BC’s New Employment and Labour Market Services (ELMS)

British Columbia has embarked on moving many specialized services related to employment into the new Employment and Labour Market Services (ELMS) program. As a result, services like Triumph and Polaris are no longer providing services to people with disabilities. The Ministry of Social Development has hired a number of contractors to provide a “one stop shop” intended to serve the typical population and people who have barriers to employment. You can access the contractor in your area by checking the list on the WorkBC website.

The WorkBC Centres website states the following: “The Employment Program of B.C. replaces four provincially funded employment programs and six programs funded under the Canada-British Columbia Labour Market Development Agreement with an integrated approach for British Columbians needing services. The new program will make it easier for people to find work and provide stability for their families through a wide range of integrated employment services and supports.”

The WorkBC Centres are just getting started and how they will serve people with developmental services is unknown. At the same time, many agencies for Community Living who serve people with developmental disabilities have developed supported and customized employment agencies that specialize in assisting people find employment. These services can be accessed via a referral from Community Living British Columbia (CLBC).

If people are accessing the new WorkBC Centres please leave a comment and let us know about your experiences with the new services.

IRIS Report on Employment

Check out the link below to access the report written by the Institute for Research on Inclusion and Society (IRIS) entitled: “Towards an Understanding of Effective Practices in Employment Programs for People with Disabilities in Canada.”  The report delves into what is essential to creating good policy and best practices that advance the rights of people with developmental disabilities.

Announcement: FSI Takes the Lead on the familyWORKs Project

We are excited to announce a collaborative venture between the familyWORKs project and FSI’s “Families Promoting Employment First” project. We are both focused on enhancing positive outcomes for people with disabilities seeking paid work. We believe that if we combine forces it will create a synergy that will enable us to widen our scope across the province of BC, share knowledge from families, and see a better future in terms of employment outcomes.

With the support of 2010 Legacies Now, CLBC, and BACI, familyWORKs has brought families together to engage and inform about the possibilities for paid employment for people with intellectual disabilities. The familyWORKs story started in 2009 and since that time we have learned together about the different approaches for inclusive employment. familyWORKs, along with our participating families, are becoming disability confident by working on a number of Economic Inclusion projects in Burnaby: working with the Burnaby school system in a pilot project to achieve paid employment before students leave school, created a website that contains information about getting employment for people with disabilities, thinking about how to carry out asset-mapping, and started work on educating employers about disability confidence.

Concurrently, the Family Support Institute (FSI), in cooperation with the Simon Fraser Society for Community Living, and initially funded by CLBC, has been working on their project “Families Promoting Employment First,” a project that has developed a workshop and trained facilitators to engage families in learning about different approaches to achieving paid employment for people with intellectual disabilities. Since that time, the project has facilitated a number of workshops across the province of British Columbia and has plans to engage in more training workshops across the province. The strength of FSI is that we have members in communities across British Columbia. 

As we begin to work together, our combined efforts will allow us to pool our resources to bring to families a more holistic approach to help families to help themselves when it comes to creating a possible future of paid work for loved ones. We have a vision of a familyWORKs chapter in many communities across the province that will benefit from our combined resources: an established web presence, our combined learning so far, a developed workshop, and examples of economic inclusion projects that families can take on in communities across BC. What we are proposing helps families to increase their skills, learning and awareness about possible best practices so that collectively, they can increase the chances of getting their family members paid employment.

Families Promoting Employment First Workshop

The Family Support Institute of British Columbia is putting on the Families Promoting Employment First workshop that is designed to allow parents to explore the possibilities of work for their loved ones.  Employment holds an important part in everyone’s life. Join the Family Support Institute in a workshop that can help you to develop some ideas and strategies around employment for your son or daughter!

We can help you begin to think differently about employment and what it means for your loved ones. In our workshop we discuss:
• What roles do families play?
• What could a family’s role be?
• How can families play an active role in preparing, planning and
pursuing employment?
• How can families use ideas and tools to profile, promote and
support their sons and daughters towards employment?

DATE: June 9th, 2012  
TIME: 9:30am – 4:00pm   
Location: Garden Park Towers
                  #101-2825 Clearbrook Road, Abbotsford
RSVP By:   June 4th, 2012  
Contact:    Valerie Irving (604-540-8374 ext. 521) or email at virving@fsibc.com

 

Results of the Venture Pitch

Check out this story about the collaboration between FSI and familyWORKs in the BACI Blast that outlines the outcome of our pitch to the Venture.

