Employment Services - Project Search
A new program at Children’s Hospital offers adults with disabilities job training and hope.
written and photographed BY GARY TURCHIN
Project SEARCH intern Lisa, 43, spent 20 years working at a fast food franchise. When a new owner took over, all the adults with disabilities were let go.
It still smarts.
“I know it’s against the law,” Lisa said, “but people with disabilities are discriminated against.”
Lisa came to Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland’s Project SEARCH looking for another, hopefully better, job. She’s interning at Materials Management, visiting stockrooms all over the hospital, organizing them and removing expired products, “before,” she said assertively, “the Joint Commission inspection finds them.”
She means it.
Lisa joins 11 other interns—Christine,
Derrick, John, David, Jessica, Ryan, Peter,
Mariana, Jeff, Leah and Hao—at Project
SEARCH, a new job-training program for
adults with cognitive disabilities that
opened at Children’s Hospital in
September 2008.
But the project is new only to Children’s; it comes with a renowned pedigree. Erin Riehle, RN, MSN, founded the program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital a dozen years ago. She has been so successful at employing adults with disabilities and increasing the range of jobs that are open to them, that it has been replicated at more than 70 sites nationally. Children’s is one of the first sites in Northern California.
The need for Project SEARCH, and programs like it, is obvious: The unemployment rate for adults with disabilities approaches 70 percent; and job choices for those who do work are very limited.