Improving VR Outcomes for Out-of-School Youth Involved in the Justice and/or Foster Care Systems

A brief produced from this work, Job Training for Justice-Impacted New Yorkers with Disabilities: Interagency Coordination between Corrections and Vocational Rehabilitation, is available.

• Explore issues of population identification, outreach, and service delivery from both practitioners’ and youths’ perspectives.
• Determine VR practitioners’ utilization of evidence-based, culturally appropriate interagency approaches towards identification, outreach, and service for these populations.
• Increase understanding of the experiences of system-involved out-of-school youth with disabilities in accessing and benefiting from VR services
• Identify effective approaches for connecting out-of-school youth, and their families, with VR services to improve employment outcomes.

Outputs from this grant included a practitioner-oriented toolkit and CRCC-accredited webinar trainings for practitioners that serve these populations across diverse youth-serving agencies. These outputs brought together evidence from three primary research activities:

• Focus groups and interviews with out-of-school youth and their families as well as with VR and other service professionals (e.g., justice and foster care personnel)
• A follow-up survey to obtain quantitative data about VR experiences across these four types of stakeholders
• Secondary data analysis of the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA-911) data set to identify trends and promising practices for increasing employment outcomes for systems-involved populations.

Work on this grant was completed in Fall of 2024. YTI is continuing its work in this area with a specific emphasis on New York and employer/business perspectives, through recently awarded funding from Cornell ILR’s Center for Applied Research on Work (CAROW) WorkABILITY Incubator.

For more about these and other YTI projects centering on justice-impacted youth and adults with disabilities, go to the Y-Reconnects website.