The Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at the University of Massachusetts Boston will lead the Center on Scaling Up Progressive Employment (PE). In partnership with Mathematica Policy Research and the Disability Policy Consortium, and with support from public vocational rehabilitation and workforce partners in nine states, the goal of the Center on Scaling Up Progressive Employment is to further build the evidence base for the PE model as an intervention that improves competitive integrated employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities and meets the needs of businesses in the community. Center activities are driven by three primary objectives: 1) Strengthen the existing evidence of effectiveness of the PE model on improving dual-customer outcomes (jobseeker competitive integrated employment outcomes and business practices); 2) Develop evidence of the feasibility of the PE model to both scale up and scale out beyond the VR system and as a community-level intervention; and 3) Increase awareness and build capacity for PE implementation in 15-20 new sites through knowledge translation, training, technical assistance, and dissemination. Linking research activities to the four core PE model components of services to jobseekers, business engagement, team approach, and strategies to mitigate risk, we propose a research agenda designed to strengthen the evidence base for PE by examining the: a) impact on employment outcomes at the individual jobseeker level with a multi-site quantitative evaluation; b) experience of businesses within the local labor market using field based real-time data collection, c) replicability of PE at the cross-systems level with a modified Delphi study; and d) effect of the PE team as a community level intervention using a community conversations method of qualitative inquiry.
