Even as California’s unemployment rate has sunk to record lows in recent months, the population of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities has struggled with high levels of unemployment or underemployment.
A collaboration among three Bay Area agencies is trying to change that.
Launched in July 2016, HireAble is a campaign from three nonprofit partners — Contra Costa ARC, Futures Explored and East Bay Innovations — that connects local businesses to employees with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Since then, it has helped 70 people with disabilities get jobs in the Bay Area.
The campaign, which was funded by a grant from East Bay charity Thomas J. Long Foundation, is an extension of the work providing support for people with disabilities that the three nonprofits have been doing for years, said Tom Heinz, executive director of East Bay Innovations.
“There’s been a history of people devaluing people with disabilities … One way to help people become more valued is by having them show value,” Heinz said. “This is a population with a 85 percent unemployment rate, which communicates that this population isn’t capable of being employed — that’s wrong. They haven’t been given appropriate resources, but now they’re starting to.”
In California, people with developmental disabilities work with regional centers to obtain a variety of services, including using transportation, help living on their own and, in some cases, getting jobs. Those who want to be employed can get “supported employment” — training and resources that enable them to work in jobs alongside colleagues without disabilities. That can include being paired with job coaches who accompany workers to their jobs to help them learn the tasks and skills needed to succeed. Often, as those employees get comfortable with their job duties, the coaches phase out and return less regularly, mostly when the employee needs help learning a new job task or solving a work issue.
Supported employment services developed in the late 1970s but remained underfunded for years. But that has changed recently, Heinz said, thanks to the Employment First Policy signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2013 and pressure from groups like Disability Rights California.
HireAble is a local effort to get the word out to employers about the community of people they can tap for job candidates.
“We talk about a push for diversity and often it becomes cultural diversity, but in the workforce, (the disabled community) is one of the most under-represented groups out there,” said Will Sanford, executive director of Futures Explored.
Both the nonprofit leaders and employers they partner with are quick to point out that hiring from the community of people with developmental disabilities is not just a charity mission.
“When you do it well, you hire the best person for the job,” said Tom Stepien, CEO of Primus Power, an engineering firm in Hayward that provides energy storage systems.
Stepien found the best person for a job in John Racho, an alum of Project Search, a training and job placement program from East Bay Innovations, five years ago.
Racho did so well in the job — which included administrative work such as setting up for meetings, and receiving and sorting mail or packages — that he was converted to a full-time employee and given stock options, like other full-time Primus employees.
“He’s got a beautiful attitude,” Stepien said. “And he’s grown with us and added value.”
Racho, 28, said he still loves working at Primus Power after five years. He handles shipping and receiving and likes maintaining the break room for employees. “It’s keeping me busy,” he said.
The HireAble collaboration is not just about spreading the word about qualified candidates like Racho, but helping those people compete for jobs.
For the nonprofit partners that provide job coaches and match people with employment, that means expanding their training and conducting outreach to new industries. HireAble’s nonprofit partners have broken into the health care sector, for example, training people to be home care aides, which are in high demand as the population ages.
The organizations are working with the state of California to pilot a program offering internships with the state government to people with developmental disabilities, and they hope those internships could turn into jobs.
Heinz, of East Bay Innovations, said his organization has placed people in 15 departments in Alameda County, including the sheriff’s office, as well as Oakland Unified School District and myriad other agencies and businesses. They will start a training program with the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley in January. In addition to the 70 job placements over the past year, HireAble partners have secured 37 paid internships, trained 25 employers and coordinated 10 volunteers.
The partners hope the program can expand what diversity means to hiring managers and business leaders.
“At the end, the employer’s going to hire the most qualified person for the job,” Heinz said. “If they’re compared to non-disabled (people), they have to be able to compete, so we have to provide a training pipeline and infrastructure into certain industries so they can make sure it’s commensurate. That’s something this collaboration is trying hard to do.”
