John King

As a Service Coordinator at Harbor Regional Center, I serve individuals with developmental disabilities, such as Autism, Cerebral Palsy, and Down Syndrome. In this role, I coordinate access to essential services that enable full participation in family and community life. Acting as the primary contact, I manage service requests, assess needs, and ensure timely, accurate service delivery. As well, I support individuals facing mental health crises, homelessness, or involvement with the criminal justice system. My responsibilities include planning and coordinating individualized support services, advocating for their unique needs, and helping connect them to generic resources, such as Medi-Cal, SSI, and CalFresh. Working closely with a Client Services Manager, I maintain comprehensive records and monitor service outcomes to uphold compliance with the Lanterman Act and Harbor Regional Center policies. I drive positive outcomes aligned with each client's personal goals across all areas of life, including home, social activities, medical care, mental health, and financial stability.

AbilityFirst is a nonprofit organization serving children and adults with disabilities. As an Activity Coordinator, I was part of the management team, whose goal is to run an After-School Program in a community-based setting. I coordinated 15-20 staff and 30-35 participants as they program activities and outings in the community. In regards to duties, I maintained and ordered supplies for activities, developed behavior goals, trained staff, managed behaviors, and assisted the Program Supervisor in performing intakes of new participants and hiring new staff. During my tenure, I reformed AbilityFirst's goal-taking data in order to track participant's data more efficiently and drastically improved staff morale through schedule changes, allowing for more preparation for their shifts with participants.

I worked as a Special Education Instructional Assistant – Autism at G.B. Elementary in the Centralia District. This job involves caring for children in district's mod-severe special education program. I had to instruct 11 children on individual behavioral and academic tasks and also take data on these tasks. Furthermore, I prepared learning materials, helped the teacher prepare for daily instruction, and applied specialized teaching techniques to reinforce social and communication skills. Lastly, I was responsible for protecting children from self-injurious behaviors and tantrums.

In 2021, I was a political consultant deputy at Elevation Strategies, a political consulting firm based in New York City. As a deputy, I was a vital piece in managing a team of 80-100 interns, assigning tasks, holding meetings, and working with the clients and the owner of the firm to complete projects. Due to my contributions, Elevation Strategies grew from 30 to 100 interns and was hired by Kathryn Garcia who was runner up in the 2021 NYC mayoral primary election. On top of this, I lead a team to create a survey of New York City about the mayoral primary election. I created the survey and helped delegate to get to the goal of 1,000 responses. Lastly, I organized volunteers for clients from recruiting to scheduling them to petition and phone bank.

I worked as a behavioral interventionist for an applied behavioral analysis (ABA) company called ACES ABA. In this position, I collaborated with team members, school personnel and family members to develop individual plans of care for students. It is my responsibility to make sure the program is implemented consistently and to adapt the program as the situation changes. I also planned daily activities to keep students engaged and on track with learning goals. During this experience, I worked with a wide range of ages from 4-15 in both telehealth and in-person therapy.

While working on my undergraduate degree at CSUF, I worked on Dr. David Gerkens' cognitive psychology-focused research team at CSUF beginning in the Fall 2019 semester. During this time, I gathered, arranged and corrected research data to create representative graphs and charts highlighting results for presentations. Furthermore, I performed statistical, qualitative and quantitative analysis and prepared materials for reports, presentations and submission to peer-reviewed journal publications. In total, I helped develop and implement 3 research projects on climate change and bias in news consumption. We were accepted to go to the Western APA Conference and present our research in 2020 and 2021.