Disability Futures

Young adults with intellectual disabilities for the most part now live in houses and apartments in the community, not in institutions as they did in years past—a measure of our progress. But far too many spend their days employed in sheltered workshops and activity centers that closely resemble the dayrooms of those old institutions. According to the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston, 80 percent of the 566,188 people served by state intellectual- and developmental-disabilities agencies in 2010 received services in sheltered workshops or segregated nonwork settings. Instead of productive, mainstream jobs with competitive wages, these individuals find that the only work options available to them are largely dead-end jobs that pay less—often far less—than the minimum wage. For some, the sheltered workshop is the best-case scenario—not because they lack the skills to do better, but because our disability policies leave them with nothing even minimally productive to do all day.