Meet Quillo
All startups have a story: a conversation becomes an idea. Ideas are sketched out on a whiteboard. And before you know it, you’ve surrounded yourself with enough people saying, “Yeah, this would work!” Here is how Quillo’s conversation started.
Our Mission
Quillo provides an empowering platform for sharing stories, resources and knowledge for people with disabilities, support staff, and their families. With Quillo, we focus on possibilities, and motivating messages to build a sense of community, equity, and belonging for the respect and well-being of ourselves and others.Our Story
Try Another Way
When I started with The Arc in 1973, I got to spend two days with Burton Blatt. He was the first of many thought leaders who inspired me, leaving a mark and a lesson learned. I am especially fond of Marc Gold’s “Try Another Way” approach. It was so simply and brilliantly conceived and implemented – we all can try another way to find the right answer.
After 42 years with The Arc, a good friend urged me to think differently about the workforce situation we face in our field that is fraught with high turnover, low wages and high stress. There has to be another way.
In the past four decades, we have gone from staff working together in one building to a workforce with individuals in different places around the community. In the two years I spent developing Quillo, our research of this field and its workforce showed that 80% of people’s communication with their supervisor was by cell phone. Face-to-face interaction is less common. And when we asked them to define their communication as predominantly positive, predominantly neutral, or predominantly negative, over 70% said it was predominantly negative! Our relationships were transactional and the transactions were overwhelmingly negative.
The question on my mind was this: How do we strengthen relationships and create a culture that values everyone?
It is not what to do and how to do it that keeps people engaged and growing in their work. It is the connection to Why and their feeling of being valued by others that is so important. With so much emphasis on rules, we have become more focused on compliance than building people up with an understanding of the Why. As the field continues to adapt, we can do better.
Quillo is about culture! Built from the ground up with the needs of our community in mind, Quillo tells stories that create emotional connections, giving people topics to think about while reminding them of their value to others. The app was designed using positive psychology, all focused on the personal well being of each staff member.
I was driven to try another way, to re-envision the WHY that makes the What and How so much more valuable to people. Taking this idea and running with it, I rounded up a dedicated team who were ready to try another way, too. Welcome to Quillo.
-John
Meet Our Team
John Dickerson | Founder & CEO | [email protected]
Sue Gordon | Chief Operating Officer | [email protected]
Rebecca Scherpelz | Chief Content Officer | [email protected]
Kesia Birdwell | Video Producer | [email protected]
Mark Cline | Chief Marketing & Sales Officer | [email protected]
Bryce Dickerson | Chief Technology & Security Officer| [email protected]
Cynthia Morraz | Director of Digital Community | [email protected]
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