The second dimension is assisting, insisting and supporting people with disabilities and their communities to use what they have. Often this will mean using what they have in combination with public funds, but it may also mean using only what is at hand within the community itself. This means that individuals and families reach out to generic community resources with the support they have. It means supporting employers to make jobs available to people with the most challenging needs, and yet again, demonstrate that sheltered and congregated settings are not needed. It means supporting families to using some of their wealth to invest in home ownership for their adult children with disabilities.
There are pockets of communities that are actually embracing the idea that all people matter, that all people are important, and that people should be able to take the funding that is allotted to them through public dollars and then private money which they earn through employment or small businesses, money that is their income, their own, and use that to purchase things that they want, a life that they want based on generic community opportunities and support.
Pat Carver, Center for Self Determination
The places to look for the most dramatic action are strange ones. In Canada, the First Nations communities. Against all odds, they've done stuff that nobody thought possible. In the largest slum in the world in Mombay, there is likely the most impressive education inclusion at the preschool level that I've ever seen, and doing its work with almost no money These kinds of things are happening everywhere. They are not well supported by policy. People just take their lives in their own hands and just go for it.
Jack Pearpoint, Inclusion Press
I think one of the biggest undertakings… is to look at systems other than government to support people to live the way they want to live.
Rebecca Rooker, Parent and Leader of the MN System Redesign Committee
We have just been awarded, as one of the five projects in the country funded by the Department of Labor, to take the lead on what is now being called "customized employment". Our goal is to successfully assist at least twelve of those people to get into part time competitive employment. Each one of the job development opportunities will probably take, based on the literature, between 50 and 100 contacts to create the one potential job carve, job shape, employer match, etc.
Allan Bergman, Anixter Center, Chicago