Employment and PWD

We have heard from an official at MSD about what happens when a person is working and receiving benefits from PWD. They have said the following:

• Recipients of disability assistance are required to submit a monthly declaration before the 5^th of if they have any change to their situation; i.e. income, change of address, add a dependent etc.
• The ministry requires that the declaration is submitted before the 5^th day of the following month in which the income is received in order to allow time for processing.
• The client will continue to be covered by the ministry’s Pharmacare coverage. Once the client continues to report income that is over the total disability rate/allowance the client will not be eligible for disability assistance benefits however, will continue to receive Medical Services Only for a period of 12 months.
• If the client’s employment ceases and are in need of disability assistance, the client would contact the ministry and be required to proceed through the process of reapplication.  The ministry will request documents from the client in order to reassess their eligibility for disability assistance.  The client will be required to submit documents that contain current income/asset/living information.  If the person has previously been designated as a Persons With Disabilities by the ministry the designation itself will still be recognized.  The reassessment will be to determine eligibility for financial assistance.

If you require further information please call:

Laurie-Anne Chow who is the A/Manager Community Relations and Service Quality @ 778-628-3549. 

We also understand that the rules are somewhat different for people who are self-employed and we are waiting to hear more on this.

 

familyWORKs Pitches to The Venture

familyWORKs is pitching to the Community Living Innovation Venture on Wednesday,  February 29th (yes its a Leap Year…) from 7-10 pm. The event will be held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Courtroom #3, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver. The Venture has selected inclusive innovators to pitch for up to $100,000 in awards and the chance to be a Venture Learning Lab Partner.

The familyWORKs pitch involves a collaborative venture between familyWORKs and FSI’s “Families Promoting Employment First” project. Both ventures are focused on enhancing positive outcomes for people with intellectual disabilities seeking paid work and have strong relationships with families.

With the support of 2010 Legacies Now, CLBC, and BACI, familyWORKs has brought families together to engage and inform about the possibilities for paid employment for people with intellectual disabilities. The familyWORKs story started in 2009 and we have learned together about the different approaches for inclusive employment. familyWORKs is also working on a number of Economic Inclusion projects in Burnaby: working with the Burnaby school system in a pilot project to achieve paid employment before students leave school, created a website that contains information about getting employment for people with disabilities, we have started to think about how to carry out asset-mapping, and started learning more about how to promote disability confidence.

Concurrently, the Family Support Institute (FSI), in cooperation with the Simon Fraser Society for Community Living, and initially funded by CLBC, developed “Families Promoting Employment First,” a workshop with trained facilitators to engage families in learning about different approaches to achieving paid employment for people with intellectual disabilities. Since that time, the project has facilitated a number of workshops across the province of British Columbia and has plans to engage in more training works.

We envision a familyWORKs chapter in many communities across the province that will benefit from our combined resources: an established web presence, our combined learning so far, a developed workshop, and examples of economic inclusion projects that families can take on in communities across BC.  What we are proposing is that we assist families to increase their skills, learning and awareness about possible best practices on employment. We think that families involvement increases the chances of getting their family members paid employment.

We will know that we have been successful when the following occurs:

• When families see the possibilities of paid work for their loved ones with an intellectual disability when they used to see none.
• When families realize that they need to start earlier in preparing their loved ones for work and creating expectations about work.
• When families are better equipped by having the knowledge about the different approaches and strategies in getting people with intellectual disabilities work.
• When families work together to share resources to increase the chances of paid employment.

We will use the funds from The Venture for a coordinator to carry out the project as we go around the province setting up chapters, to share resources with the chapters, to cover off the costs associated with travel, and to increase our web presence.  What we want to do is rather than “scaling up” we will “scale across” to allow for diversity in what works for individual communities throughout much of British Columbia and will provide economic inclusion for people with disabilities in BC.

The other Pitch Participants are:

1. Inclusionworks!
2. Powell River Association for Community Living
3. PossAbilities’ Can You Dig It

familyWORKs is excited about participating in this event with an excellent list of other innovative ventures.

