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that the backlog of Ticket holders has diminished; most have developed IWPs and are
currently receiving services.
C. PRIOR RELATED EXPERIENCE OF ORGANIZATIONS AND STAFF
A major goal of the Ticket Act was to induce new providers to begin serving disability
beneficiaries, perhaps giving them entrée to services they previously could not easily access.
The case-study ENs encompassed diversity on this dimension—some were newly created,
others had been in existence but were not necessarily working with SSA’s disability
population.
The director of AAA TakeCharge had prior experience, with another organization,
providing employment and placement services for persons with disabilities. However, she
created her company specifically in response to the TTW program.
ABIL is an agency with a long history of services for persons with a variety of
disabilities. ABIL is a Center for Independent Living that provides peer counseling,
independent living skills training, housing, limited vocational preparation, and other services.
ABIL is also the BPAO grantee in Arizona. However, to expand into Ticket operations,
ABIL created a special new division, the Employment Services Division. A unique
characteristic of ABIL is that it is primarily staffed by individuals with disabilities, thus they
are especially adept at understanding what is required to find and maintain employment as
well as establishing credibility with TTW clients.
As noted previously, CCSA is staffed by a husband and wife team and is funded with
contracts through the Wisconsin VR agency, the Veterans Administration, and other state
agencies. The director, a man with a disability, founded the company based on his own
experience and frustrations in finding suitable employment. The organization participated in
SSA’s Alternate Participant program, and experienced substantial difficulty collecting
payments from SSA for services provided under that program. When first interviewed, the
director anticipated encountering similar difficulties collecting payment under TTW and
indicated that he will ensure that TTW participants will never constitute the majority of
CCSA clients.
Though EES has existed since 1982, it is a new entrant into the field of disability
services, drawn to this area by the initiation of TTW. It was a non-profit organization until
1989, when it converted to for-profit status. EES serves a variety of client populations. It
operates three of the five Chicago-area One-Stop Centers and one suburban One-Stop
Center, under contract with two Workforce Investment Boards: a Welfare-to-Work program
and a program for dislocated workers. It also hired two staff members (counselors) with
disability-related backgrounds—one had a background in mental health and the other is an
occupational therapist.
Glick and Glick, like EES, was a pre-existing organization that decided to expand the
scope of its operations into the TTW program. An employment agency operating since
1975, it has roughly 100 employees. Its core business is employment services; specifically, its
clients are employers seeking to hire people whose characteristics would enable them to
V: Case Studies of Eight Experienced TTW Providers