Eliminating barriers - Canadian Multicultural Disability Centre

Best practices and strategies for eliminating barriers experienced by persons with disabilities, particularly persons with disabilities from ethno-racial backgrounds, in the areas of employment, education and health care services.

Goals And Objectives

The objectives Of this program are:

provision of employment services to unemployed or underemployed persons with disabilities from ethnocultural communities.

Prepare these unemployed, disabled, ethnocultural communities to find and keep employment or become self-employed.

Organizing content and knowledge for needs assessment, service delivery that accommodate persons with disabilities of ethnocultural background.

Design individualized assessment plans based on realistic and practical need. Such methods are intended to enhance the individual’s capacity to network and explore avenues for employment and educational opportunities. Providing appropriate resource allocations to meet specific participant’s expectations and achievable goals.

Put together an awareness program highlighting the unique needs of youth with disabilities of ethnocultural background and developing compensatory strategies for them to utilize to overcome discrimination, which emanates from double jeopardy of being a member of both racial minority and disability communities.

Promotes professionalism within the CAP site, which is dynamic, purposeful, relevant and responsive to the unique needs of all participants regardless of their racial, religious, gender or linguistic background.

Project Activities

To accomplish the above-identified objectives The Canadian Multicultural Disability Centre (INC) conduct employment needs assessment, to identify the participants’ prerequisite skills using the Environmental Inventory Process. The reason is that persons with disabilities from ethnocultural communities often lack the critical language to function effectively at workplaces. The environmental inventory is an alternative assessment process for persons with disabilities from ethnocultural communities. Sometimes this is referred to as community-referenced assessment. The purpose of this type of evaluation is to determine what adaptations or supports are needed to increase the participation of these disabled persons in the workplace as well as community environments

The environmental inventory process involves asking yourself three questions:

What does a participant who does not have a disability and is not a member of the visible minority do in this environment?

What do a participant who has a disability and a member of the visible minority do in this environment? What is the discrepancy?

What types of supports and or adaptations can be put in place to increase the participation level or independence of the participant who has a disability and a member of the visible minority?

The above-identified questions are used to establish the Probes of basic job performance skills.