Joshua Rubin

December 18, 2009

Chairman Rivera, members of the committee, good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today on this critically important subject. My name is Joshua Rubin. I am the Director of Policy and Planning for the YAI Network.

YAI comprises seven not-for-profit agencies serving over 20,000 people with intellectual, developmental and other disabilities through 450 community-based programs. Our 5,500 dedicated and highly trained staff provide services including early intervention, primary and specialty healthcare, day services, residential, job training, recreational, respite, home health, family support, camping, travel and many others in all five boroughs of New York City, Long Island, the Hudson River valley, northern New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

I appreciate very much that you have chosen to hold this hearing today on the status and effectiveness of employment programs administered by OMH and OMRDD because we believe that work is one of life’s central activities.

Work helps us define ourselves, establish our identity and carve out our role in our community. Work serves as a framework for our self-respect and as a foundation for our economic wellbeing. It provides us with a proper outlet for our creative energy.

Work becomes such an inextricable part of who we are that even the language we use to talk about it indicates its essential quality. We don’t say “I work as a lawyer,” or “I spend my days providing healthcare services.” We say “I am a lawyer,” or “I am a doctor.” We are what we do, and in turn the work we do tells us what we value and how we are valued.

Indeed, work is so fundamental to the human condition that the bible identifies it as the reason humankind were invited into the Garden of Eden. “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15, New International Translation, 1984). 

Work also provides our lives with structure and rhythm. Sociologist William Julius Wilson put it eloquently, “In the absence of regular employment, a person lacks not only a place in which to work and the receipt of regular income but also a coherent organization of the present – that is a concrete system of expectations and goals.  Regular employment provides the anchor for the spatial and temporal aspects of daily life.  It determines where you are going to be and when you are going to be there.  In the absence of regular employment, life, including family life, becomes less coherent” (William Julius Wilson, “Jobless Poverty: A New Form of Social Dislocation in the Inner-City Ghetto,” in A Nation Divided: Diversity, Inequality and Community in American Society, edited by Phyllis Moen, Donna Dempster-McClain and Henry A. Walker, pp. 133-145, 149-50, Cornell University Press, 1999).
 

For a person with a mental illness or a developmental disability, work can take on even greater importance. Many people with disabilities are told repeatedly throughout their lives about what they cannot do and how they need to rely on others. They are forced to fight to be seen as people, and not just as the sum of their conditions. Their identity, from a very early age, is built for them around their deficits, not their strengths.

Before the movement to deinstitutionalize, people with disabilities were expected to be not just unproductive, but counter-productive. They were seen as nothing more than drains on public resources, and were socialized as such. When we, as a society, finally realized the shamefulness of throwing away lives in this way, we began the steady process of moving people from institutionalization – and the infantilization that goes with it – toward lives of independence, inclusion, individuality and productivity.

It is to our great credit that New York has led a national movement to celebrate the potential and the shared humanity of our citizens with disabilities and disabling illnesses. In the decades since the deinstitutionalization movement began, we have made exceptional progress in moving our state and our society towards a greater understanding of how to make the vision of community living into a reality.

Work is the final frontier of that extraordinary undertaking. Work is the last necessary step to ensuring that people with disabilities are full members of their communities, contributing to society and building lives of meaning and value. For people with disabilities, the opportunity to work gives life new meaning and dimension as they apply their skills, earn a paycheck and receive praise for a job well done.

For all of their differences, people served by OMH and OMRDD are remarkably consistent in what they tell us they want. Three things consistently rise to the top of surveys: a safe, comfortable place to live, someone to share their time with and something meaningful to do. None of this should come as a surprise. I feel safe in saying that everyone in this room wants those same three things.

At YAI Network we structure all of our programs around a core set of values. Among those values is a resolve that every person, no matter how profound their disability, has the capacity for productivity. Let me be clear, that does not mean that we believe everybody can have a paid, competitive job; for some that will remain a goal out of reach. But we do believe that everyone can fruitfully contribute to society.

We have, through contracts with both OMRDD and OMH, structured our service system to facilitate the productive capacity of each and every person we serve. For people with profound disabilities, we create volunteer opportunities through our day habilitation and prevocational programs. Although some of this work is unpaid, it is nonetheless extremely valuable. In 2008 the 1,100 consumers in our day services system provided nearly 250,000 hours of volunteer labor to not-for-profit organizations throughout the New York City metropolitan area. Soup kitchens, nursing homes, hospitals, animal shelters and parks are just some of the places where volunteer workers helped organizations serve their communities.

