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- Did you know?
- Less than 25% of people with disabilities are employed. ESI produces WorkWORLD™ software that helps people with disabilities find employment-based paths to higher net income through the best use of work incentives and benefits.
- About the Employment Support Institute
- The Employment Support Institute (ESI) at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Business was formed in 1989 to combine theoretical and applied knowledge from both business and human service perspectives and disseminate the results in a variety of forms in order to improve the lives of people with disabilities.
ESI uniquely involves faculty and students with expertise and interest in Information Systems, Marketing, and Entrepreneurial activities to explore better solutions to the problems people with disabilities face. ESI's efforts demonstrate how collaboration across academic disciplines can help meet community needs.
Over the past two decades, ESI has become nationally known for the development and continuous improvement of innovative decision support technology that simplifies complex benefit and employment policy for people with disabilities. The technology fosters self-determination, informed choice, higher net income, and efficient use of government resources while helping people with disabilities achieve greater self-sufficiency by returning to work or entering the workforce.
Disability benefit, employment, and welfare programs currently interact in complex and/or incompatible ways that often discourage and even frighten beneficiaries from seeking employment and increased earnings. Policy complexity and "incentive incompatibilities" or "perverse incentives" serve as barriers, not only to the employment of individuals with disabilities, but also to the efforts of policy makers who are seeking to improve policies and remove disincentives.
Unfortunately, approximately three-quarters of people with disabilities in America are unemployed. In both good economic times and bad, people with disabilities have fewer opportunities than those without disabilities—a reality that stands in stark contrast to America's ideals of equal opportunity for all. At a time when the workforce is aging, people with disabilities represent a new pool of workers for businesses across the country.
The Employment Support Institute has worked with the Social Security Administration (SSA), state human services agency personnel in eight states, advocacy organizations, and individual software users to develop and continuously improve decision support software to meet these challenging problems.
ESI recently worked with SSA and its contractors to conceptualize and design software calculators for use in the Benefit Offset National Demonstration program. This Congressionally mandated effort tests a proposed new work incentive in the Social Security Disability Insurance program that would eliminate the artificial threshold limit on earnings that serves as a barrier to work return for many people with disabilities, and represents the first significant change in this program in nearly a half-century.
ESI currently produces WorkWORLD™, innovative software for personal computers designed to help people with disabilities, advocates, benefit counselors, and others explore and understand how to best use the work incentives associated with the various Federal and State disability and poverty benefit programs. It automates the computation of benefits, and takes into account the complex interaction of income, benefit programs, and work incentives. Complete information about WorkWORLD is available at http://www.workworld.org/.
ESI also is currently developing a web-based version of WorkWORLD in collaboration with a number of State agencies in Virginia. These include the Department of Rehabilitative Services (DRS), Virginia Board for People with Disabilities (VBPD), Department for the Blind and Vision Impaired (DBVI), Department of Education (DOE), Department of Medical Assistance Services (DMAS), Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS), and the Department of Social Services (DSS). The scheduled launch date is January 2012.
