The Rural Illinois Customized Employment Sustainability Project (RICES)
Health & Disability Advocates, Marc Gold & Associates, Griffin-Hammis Associates
The Rural Illinois Customized Employment Sustainability Project (RICES) builds lasting capacity throughout the state’s heartland by creating capacity for leveraging generic community resources, multiple funding braids, cooperative relationships, and inventive service delivery through the demonstration and stabilization of both wage and self-employment in 8 cornerstone communities.
The most effective means of propelling systems change is by demonstrating what is possible; historically in fact, it is about the only means. RICES will illustrate what is possible on several levels by improving and regenerating existing infrastructure (e.g. Medicaid Waiver services, job development approaches, VR assessment and self employment policy, Small Business Development Center parameters). The project will accomplish this by:
Selecting 8 18 month-duration Developmental Disability development sites through a competitive request for proposals over the three-year term of this project;
Incentivising participation by partially providing for a “Quick-Launch” fund for leveraging resources used in business financing and resource ownership;
Performing comprehensive Resource Mapping in each community to identify key resources and begin the process of building intermediary alliances;
Convening stakeholder groups/Social Capital Conclaves in each site that foment partnerships across systems to create communities of economic cooperation;
Recruiting 4 individuals with significant disabilities per site per 18 Month Phase (16 individuals per Phase) with 32 people receiving Customized Employment after 3 years;
Training a cadre of rehabilitation personnel, self-advocates, and families in the key CE functions and processes, including wage and self-employment;
Providing on-site and distance technical consultation in collaboration with existing Illinois resources regarding public benefits (SSA, PASS, PESS, IDAs, et al.), assessment (Discovery), multiple funding sources, business planning, customized job development, transition from school to adulthood, etc.;
Providing TA and Mentoring to local teams supporting change in practice across agencies, partners, intermediaries, and communities.
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