Our employment initiatives, run by YAI/National Institute for People with Disabilities, have created over 800 full and part time paid job placements over the last four years. We currently support nearly 350 people in competitive jobs. That’s 350 people who know the satisfaction of a hard day's work, the self-respect that comes from achievement and the sublime joy of contributing to their household’s finances by bringing home a paycheck.

I’d like to share one story of a consumer who we have helped to find and maintain a job because I think it is illustrative of the numerous secondary benefits of the types of programs about which we are talking today. Alyssa G. has an intellectual disability and a serious and persistent mental illness. A decade ago when she entered our Brooklyn Supported Work and Training program she had never been outside the borough of Brooklyn. She was shy, uncomfortable in her skin and tragically trapped by her disabilities.

Through a painstaking process her counselors and job coaches worked to bring her out of her shell, and help her identify the strengths residing within her. When we were able to match her with an opportunity at a major Wall Street firm as an administrative clerk she took advantage of the opportunity and aced her interview. Slowly, Alyssa’s world began to expand, beginning with her daily commute to a place she had only seen on television, Manhattan. Ten years later Alyssa’s horizons have expanded so much that she was able to fly, on her own, to Arizona to share the joy of a family member’s wedding. The impact of the job on her life and her perspective has been nothing short of transformative.

But it’s not just her life that has been changed. Alyssa has become a part of the corporate fabric. She is a one woman destigmatization program. Every day she shows her coworkers what people with disabilities can do with the right support. We all remember Chris Burke from Life Goes On and Benny from LA Law. They helped introduce America to the idea that people with disabilities can be productive members of society. But Alyssa, and the other people we serve are real, and they’re at work every day. They are changing attitudes, perspectives and beliefs.

And her employer – a large multinational corporation – has seen that hiring people with disabilities isn’t charity; it’s a good business decision. They have a loyal, dedicated, enthusiastic employee who brings positive energy and community spirit to her workplace. Because of her employment, her company has become a major corporate supporter of programs serving people with disabilities.

The impact on Alyssa’s family has been similarly amazing. Her mother has seen her daughter accomplish things that she was repeatedly told Alyssa would never achieve. And a few years ago when her company gave all their staff stock for the holidays, Alyssa’s family suddenly found itself in possession of something else it had never had – wealth. The idea of owning stock was so foreign to her mom that Mrs. G refused the stock, saying, “We’re not the kind of people who own stock.” Before her daughter went to work, that may have been true, but now they are very much the kind of people who own stock.

In addition, YAI Network member The Corporate Source creates jobs for people with disabilities through outsourcing arrangements with government and the private sector. Through its contracts in building maintenance, switchboard, vehicle maintenance and food service, The Corporate Source provides 350 people with disabilities with well-paying, steady jobs that come with comprehensive benefits. The Corporate Source provides vital services to the United States government, and gives US taxpayers tremendous value for their tax dollars in facilities ranging from the VA Medical Center in Manhattan to the Alphonse D’Amato Courthouse in Islip to the US Coast Guard base in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.

And again, I have to stress that employing people with disabilities is simply good business. Twelve years ago Levy Restaurants, which provides the food services at the US Open, had a problem. They could recruit part time workers for the two week tennis tournament without trouble. But by the time the finals – a showcase for the world – rolled around, many of the workers had disappeared. Levy Restaurants turned to The Corporate Source for employees who would be dedicated enough to stick it out through the whole tournament.

Eleven years later, the food court at the US Open is still maintained by The Corporate Source. Many of the employees are working for pay for the first time ever, taking the skills they have learned in their OMRDD and OMH funded employment programs and putting them to use at one of New York’s signature events. Indeed, it’s such a powerful experience for many that even after they find full time jobs, they take a two week vacation so that they can go back to work at the Open.

I hope these anecdotes have given you some sense of the powerful impact of the employment programs funded through OMRDD and OMH. But I’m aware that data are not the plural of anecdote so I’d like to finish up by sharing a statistic with you. In 2008, people supported through YAI’s Employment Initiatives and employed by The Corporate Source earned over six million dollars. That’s a lot of money.

And from the perspective of government, that six million dollars translates into a lot more money. Not only is it six million dollars for which they didn’t need to rely on the government, it’s also six million dollars on which they paid taxes. In addition, since so many of the jobs they did to earn this money came with health benefits, they also saved the government substantial amounts of Medicaid money.

I know that these are challenging times for New York State’s economy and budget and that in these times our representatives in Albany are being forced to make difficult decisions about how to reduce expenditures. When you are making these decisions, I urge you to remember that funding for employment services in OMRDD and OMH is not an expenditure; it is an investment. With the right support, people with disabilities can be valuable, valued and productive members of our community.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning. I am happy to answer any questions the members of the committee may have.

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