The RRTC on Advancing Employment for People with Intellectual/ Developmental Disabilities, housed at the Institute for Community Inclusion at UMass Boston, convened its a State-of-the-Science initiative during the Summer and Fall of 2018. Towards that end, we hosted a variety of listening sessions, both in-person and online, with multiple stakeholders, to share findings and gather feedback on what we know, what more we need to learn, and where we are headed. Our series of events culminated in November of 2017 with our event in Washington DC. Click here for the stakeholder feedback materials from that day.
Our partners in this initiative include The Arc U.S., Self-Advocates Becoming Empowered, the University of Minnesota, and the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services (NASDDDS). This effort represents a deliberate attempt to involve multiple stakeholders in agenda-setting that will inform the course of future research and promote the knowledge translation that is necessary to move research findings into everyday practice.
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For an introduction to our work, you can view the introductory presentation from our 44 event series here. |
Our events were based on three themes that capture the essence of our work to advance employment for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Below you can download the accessible and brief versions of these papers. You can follow the topical hashtags for updates and past posts on social media as well.
Engaging Families Accessible Language Version
Engaging Families Brief Version
Organizational capacity (focusing on community employment providers) Accessible Language Version
Organizational capacity (focusing on community employment providers) Brief Version
State Policies that Promote Employment - Accessible Language Version
State Policies that Promote Employment - Brief Version
State of the Science in 2017 Agenda and Accompanying Materials
State of the Science in 2017 DC event stakeholder feedback slides
Questions?
Allison Cohen Hall, Project Director, RRTC on Advancing Employment for Individuals with IDD
Download full brief here or read on for summary. To synthesize our findings to date, the ThinkWork team at ICI developed 3 draft papers that captured the core themes from our RRTC on Advancing Employment for Individuals with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities (IDD). We asked experts in the field to weigh in on these papers, and then broadly disseminated the papers to multiple audiences.