The Fire & Energy of S/E

Supported employment (S/E) is a raging fire, burning bright across the world. We've felt it now for 20 years, as it's burned a passion into our souls to strive for employment for anyone, anywhere, anytime. It still lights up our imaginations with promises and potentials unmet. We've seen it in the eyes of the best employment consultants. It's the intuitive energy of listening to someone during a Personal Futures or Vocational Profile process and really understanding the work and employment dreams of another person.

S/E is networking, marketing, and negotiating with the business world for profitable and exciting employment partnerships. Supported employment is searching the workplace for the clues of future job carving possibilities and ideas. It's engaging workers, co-workers, and supervisors to be their best and knowing when to assist and when to create time and space for natural events and relationships to occur.

S/E in a Global Economy

Supported employment, under its own momentum, will soon move into the 21st century. Without a doubt, S/E continues to validate its founding beliefs and dreams. The heros of supported employment are the 150,000 + employees, as well as employers and employment consultants around the nation, creating new social and cultural realities barely imaginable only a few years ago. The challenge is, as it has been from the beginning, to raise our expectations beyond the word "employment."

As we work more closely with the business world, new words are being added to our vocabulary—words like: profit, partnerships, corporations, s-corporations, limited liability partnerships, limited liability companies, micro -enterprise, entrepreneurial, leveraging resources, small business, women owned small business, minority owned small business, employee owned businesses, corporate culture, re-engineering, downsizing, rightsizing, owners, and shareholders. As we add these words from the business world to our vocabularies, do we really understand them and integrate their concepts into community employment? Perhaps the question is how do we blend the fire and energy of our brightest and most creative employment consultants with the challenges of the next century? What tools and cultures do we need to develop and promote as we push the limits of our existing boundaries? Where are we going? How do we build on and add to our current S/E strengths?

Self-Employment & Business Ownership

Moving S/E into the next century requires new options, new S/E cultures, and new tools for employment consultants. Fortunately, the next steps are here today. They've been here for years. Just as S/E started from the creativity and visions of excellence, the 21st century tools for new S/E futures are developing today as employment consultants embrace the business world and its array of work and employment options. The only real barriers seem to be in our beliefs and expectations. The business world has been and is ready to do business. How do we know this? We asked. Employers are interested in hiring employees who own substantial employment related resources, forming limited partnerships, and supporting sole proprietorships with people of similar interests and dreams.

Do you know that small business is the fastest growing segment of the business sector today? Employment consultants need to understand this business trend. We need to believe that all of the options in the business world are possible for people with disabilities, and then act on those beliefs. Acting on those beliefs makes it possible to achieve employment for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Creating paid work and profits from the needs of the business and economic culture opens new worlds and options for people to become partners in businesses, sole proprietors, and employees with ownership of vital business resources. If this can happen, as it has repeatedly in small, remote communities (such as Plains, Montana: population 1,200; Red Lodge, Montana: population 2,300; Alamosa, Colorado: population 10,000; Sterling, Colorado: population 5,400), it can happen where you live.

Employment for Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime

Recently in a small rural town in Montana, a "challenging" person who was identified as having multiple and significant disabilities, shared his work dreams with us. The place he identified for his work dreams, was a local "nature center." He took us on a tour and clearly demonstrated the interest and relationships he had already developed there. In attempting to job develop here, multiple objections were offered from the manager, including the lack of funding for new employees. The manager would agree to any volunteer help, but "had no money" for employees.

Acting on the belief that it is possible to create employment for anyone, anywhere, anytime, a business plan for a sole proprietorship for the "challenging" person was proposed to the nature center manager. The plan was to operate a retail sales business at the nature center (selling center-related items) and return 10% of the profits to the center. The manager reviewed and assisted in refining the business plan and then submitted it to her Board of Directors for approval. The business is owned by the person, and we were able to clearly "create" a work outcome based on our beliefs of employment for anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Another example involves a young man in another rural Montana town, where an employer was approached to develop a position as an entry level assistant mechanic. The employer did not have an adequate cash flow to hire him. A limited partnership proposal was written, using funds from a Social Security Plan for Achieving Self Support (PASS), to become a part owner of a segment of the business. The wealth of knowledge of the business world came into play. The owner advised, amended, and assisted with creating an entirely new proposal for a sole proprietorship for the young man, based on a $28.00 per hour contracted rate for the individual's new small business, with a 25% consignment fee for the use of space at the principal owner's building, and a clear method for sharing customers and work loads. The business plan and PASS have been approved. In this case an absolute "no jobs available" from the potential employer was turned into a mutually profitable sole proprietorship and partnership. Once more the business world teaches us that it is possible to achieve employment for anyone, anywhere, anytime.

What Comes After What Comes Next?

For the past 20 years, the field has struggled with determining what jobs people can do; what jobs people should do; what jobs are available. The discussions and hard work are far too often focused on organizational resources, restrictive or limited policy, and agency convenience. These are the wrong concerns and mind set. The employment arena is not a finite resource, although the human services perspective has ascribed this characteristic to it. Neither is employment development a passive activity. Employment is created through vigorous and relentless invention, partnership, collaboration, and hard work. Even in the smallest communities, in the most rural corners of the world, we are finding, as our colleague Roger Shelley says, "that there may not be a lot of jobs, but there sure is a lot of work." Skilled consumers, families, and personnel will exploit the reality of market expansion through tenacity and risk-taking. There is a conscious choice to be made by each of us: have the world act upon us, or act upon the world.

Making employment happen requires a drastic change in daily activities. First, quit doing things that do not lead to employment. (Do endless meetings come to mind? How about work readiness training that has proven to be a dead-end towards community employment?) Second, ask business people how they got into business and what they need to stay in business. Act to help them find and hire people. Third, listen to the job seeker; what does he/she want to do and how close to that goal can you get by enlisting employers, friends, family? Fourth, stop making assumptions based upon behaviors and motivations witnessed in boring, repetitive, segregated settings. Stop wasting time and money on interest inventories and standardized testing. Instead, develop situational assessments and job analyses that give real information with environmental relevance. Fifth, listen to yourself. Are you in this job for something to do, or to do something? For most people served in community rehabilitation, there is no Plan B. Most people are stuck in dead end day programs, so what exactly is the big risk in trying a job, even an "unrealistic" one? Twenty years ago it was "unrealistic" for people with severe disabilities to work in any community job. Today we know that to be a misguided assumption. Do not become the people that the next generation frowns upon for being so "backwards" in its attitudes. All the pieces to create quality community employment exist now.

Looking into the future of supported employment, and the promise of the employment consultants who light up the sky with their dreams and skills and fires burning within, is an exciting and breathtaking experience. The early promises and potentials of supported employment have become the reality for thousands of people, yet millions of people wait for similar futures, in workshops, day activity centers, and institutions. There are still so many S/E promises unmet. It's time to take the next quantum leap into our shared futures with the business world around us, building on the employment consultants' energy and dreams and skills, and create employment for anyone, anywhere, anytime.

To contact the authors: David Hammis, (406) 243-5485 dhammis@selway.umt.edu Cary Griffin, (406) 243-2454 cgriffin@selway.umt.edu