Many Hands Make Employment Work: Collaborations Between VR Agencies and Workforce Development Boards to Provide Work-Based Learning Experiences

This report presents two examples of collaborations between state vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies and local workforce development boards to deliver programs that provide work-based learning experiences (WBLEs) to students with disabilities. We emphasize VR agencies and workforce development boards because they are the primary providers of WBLEs for youth. The first example, Texas’s Summer Earn and Learn (SEAL) program, offers summer WBLEs through a partnership between the Texas Workforce Commission, the VR agency, and 28 workforce development boards. The second example, the Promoting Readiness of Minors in Supplemental Security Income (PROMISE) project in Arkansas, is a model demonstration project for youth that combined resources from the VR agency and workforce development boards to offer summer work experiences to youth as part of a broader set of services. We also present key features of the two programs in a framework developed for policymakers to help them select, develop, and adapt initiatives for their contexts (Honeycutt et al. 2018b).