The Tyde Project - Transitioning Youth with Developmental Disabilities

What is the Issue?

Employment rate for Canadians aged 25 – 64

Persons with no disability 79%
Persons with disabilities 49%
Persons with development disabilities 22%

In Canada, people with all disabilities face barriers and challenges to finding meaningful work and the situation for people with developmental disabilities (self advocates) is worse. Only 22.3% of self advocates reported some kind of employment, and when they did have a job they worked few hours and received lower pay than people who did not have disabilities.

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Self advocates want to work, and research shows that helping young people who are graduating from high school and becoming adults is an important time to promote employment.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) says that people with disabilities have the right to work and governments need to support and promote people with disabilities’ right to work.

What Are We Going to Do About This?

The BC Transitioning Youth with Disabilities and Employment Project – “The TYDE Project”

“The TYDE Project” – is an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral network of partners committed to improving the employment outcomes for transitioning youth ages 14 – 18 with intellectual disabilities or autism in British Columbia through early an intervention targeting youth and their parents/caregivers. Research consistently supports that intervening early when young adolescent girls and boys with developmental disabilities are transitioning from school to adult life translates to positive employment outcomes. Further, research demonstrates that 1) experiences with inclusive education, 2) positive parental expectations for employment and/or post-secondary education, 3) greater levels of self-determination among transitioning youth with developmental disabilities, and, 4) early work experience are predictive of higher employment outcomes. These four domains underpin the TYDE Project. Through this partnership, we will create an interactive online curriculum to increase employment outcomes for youth with developmental disabilities by increasing youth pre-employment skills, increasing youth self-determination, and improving parental/caregiver knowledge and expectations for fostering their youth’s future employment experiences.

TYDE Objectives

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Develop and test The TYDE Transitioning Youth to Employment Tool; an online interactive learning environment designed to enhance employment outcomes for youth with ID or ASD.
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Implement and evaluate two different modalities of delivering the online learning curriculum:
a) online only and b) online with a beginning and closing in-person retreats.
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Integrate the importance of gender and its intersections with other factors such as geography (e.g., urban vs. rural), ethnicity, socio-economic, sexuality etc. in our research and KM activities; further, in acknowledgement of the harmful history (ongoing) and effects of colonization in Canada, we will ensure that we attend to and include Aboriginal youth with ID or ASD and their caregivers.
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Explore how the TYDE Project can be scaled up to a national scale.
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