stress disorder. In pre-
liminary testing, their subjects 
were twice as likely to get jobs 
or internships after the training 
than a control group that did not 
undergo the training.
Now, the training is being 
evaluated in four different initia-
tives with funding drawn from a 
variety of sources. One project, 
funded by the National Institute 
of Mental Health, is evaluat-
ing whether the Molly training 
is effective for adults receiving 
mental health unemployment 
services. Another, funded by 
the Kessler Foundation, focuses 
on high school students with a 

range of disabilities. These stu-
dents typically receive federally 
mandated “transition services” 
that help them in the transition 
from high school to either college 
or the workforce, and the Molly 
training could be an effective 
addition to these services.
A third project, funded by 
the NIMH and the University’s 
School of Social Work, works on 
adapting the Molly training for 
different groups of people. And 
the fourth project is funded by 
the University’s Poverty Solu-
tions initiative. Its goal is to 
evaluate the potential of working 
with Certified Peer Support Spe-
cialists on Molly training. The 
Peers, as they are called, have 
lived mental health experiences 
and received treatment, and they 
act as advocates for other individ-
uals suffering from mental health 
problems.
Smith hopes the training will 
be used with as many groups as it 
can help. He expressed his belief 
that the tool could be applied in, 
among other situations, re-entry 
services for people with prior 
criminal convictions. He suggest-
ed that the training could help to 
reduce recidivism — the tenden-
cy of a criminal to commit more 
crimes — by making it easier for 
former criminals to find jobs.
“We really want to make the 
tool accessible and evaluate if this 
tool can help other groups, too,” 
Smith said. “At the end of the day, 
job interviewing is something 
everybody has to do. Whether 
you’re somebody with a certain 
type of disability or whether 
you’re somebody that has no dis-
ability, it causes anxiety. And it’s a 
skill set that needs practice.”
Although the training is still 
in the process of being evaluated, 
its success in laboratory condi-
tions appears to have translated 
to tangible success for prelimi-
nary trainees. In their project 
to deliver the training to high 
school 
students, 
30 
percent 
found employment and 20 per-
cent found internships in the first 
four months following the train-
ing. This was consistent with the 
team’s prior research, suggest-
ing that the training could be 
immensely helpful for adults and 
young people alike.
Educators who have worked 
with the training testify to its pos-
itive impact. Meredith Schindler 
is the executive director of the 

Ann Arbor Academy, an indepen-
dent school where a third of the 
students have autism. These stu-
dents have worked started using 
the Molly training at the begin-
ning of the 2017-18 academic year.
“The 
Molly 
training 
is 
designed to help people speak 
more effectively about their abil-
ity to work well on a team — that 
they’re a hard worker,” Smith 
said. “If they’d had gaps in their 
work history, it helps them learn 
how to frame their responses in a 
positive way.”
Schindler expressed a similar 
sentiment. She noted that adults 
with mental disabilities gener-
ally make excellent employees, 
and that their primary challenge 
is getting their foot in the door 
with employers wary of hiring 
disabled people. According to 
Schindler, the Molly training has 
helped her students develop the 
skills necessary to face this chal-
lenge.
“We’ve definitely seen an 
improvement in kids’ social 
skills,” Schindler said. “And I 
think it’s definitely partially due 
to what they’re getting with the 
training. You see more confi-
dence and you see a better ability 
to handle some questions.”
Karen Steffan is the coordina-
tor of vocational services at the 
LaGrange Area Department of 
Special Education in Illinois. She 
oversees a variety of work pro-
grams for high school students 
and coordinates educational pro-
grams for around 4000 students 
with disabilities. Like Schindler, 
she has seen a marked improve-
ment in the skills of students 
using the Molly training.
“It was new to all of us,” Stef-
fan said. “We all had our learning 
curve on it. But it captures your 
interest and certainly allows you 
to stay engaged with it. … It fits in 
every environment we tested it 
in. It was convenient for people. 
It was timely for people. It was 
engaging. And it gave you imme-
diate results.”
Feedback like this is encourag-
ing for Smith and his team, who 
are hopeful about the program’s 
potential and eager to apply it 
wherever it can help. Likewise, 
for disabled people and their 
advocates, Smith’s work is a 
source of hope for the future.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Virtual character 
Molly Porter measures 
progress of workers

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

