Publisher's Synopsis
Customized Employment strategies offer new processes to advance employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities. The Office of Disability Employment Policy, U.S. Department of Labor initiated a series of demonstration projects to identify policy issues that support the use of Customized Employment strategies in the workforce development system. The purpose of this report is to summarize the lessons learned from this demonstration initiative and the policy recommendations it has generated. Information for this report has been developed based on the technical assistance provided by staff of the National Center for Workforce and Disability/Adult. Technical assistance staff worked directly with grantees in the design and implementation of their projects, and helped them to identify lessons learned. This report is organized in the following manner: Executive Summary I. Background on the Demonstration Projects and Grant Initiatives II. Recommendations III.Development of Partnerships and Collaborations IV. Experiences with Integrating Service Delivery Strategies Within the Workforce Development System. V. V. Experiences with Leveraging Resources for Common Goals VI. Policy and Systemic Influence VIII. Sustainability of Grant Activities Section I provides information and background on the demonstration projects and grant initiatives embarked by ODEP starting in 2001. Section II summarizes local, state and federal recommendations generated as a result of this demonstration initiative. A key purpose of this initiative was the identification of policy issues and strategies to consider in order to address and ensure that individuals with disabilities can access and succeed within the One-Stop Career Centers, and achieve positive employment outcomes by using Customized Employment strategies. The sections that follow provide greater detail on the challenges and strategies experienced by the sites that contributed to the development of these recommendations. In sections III to VII, information gathered from grantees' experiences is presented in a consistent outline. -Key findings and successful strategies-bulleted examples of grantee activities that have contributed to projects' understanding of each issue. -Overcoming obstacles-some of the challenges grantees experienced and the strategies they used to address them -Discussion-the integration of findings across all of the grantees Within the body of the report, individual grantees are identified by the city and state where the grantee is based (with the exception of Alabama, Montana, and Alaska, which were statewide initiatives). Examples from grantees are used for illustrative purposes.
