Nancy Hinkley has a husband, three daughters, a house, a dog, a little yellow car, a seat on the Bainbridge-Guilford School Board and tremendous energy for helping teens with disabilities move into adult life with jobs and brighter futures.

"This is the job I've been building for my whole life," she said.

At the ILR School's Employment and Disability Institute, she translates what researchers have learned about young adults and disabilities, then shares that knowledge with teachers and others -- across the state and the nation.

"I help people understand" how to bring research into practice, said Hinkley. For more than 20 years, she coached students in public schools to "take charge of [their] disabilities and focus on strengths ... nobody gets a job based on what they can't do."

Teens and young adults with disabilities sometimes "forget what they can do," Hinkley said. "I discovered I loved helping them work through the system to get them where they needed to go."

For some, "It's like being a foreign exchange student in your own country. You don't know the questions to ask," she said.

She is fond of saying, "Let me hear your story, and let me connect you" to resources that will get you where you want to go.

Hinkley's passion for empowering students and their teachers goes back to when she was 15. She had rollicking fun with the girls who lived near her family's farm in northwestern Pennsylvania, including a girl new to the area.

Hinkley remembered thinking, "She was so smart, she could fix anything ... she is smarter than I am."

When 10th grade started that fall, Hinkley was stunned to learn the girl was segregated in a special-education classroom. 
"You've made a horrible mistake," Hinkley told school authorities, who ignored her.

That friend "was one of my drivers," Hinkley said, toward a career helping teens with disabilities transition from school into the work world.

Another driver was a guidance counselor who intervened when Hinkley was on the verge of dropping out of high school in her senior year.

Her father had died that winter pulling a neighbor's car out of a ditch during the blizzard of 1977. He left behind a wife and three daughters.

When Hinkley, the eldest child, mentioned to her guidance counselor she would be leaving school to support the family, the response was emphatic: "You can't drop out."

Within 48 hours, a second-shift job at a nursing home was lined up.

During the day, Hinkley went to school and continued participating in marching band. "I would take my nurse's aide bag to school, attend classes, go to band practice, hand off my band equipment for the bag as we marched past the nursing home, and I'd go to work."

The following September, Hinkley became the first in her family to attend college.

Four years later, she graduated and started as a special education teacher in a middle school on the Virginia-North Carolina border. In August, she begins a doctoral program in educational theory and practice at Binghamton University.

"My role in life is to be a link to better opportunities for those with disabilities," she said.

Mary Catt is assistant director of communications at the ILR School.