JANUARY, 2024: In 2021, Community Options Enterprises (COE) received a two-year, $100,000 grant from Impact100 Garden State to support COE’s work helping New Jersey residents with disabilities to find jobs.
The Impact grant enabled COE to expand an existing program and offer improved support to a greater number of people. The most tangible change COE made using the Impact grant involved staffing. “This grant allowed us to hire a full-time staff person to develop new jobs and business contacts in the community,” says Dina Casalaspro, Managing Director. “It has been a huge success!”
A dedicated job developer
Before 2021, one group of professionals was responsible for a range of duties: coaching clients to prepare them for the labor force, developing job opportunities, and forging community partnerships.
Recognizing that these tasks require different skills, COE devoted a significant portion of their grant funds to hiring and training someone to focus on job and community development so the organization’s existing staff could devote more time to working with clients. Says Casalaspro, “This position has continued to allow our coaches to spend the much-needed time out in the community with the caseloads they were assigned and providing the job coaching services needed.”
Success by the numbers
At the end of the two-year grant period, COE reported the following accomplishments:
- placed 41 northern New Jersey residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities in competitive and integrated employment;
- generated 99 partnerships with employers or sites willing to commit to hiring an individual with a disability or to host work sampling, work experience, or volunteer opportunities so clients disability or to host work sampling, work experience, or volunteer opportunities so clients could build resumes and experience;
- identified 59 employers that did not currently have open positions, but that are open to taking applications;
- created a catalog of partner employers that spans 20 municipalities and a range of industries;
- established 30 referral partnerships across 22 municipalities for a variety of services for people with disabilities; and
- earned positive reviews from clients in post-program surveys.
Today, COE reports that they continue to have a job developer building relationships in northern New Jersey, now funded by other grants. With this augmented staffing, the COE program became so successful that the New Jersey Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services asked COE to assume responsibility for additional clients who had been assigned to other agencies that were not as effective.
See Dina Casalaspro explain the importance of the job developer position in this video from the February 2022 I Love Impact event.
To learn more about COE, visit their website.