UMKC joins fight for disabled youth

In an effort to reduce discrimination against youth and young adults with disabilities, Institute for Human Development (IHD) will launch a project that is expected to strengthen the transition between educational attainment and organized employment for disabled youth in the jobs market.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 10 percent of youth with disabilities age 16-19 were employed in September. In the same age category, youth with no disabilities were more than twice as likely to have a job during the period.

The disparaging results are similar for young adults in higher age ranges.

Working to improve employment outcomes for those youth with disabilities, the IHD was thrilled last week when it was awarded $2.19 million to facilitate a project that may alleviate burdens between educational institutions and community-based organizations in their struggle to assist youth and young adults with disabilities.

“Missouri needs a collaborative effort focused on helping communities and organizations make sense of different opportunities related to transition to employment,” said Tom McVeigh, Associate Director of the IHD and principal investigator of the Show Me Careers project.

The award, jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Administration for Children and Families and the Administration on Developmental Disabilities, will support the empirically-proven project, Show Me Careers: Missouri’s Transition-to-Employment Collaborative.

Bureaucratic Participants include: the IHD, Missouri Department of Mental Health, Division of Developmental Disabilities, Missouri Planning Council for Developmental Disabilities (MPC), Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Adult Learning and Rehabilitation Services (Missouri VR), Office of Special Education, and People First of Missouri.

Individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities will also be involved in the planning and implementation stages of the project.

As an applied research center, IHD has promoted community partnerships for more than 30 years, using evidence-based research as support for practices that improve those partnerships. Show Me Careers: Missouri’s Transition-to-Employment Collaborative is one of more than 50 projects of the IHD.

ltrigg@unews.com