Introduction

By Cary Griffin, Director of Special Projects at The Rural Institute

As I write this, it is one year to the day that my friend and colleague Joe Schiappacasse died. Joe was perhaps the most intuitive behaviorist I have known in my career. But he was so much more. An incredible father and husband whose strong values permeated every part of his life, a friend of uncompromising loyalty, and a professional who never ignored the desires of people with disabilities. One of the many, many things Joe tried to teach me was that coercion in any form was dis-empowering, manipulative, and usually the wrong thing to do. Joe helped people re-think behavioral change (what he called “providing enviable behavioral supports”) and I struggled to change bureaucracies from funding and supporting the segregation of adults with disabilities in sheltered workshops and group homes. He used to laugh at my efforts and tell me that systems change one person at a time and that bureaucracies simply wait you out or wear you out. He was right, of course. Systems do change, but almost always after watching one individual after another succeed at something the bureaucracy both passively and actively discourages. Change happens one person at a time, one organization at a time, one system at a time. Slowly.

That is the lesson we have learned working with people with disabilities in rural communities. At the University of Montana’s Rural Institute, we work internationally with rehabilitation and human service organizations. Although these organizations are often small (frequently located in small cities and towns with populations under 50,000), they are part of the much larger community and disability service system. Large systems are like lumbering bears: they move and change slowly, but when they do change, they impact everything in their paths.

Working with or in rural rehabilitation services is not like working in metropolitan areas. While popular myth holds that change is more difficult in rural areas, systems change is often easier. In metro areas power is concentrated in large groups of people and organizations. Change threatens the systems they’ve established. They are behemoths that lumber slowly, and sometimes dangerously, over the human services landscape. Often in rural areas, a single agency, a single leader, a single family can make unobstructed changes because there is little local influence from the governing system. In rural areas ideas take hold in smaller groups with fewer resources or empires at risk. And so, in our experience, the individual in frontier communities has a clearer picture of necessary outcomes than their urban counterpart who must navigate the labyrinth of rules, regulations, and professional resistence. In rural areas commonsense outcomes are easier to see, and the results of bad services are likewise more visible in the community. In an urban setting it is easier to hide people away and make disability disappear. In small towns everyone there knows people with disabilities, because people know their neighbors. Of course, the dominant disability industry has tried its best, succeeding over the past 20 years, in building facilities that hide people away. But, in these same communities, the change to supported living, community employment, and small business ownership is continuous.

The Organizational Consultants at the Rural Institute’s Adult Community Services and Supports Department, in partnership with many agencies and allies such as local Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) Counselors, Community Rehabilitation Programs (CRPs), individuals with disabilities and their families, and specifically the Montana Job Training Partnership, the Montana Community Development Corporation, and dozens of others make change happen. Our projects, funded by the Rehabilitation Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Labor, offer small, rural agencies opportunities to collaboratively develop best practices in supported employment, self-employment, and organizational leadership. Each year we select (CRPs) and Independent Living Centers (ILCs) as demonstration sites for our development projects. We show up in their towns and work with them side-by-side. Those agencies receive one-to-one technical assistance and training that transforms the way they serve people with disabilities. We show up in rural communities all over the U.S. (and internationally) and make change happen one person at a time, one agency at a time. We show up, and that is one way to make lumbering systems change. Through partnerships on many levels, remaining focused on one person at a time, we put best practices to work, assist people with disabilities to transform their lives, and demonstrate in partnership with local rehabilitation systems that substantive progress is possible in any community.

In this monograph we feature articles about the best practices used to transform systems. The first section focuses on the work in supported employment and self-employment, some with VR counselors, Workforce Investment Act (WIA) programs, and CRPs nationwide who invest in their staff and consumers to make change happen. The second section has articles written or co-written by customers of disability services. Customers are the best and ultimate judges of success and their stories demonstrate the personal impact best practices can have. The third section is devoted to organizational development—systems change when organizations change, and we provide technical assistance and training nationally to Boards and managers who understand that change means learning new ways to solve old problems. Finally, we’ve included some of our RuralFacts sheets in a resource section.

This publication could have been 400 pages long. Our diverse partners teach us lessons daily. If only there was time to record all the incredible work the rehabilitation field and people with disabilities are doing right now. In times of political and economic change, it is refreshing to see so much excitement about new options. What is especially exciting is that most of the changes are being accomplished at the local level, without the need for major policy shifts, endless meetings, changes in University curricula, lengthy memoranda of understanding, or pitched battles between the old guard and the new. A quiet revolution is rebuilding the foundation of rehabilitation in rural America. Of course, as Joe used to tell me, once you've built the new system it isn’t long before it’s outdated, too. And so the cycle of change continues. Enjoy.