COVER STORY

Support, in and of itself, is not unnecessary. However, it should lead to a destination beyond itself. It should lead to the creation of a life of independence. Benefit checks should be replaced by earnings and public healthcare should be replaced with employer-based healthcare.

BY GREG MAKELY

For those who experience disability, often the arduous journey begins with a cultivated dependence upon parents, school officials, and public benefits: Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Medicare. There is an expectation set that things will always be done "for", and not "by" them, and that alternative means support must always remain available.

So, instead of making the normal transition from childhood dependence to adulthood independence that people without disabilities make, adults with disabilities are largely held in check. If there is no expectation for independence, there is no need for the means to create it; namely, work. So, instead of putting serious effort into creating career paths, parents and school officials often concentrate on the acquisition of benefits and day programming. Support, in and of itself, is not unnecessary. However, it should lead to a destination beyond itself. It should lead to the creation of a life of independence. Benefit checks should be replaced by earnings and public healthcare should be replaced with employer-based healthcare. The Social Security Administration (SSA) understands this. 

In 1999, SSA began to take steps to move a tenth of the 1% of those on the disability rolls off, by incentivizing work, through the Ticket to Work Program legislation enacted. They had already installed Work Incentives, years prior, but those were being largely unused, due in part to local offices being too busy with the administration of retirement benefits to dedicate time to properly promote and implement available Work Incentive protections on an individual basis. In the passage of this legislation, the Benefits Planning & Outreach program was created, which granted money to agencies outside the Administration, to assist SSI and SSDI beneficiaries with learning about and applying for Work Incentives in order to protect cash and healthcare benefits while pursuing work efforts. Today, the program which has now evolved into the Work Incentives Planning and Assistance pro gram, retains the same purpose, the incentivization of work efforts with the promise of benefit protections. The Family Resource Network has been a provider of this programming, since its inception, in 2001, under the name NJ Work Incentives Network Support program (NJWINS).

During the provision of Work Incentives Planning Services, The Family Resource Network recognized the need to provide services that would not only incentivize work for beneficiaries but also assist them with finding, keeping and augmenting work efforts. To this end, The Family Resource Network created the Getting to Work program, with three years of grant funding from the Kessler Foundation, one year of federal funding from the SSA Ticket program and by becoming a vendor of NJ Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services, the NJ Commission for the Blind and Visuall Impaired, and the NJ Division of Developmental Disabilities referral.

FINDING THE RIGHT FIT: The Getting to Work program emphasizes a person-centered, individualized and customized approach that begins with discovering who a person is and what he/she dreams of doing. In that discovery process, a dream can be sized to fit into a realistic job goal. The goal is always both job retention and career development.

The Getting to Work program emphasizes a person-centered, individualized and customized approach that begins with discovering who a person is and what he/she dreams of doing. In that discovery process, a dream can be sized to fit into a realistic job goal. For example, if a person wants to be a doctor, but lacks that aptitude, exploration begins to identify an alternative job goal.

For example, if a person wants to be a doctor, but lacks that aptitude, exploration begins to identify an alternative job goal that also fits into a medical setting. Perhaps, that means placement on a hospital janitorial staff. Perhaps, the desire to become a professional baseball player is resized to placement on the groundskeeping staff at a local triple A ballpark. The goal is always both job retention and career development.

Program participants are taught to understand that the acquisition of a job is only the starting point, that they must develop a work record they can use to both retain employment and to cre ate their next career step.

Since it is easier to teach these this kind of thinking at an early age than to have to reshape entrenched thinking in adulthood, The Family Resource Network created transition to work programming for both high school students and college undergraduates who experience blindness, with a program called Employment Development Guidance and Engagement (EDGE). The EDGE program touches all aspects of life that require independence, with classes and activities geared to teach student the means to independence, and parents, the means to supporting independence by allowing their children to venture beyond parental advocacy and achievement to selfadvocacy, achievement of independent living skills and employment. A valued part of this transition programming is the use of mentors who, themselves, have achieved professional success, while experiencing the same disability.

As Getting to Work and EDGE programming is successful and work efforts grow, participants can loop back around to NJWINS to address the next topic: asset development. NJWINS does so by helping them widen the door to benefit maintenance, with programs such as NJ Workability Medicaid (also created from the 1999 Ticket to Work legislation) and NJABLE, which will allow them to earn and save more; possibly enough money to eventually afford to become homeowners. This, in turn, addresses the largest advocacy issue for people with disabilities. Those who don't pay property tax tend to have no voice in municipal undertakings. Home ownership, therefore, is critical to lobbying for the accessibility, transportation and expanded scholastic offerings that make career establishment possible.

Federal and state government have been partnering with agencies such as The Family Resource Network to dispel the myth that careers and independence are not possible for people with disabilities by providing the innovative benefit and employment support necessary to bridge that fictitious gap and pave the road to the land of self-sufficiency and full potential.•

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Greg Makely is Vice President of Employment Services, The Family Resource Network.