A Message from your Executive Director, Laura A. Owens, Ph.D.

Welcome to a new year and a new decade!

As many of you know, my experience in this field began as a high school teacher for students with significant disabilities which led to starting an employment agency to assist individuals with disabilities in obtaining and maintaining community employment. When I was hired as a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, I used my experiences with families, individuals with disabilities and business to ground my teaching and guide my research.

When I took on my current role at APSE, I continued to use these experiences to ground my work. But I realized that after almost 25 years in the field, very little had changed. Citizens with disabilities continue to be the last minority group to be assimilated into our society, and they continue to have the highest unemployment and underemployment rates of any minority group in our country. It became clear that this was a call for change.

Change is inevitable, but growth is optional. Over the years we have seen change in our field – but this change has not led to growth. According to Saul Alinksy in his book Rules for Radicals (1971), change means movement and movement means friction. We may not all agree with how change progresses, but we do agree that change needs to happen. We cannot continue going down the same path – we need to create a new path. What we need is a unified movement toward Employment First.

APSE must anchor our efforts in our core principles – focusing on Employment First – integrated, community employment with competitive wages and benefits as the desired outcome for citizens with disabilities. We will continue to face many challenges as we move forward, but that should not deter APSE members from working toward breaking down the barriers that still exclude citizens with disabilities from the workplace and deprive them of true equality of opportunity and interdependence. We must work together to change our way of doing business.

The APSE annual conference in Atlanta, GA (June 8-10, 2010) will have more opportunities for networking and open dialogue to help us change our way of doing business. We will be providing other trainings, webinars, and articles to provide individuals with information to guide them during this time of change. In Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, he argues that the Tipping Point concept is useful in understanding how huge often unexpected social change takes place. I believe 2010 can be our Tipping Point – that citizens with disabilities – particularly citizens with significant disabilities will be employed in local businesses, working alongside co-workers without disabilities, making minimum wage or better with benefits available to all employees.

Our unified voice as APSE members – who believe in Employment First – must be unyielding. Our time is now – as the famous Jewish religious leader Hillel reminds us, “If not us, who? If not now, when?