Walter shares the inside story of his vision for helping people find work and for bringing the arts and art education experiences to East County through his Antioch Arts Foundation.

A few years ago I became director of special programs for the Pittsburg Adult Education Center, where I am now helping people with disabilities to enter the job market plus providing career counseling for people in transition...

After teaching more than 6,000 residents of East County, I have picked up a lot of information about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to searching for a job, learning much of my information from my students. Lately I’ve begun my workshops with an opening statement:

“I don’t know if this is a disclaimer or an advertisement: I have been teaching 50 weeks a year for the past 11 years and have learned about the field mostly because of people like you who have taught me through the experiences you have shared.

We have fun in my classes; I try to keep them real and stress that people should be themselves during the interview process. They shouldn’t be afraid to be human. I tell them that they might as well be themselves because who else could they be? “Always remember,” I tell them, “that your life is a movie and you’re the star. I don’t care if they tried to cast Will Smith or Whitney Houston into your role. Nobody is going to play yourself better than you.”
We learn together from some of our students’ experiences what not to do. One of my students said to us, “I think I should share my mistake…. A hiring manager said to tell one thing I didn’t like about my last boss. I pounded the desk and said, ‘Thank you for asking the question. Do you have an hour?’”
That was the wrong answer. Questions like that provide a job applicant the opportunity of showing some loyalty. “Best two years of my life,” is a better response than to begin listing the previous employer’s failings. I instruct my students to employ a fair and balanced approach. A great answer would have been, “Overall he was a fair and balanced boss. I learned a lot from him.” Then the interviewee can shift gears and say something like, “But nobody’s perfect. I guess he didn’t walk on water.” At that point a little self-effacement is in order, “He wasn’t perfect. But then, the last time I looked in the mirror, I wasn’t either.”
I’ve learned a lesson about job searching from my daughter. While she was applying for a job with Precision Cabinets, she spoke on the phone to the hiring manager who told her, “We’ve got your resumé…. Do you happen to be free this afternoon?”
“Yes,” she answered. Then she initiated an exchange that landed her the job. “Do you have your appointment book in front of you?” she asked.
“Why do you ask?” the person responded.
“Mark the rest of the afternoon off because I’m the one you are looking for.”
The story effectively makes the point that a job seeker should take a positive self-image into the job search, but my daughter’s comment wasn’t necessarily appropriate for anyone to simply copy. People who are going to strut their stuff had better make certain that they have the right stuff to strut.
In many cases honesty and authenticity will open doors that would have remained closed in the face of arrogance and empty boasting. When an interviewer once asked one of my students why she left her last job, out of the thousands of people who had gone before her, she answered, “I have to level with you; I got let go.” Then she made the unforgettably frank admission, “I should have been let go a lot sooner, but they liked me because I get along with people. I always have; I always put 110 percent into every task, but I simply wasn’t the right fit for the job.”
That kind of honesty is disarming.
I counsel my students against feeling depressed when they fail to get a job after going in for the interview. “It’s a numbers game,” I tell them. And then add that during the interview process they are merely throwing spaghetti against the wall, and if they simply keep at it, eventually something will stick; things sooner or later will work out. I tell them that the important thing is to learn something from each interview — to be like Thomas Edison who refused to say that he had failed 1,000 times to invent the light bulb, but that he had successfully discovered 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb.
Greater than giving them my best tips and techniques, I reach out to my students with love and support, creating within each of them sufficient confidence in themselves. I help renew their enthusiasm, so they won’t become discouraged when they don’t get a job right away. They need to learn that things will be okay in the end. So if things aren’t okay, then this isn’t the end.

Providing a Foundation for Musical Education and Excellence
The genesis of the Antioch Music Foundation took place while I was a candidate for the position of member of the Antioch School Board and made a campaign pledge as well as a devout promise to myself, that if successful I would return all remuneration for the position back into the community. I learned the plight of the beleaguered public school music program, so I donated all four years of my small School Board Member income as seed money to get the foundation up and running. In November 2005, we established the foundation as a 501(c)3 charitable organization and began collecting tax-free donations in order to pay for such things as theater rentals, staffing, trophies, and flowers. We’ve received grants from the Sharon Beswick Foundation, and through the intercession of Federal Glover we are also receiving funds from the Keller Canyon Mitigation Fund.
The foundation is sponsoring a mixture of educational musical experiences for public school children and community musical productions that we sponsor as fundraisers. We provide the fundraisers as musical events mainly for the enjoyment of East County residents. Most of them fail to actually raise many funds; on some we merely break even.