Looking ahead to Service Design

July 16, 2018

By Armando Camacho, President & CEO

Employment innovations – we have a number of new initiatives underway relating to our Service Design efforts and moving people to competitive, integrated employment. At our Penn Station location in Bloomington, we’re working to prepare people for their next employment step and to align with future changes in service rates. This involves creating more integrated work environments and offering new training opportunities to persons served.

For example, we’ve paired a person served with a warehouse associate, and we’ve helped transition two persons served into our returns department where they are learning more advanced skills. One of the individuals, Kelley, is proud to be working more independently and doing a job formerly done by staff. Her multi-step job involves reading job instructions, repackaging and labeling returns, and signing off when complete. “It feels really good,” she said. “The hard work paid off.”

New revenue streams – one of our strategic pillars at Opportunity Partners is revenue diversification. We’ve launched a new initiative at Opportunity Partners where people can access our job development services via private pay. This is an innovative idea to diversify our revenue by expanding our services to a wider audience. For a fee of $50/hour, we can work with any job seeker (with or without disabilities). There are no eligibility requirements. So if you know anyone looking for a job, feel free to share information about Opportunity Partners and how we can help. You can learn more at opportunities.org. We’ll be eager to share some success stories with you as this program develops.

Workforce challenges – the workforce shortage in the disability services industry remains concerning. Our hiring of a full-time recruiter in our Human Resources department in early 2017 has been successful in bringing new people on board, but challenges remain at Opportunity Partners, throughout our field and at many more industries. If you know anyone who would be a good fit to join the staff of Opportunity Partners, please refer them to our job openings.

Thank you for your support as we move forward with our mission to advance the quality of life for people with disabilities, and watch for more updates like this to come in the future.