Ottawa Independent LivingPhone: (613) 236-2558

Fax: (613) 236-4562E-mail: info@oilrc.comhttp://www.oilrc.com/

Proposal – Ottawa United WayBelonging to the Community Priority Investment

Prepared by Justin S. CampbellDecember 5, 2014

Overview

The Youth Solutions Program initiative is a project designed to provide assistance, education, and skills to disabled youth to help them find life direction and enable them to find full- or part-time jobs, and/or entrance into a post-secondary education. This initiative will be part of Ottawa Independent Living, a chapter of Independent Living Canada, which promotes integration and full participation of people with disabilities in society and offers programs for living assistance and support. This initiative focuses on the Belonging to the Community Priority Investment, aimed the participation of all groups including those with disabilities.

Background

Currently, there is not enough support of the type required for individuals with disabilities to find and maintain a job, and to remain competitive in the labour market. The Youth Solutions Program addresses the issue of unemployed youth with a disability. As a result of their dependence and their circumstances, they do not experience as productive or constructive a life as someone capable of gaining employment without any barriers. There are not enough recruitment and outreach strategies to make contact with people with disabilities. Lowering the rate of unemployed youth with disabilities helps lower potential problems in their futures, problems that would affect both them as well as our society. The lower the projected rate of those on welfare in the future, the less tax money our government will require to budget for those programs and the more contributors we’ll have to our communities and way of life.

Ottawa Independent Living is an NGO that follows the philosophy that that all people with disabilities have skills, determination, creativity and a passion for life. We emphasize peer support, self-direction, and community integration by and for people with disabilities themselves. We embrace the notion that rights and responsibilities are shared between citizens and the state, focusing on building a country based on the principles of inclusion, equity, affordability and justice. We believe we have a good mesh of principles and beliefs that will guide us in this initiative.

Project Details

Goals

The goals of the initiative are designed around the United Way’s Belonging to Communities Investment Priority in that it is a support program aimed at the youth demographic in Ottawa with aims to help and guide them into participating fully in the workforce and their community. The specific goals are:

Build employability skills to facilitate success in getting job offers. Many people with disabilities lack access to education and training and are not job-ready.

Through personality-type studies and questionnaires such as the Myers-Briggs personality indicator, plus activities and mentoring, develop interpersonal skills and concrete life goals. This tackles an issue most youth experience, which is indirection and a lack of self-awareness and insight. This also aims to improve self-advocacy thanks to a specific knowledge of goals and interpersonal skills and guarantees a momentum in the individual’s productivity and participation.

Provide workshops on professional life skills such as budgeting, cooking, stress management, self-esteem, and conflict resolution.

Identify and assess employment barriers and set goals for the future. This would be specific to the individual’s needs whether the disability is mobility, hearing, eyesight, or psychological. As noted by the World Health Organization (WHO), “even though impairment has an objective reality that is attached to the body or mind, disability has more to do with society’s failure to account for the needs of persons with disabilities.” Disability is a social construct created by ‘ability-oriented’ and ‘ability-dominated’ environments.

Impact

The Youth Solutions Program addresses unemployed youth between the ages of 18 to 24 in Canadian society that have been diagnosed with a disability, mental or physical, and are dependent on their parents/guardians or benefactors. The 2006 survey by Statistics Canada showed that people with disabilities had an unemployment rate of 8.6%, higher than the national average by 2.3%. The Panel on Labour Market Opportunities for People with Disabilities reported in 2013 that there are 795,000 people of working age with disabilities. While 340,000 of those individuals have post-secondary educations and disabilities that do not prevent them from actually working, they are still without employment. The social isolation of numerous people with disabilities limits their encounters with key contacts and their knowledge of opportunities to enter the workforce or access training.

This initiative hopes to help lower the noted percentage rates for current and future generations. The lower the rate, the less money the government requires to budget for assistance programs for those unemployed, as well as a higher amount of successful, independent people. The country cannot afford to keep going without the talents of entire groups of populations that are currently under-represented in the labour market, including people with disabilities.

Methods of Delivery

The Youth Solutions program will be structured as a 9-4pm full-time incentive-based workshop facilitated by several mentors and instructors. Running for six months, participants spend five days a week at this workshop. Topics will be divided into units,

from personality types to budgeting, and it will be run as a group setting. The amount of participants will have a limit of eight, allowing for one-on-one time with the facilitators.

Eligibility will be based on age, whether or not the candidate has a diagnosed disability (physical and/or mental), a concrete goal to participate and find a job/return to school by the program’s end, and lack of a job.

Schedule

Phase 1Implementation of Phase 1 will take place beginning in July of the coming year. We will begin by securing a facility. Afterwards we will begin the hiring process concurrently with the purchase of relevant resources such as computers, assist programs for the blind and/or deaf, and accessibility accommodation such as ramps and elevators. This is expected to take one month.

Phase 2Starting in August, the hired staff will go through a workshop period to ready them for their charges and their needs, and begin to develop curriculums and workshops relevant to the program. This should take the entirety of the month. We expect the program to be ready to accept participants for a Fall-Winter term beginning in September.

Staffing

The program will be staffed with three full-time facilitators hired from teaching, counseling, and/or career planning backgrounds. Each facilitator will have a background in special education and working with people with disabilities. In addition three part-time support facilitators with backgrounds in counseling will be on hand for one-on-one support.

Resources

Budget to be prepared by the CFO.

Evaluation Plan

The feasibility of this initiative will be measured by the participants’ success in gaining employment and/or returning to school. In the final four weeks of the program, the Youth Solution Program partners with local businesses based on the participants’ education level and skill set and incorporates individuals into a final co-operative field placement similar to some college programs. During the placement, a survey will be sent out to the employer to ensure participants are meeting their expectations, and if not, additional mentoring will be concurrently provided.

At the end of the field placement, employers are free to hire the participants or, if not, write them a reference. After the program finishes, communication is continued with the

former participants and if they gain employment, the program conducts a weekly check-up with the employer for the length of one month.

The aim of the Youth Solutions Program is to create and maintain a network of business employers and educational institutions that include college, universities, and adult high schools. The largest stress placed in this program is self-advocacy and education on breaking down employment barriers, with the intention of enabling participants to look for, find, and work at gaining employment in their field of interest or study.

Appendices

Sources:

Participation and Activity Limitation Survey 2006

Employment and Social Development Canada – Canadian in Context – People with Disabilities

Statistics Canada: Initial Findings from the Canadian Survey on Disability

Disability in Canada: A 2006 Profile

2014 Annual General Report