In one of the offices I manage in my program we're sharing a building with a for-profit that does recruitment and placement. My experience in working with employers in that field is that, just like any other employer, they don't have the expertise and awareness to understand the specific needs of a person with a disability.
I want to echo our colleagues here today. The focus was on intellectual disabilities but we're cross-disability. We hear no matter what the disability is that employers need to have greater understanding of what the needs are and what it means to have any type of disability, whether it be mental health, intellectual, or episodic, that type of knowledge.
You're speaking about return on investment and results-based funding, and we absolutely understand that need for accountability when funding is provided. There are some ideas out there of other ways we can measure such as looking at the long term, employment retention, how clients excel in the workforce. The danger with a sole focus on the employment outcomes, which often are very aggressive, is that clients who require greater attention can be left behind.