Mission Statement History Board of Directors History Up until the early 70's, most people with developmental disabilities lived in large institutions or with their families, and rarely were considered candidates for employment. In the mid 1970s, New York State was involved in implementing the Willowbrook Consent Decree. People who had been in institutions were now moving into community-based group homes. Still, they spent their daytime hours in segregated, facility-based day programs. And while these programs aimed to help people gain jobs, very few ever moved into real work. To address this problem, staff from the Vera Institute of Justice, a not-for-profit organization established in 1961, partnered with OMRDD (Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disability) to see if Vera's supported work techniques could help people with developmental disabilities move into the workforce. Planners at Vera developed a set of strategies called supported work, which were designed to help people with little or no work history, or success in the work place, become employed. These techniques had been piloted by Vera in the early 70's and had been useful in helping ex-offenders, former substance abusers and other "hard to employ" populations move into the workforce. Established as a Vera project in 1978, Job Path was specifically developed to prepare people with developmental disabilities for real jobs in the mainstream labor market and was the first of its kind in New York State. Job Path started as a small pilot project in 1978, with 10 individuals; 5 people were placed at a job site, then Chemical Bank, now JP Morgan Chase, and 5 people were placed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the end of the ten week pilot, five of those people were hired at their work sites. Since then, we have placed more than 2,000 people in jobs where they work along side people without disabilities. Throughout the 1980s, Job Path played a role in changing federal and state policies, encouraging the use of supported work in New York State and across the country. For the first two years of our operation, we refined our techniques, extending services to slightly different populations -- people with developmental disabilities other than mental retardation, which was primarily the population when we started. We reached out to people with more severe disabilities and developed alternatives to segregated day and residential programs. Today, Job Path has operated a variety of programs which help individuals establish their own homes, find paid and volunteer work and social activities in their neighborhoods, and become part of community life. Vera's practice is to develop model programs, nurture them to stability and then help them launch the project to an independent existence. True to that model, Job Path spun off July 1, 1999 and became an independent not-for-profit. © 2008 JobPath, All rights reserved.   powered by metarhythm