The Selection Panel:
Bruce Dewar, LIFT Philanthropy/2010 Legacies Now
Al Etmanski, Social Innovation Generation Partner and Co-founder of PLAN and PLAN Institute for Caring Citizenship
Heather Dickson, Strategic Consultant
Jake Anthony, Actor and Self Advocate

Register to attend by emailing pitchin2012@gmail.com.

Families Promoting Employment First Workshop

Mark your calendars… there will be a Families Promoting Employment Workshop on March 3, 2012 from 9:30am -4pm at the Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion at 2702 Norland Avenue in Burnaby. Lunch will be provided. Stay tuned for more details.

• What can work look like?
• Creative resume building
• Growing skills; parents are key
• The art of discovering jobs within jobs
• Tips of the trade
• Promoting your child

familyWORKS Report

In the past year, with the support of BACI, familyWORKs has continued to engage and inform families about the possibilities for paid employment for people with intellectual disabilities. Our story is one that has evolved from the start of the project in 2009 and since that time we have learned together about the different approaches for inclusive employment. In essence, BACI, along with families, are becoming even more disability confident.

In the past, the best thinking was to help people with disabilities get employment by using a model that can be described as “train and place” which is a model that is used in many sheltered workshops, enclaves and work crews. The problem is that many people stayed in “training” and never graduated to paid employment. Further, it is not an inclusive environment and people were often not aligned with their work preferences and instead just accepted what was available. At the time, totally segregated sheltered workshops were right thing to do, but we have evolved to better approaches that are more inclusive.

What we have learned now through the familyWORKs project is that there are more effective ways to create employment such as “supported” and “customized” employment that is based on a person’s strengths and preferences. Supported employment involves seeking competitive employment opportunities with modifications and supports built in to support the employee with a disability. Customized employment builds on supported employment by looking for jobs that don’t yet exist by using a process called “job carving”.

The customized employment approach is focused on what a person can do rather than what they can’t do. Customized employment is based on a model of “place and train” where a person is first placed in the position based on their strengths and preferences and then trained systematically to carry out the duties of the position. Thereafter, the job coach monitors the employment situation and then incrementally fades out of the daily employment situation and monitors the employment placement from a distance, troubleshooting when required.

We have also learned that families are an important part of the equation when it comes to employment for people with intellectual disabilities. The first reason is that families can set the stage for successful employment outcomes by starting early in their children’s life in thinking about the strengths, preferences and the possibilities of paid work. Moreover, creating parental expectations with respect to work is important along with creating opportunities for social interaction so that children have the opportunity to learn from social situations. If children are sheltered from social interactions then they don’t have the opportunities for learning. Also it is suggested that dealing with problem behaviours is easier with younger folks because as time goes on behaviours become more entrenched and more difficult to resolve. Further, families are also important because of their connections to “who they know” that helps to find employment.

familyWORKs also has been picking away at the Economic Inclusion projects that were brainstormed in early in our process. We have worked with the school system in a pilot project to achieve paid employment before students leave school, created a website that contains plenty of information about employment for people with disabilities, we have started to think about how to carry out asset-mapping, and started work on creating disability confidence and educating employers.

Since our inception we have met with families several times and next on our collective to-do list is to carry out asset-mapping with families so that we can surface our connections to improve our ability to find employment opportunities for the people we serve. In the coming year we will continue to come together on a regular basis to advance the inclusion of people into the economic community. Moreover, we are looking have started to think about how to carry out asset-mapping, and started work on creating disability confidence and educating employers.

Thinking Employment! An Evening Lecture and Networking Event with Cary Griffin

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Plan to attend this evening of networking and conversation lead by Cary Griffin focused on Customized Employment. What it is, how it’s working, the challenges and successes. This session introduces the role families play in establishing a foundation for their son’s and daughter’s career and how to build valuable work and social skills through childhood. In addition, Cary will address some of the emerging themes identified through various BC forums and stakeholder groups.

Date:  Monday, June 27, 2011-05-16

Time: 6:30 – 9pm

   6:30 – 7pm – Networking

   7 -  8:30pm – Lecture

   8:30 – 9pm – Networking

 

Cost:  $10.00 at the door 

RSVP to Barb Penner @ Barb.Penner@gov.bc.ca

                          Phone:  250-862-6924

Location:  Performance Hall

Richmond Cultural Centre

7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond, BC

Visit www.griffinhammis.com for bio for Cary Griffin