Self Employment: the Spirit of Individual Enterprise, Part I

About This Episode Sue Babin founded and runs a self-employment business incubator called “Self Employment: the Spirit of Individual Enterprise” in the state of Rhode Island. In this two-part interview, she goes over all aspects of the program: how the idea came to her, how she started the program, how she secured funding and transformed a pilot into a permanent program, how she produced customized training materials for people with disabilities on running your small business, marketing, the markers of success, case studies of people with disabilities who have created successful businesses for themselves and her advice on how to start such a program in your state. Part two in this series can be found here (https://aoddisabilityemploymenttacent...) . Presenters Sue Babin has been working in the field of developmental disabilities for 40+ years. She was the administrator of the Office of Quality Assurance for the State Division of Developmental Disabilities (DDD) for 30 years advocating for the human rights of people with disabilities and overseeing investigations on abuse, neglect and mistreatment; administrator for supported employment statewide grants; program manager for Rhode Island’s Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) waiver; and responsible for designing and implementing monitoring and quality improvement programs for DD community agencies. For the last 10 years she has been a Special Projects Coordinator for the Rhode Island Developmental Disabilities Council (RIDDC), staff to the Systems Advocacy Committee (SAC), and founder and Project Director for Rhode Island’s Self-Employment Business Incubator Project since 2018. Sue has a Masters Degree in Public Administration (MPA), is a graduate of Leadership Rhode Island’s Omnicron Class, and was a recipient in 2021 for Providence Business News (PBN’s) annual “Rhode Island Leaders and Achievers” Awards. Donald Taylor has been with TASH since 2014, where he is the Manager of Membership & Communications, responsible for membership and chapters, data systems and communication, and collaborates closely with other staff to make sure TASH systems support their work. Donald comes from a background of data systems, operations and business analysis, going back to the 1990s. Donald came to the world of disability while pursuing a degree in history. The history profession is deeply interested in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and fellow students studying biomedical systems of oppression inspired in him the desire to make a contribution to this aspect of social justice. Transcript Announcer: You’re listening to the AoD Disability Employment Technical Assistance Center podcast, where we learn from people who are working to improve competitive integrated employment and economic outcomes for people with disabilities. This is part one of our two-part interview with Sue Babin, the Special Projects Director with the Rhode Island Developmental Disabilities Council, where she founded and runs the program, Self Employment: the Spirit of Individual Enterprise. We go deep into the nuts-and-bolts of how to run a self-employment program and the value of self-employment for people with disabilities. [music plays] Donald Taylor: Sue Babin, welcome to the DETAC Podcast. Please introduce yourself for listeners. Sue Babin: Okay. Hello everyone. My name is Sue Babin. I work for the Rhode Island Developmental Disabilities Council, and I’m also the state Director for Rhode Island’s Self-Employment Project, which is called Self-Employment: the Spirit of Individual Enterprise. I’ve been here at the Council for about 12 years. And prior to that I worked for the State Office of Developmental Disabilities. I was the waiver manager and also oversaw the Office of Quality Assurance and Special Projects, and under special projects was employment. Donald Taylor: And tell us about your program, Self-Employment: The Spirit of Individual Enterprise, and your other work on self-employment. Sue Babin: Okay. So back in around 2017, I had a couple of different families approach me at the DD Council because their family members were having a really difficult time finding employment. They were going on interviews, filling out applications and not getting callbacks. And it was getting really frustrating for the folks with disabilities to not be able to obtain a job when they really wanted employment. And so one of the family members Claudia Lowe, who at the time happened to also be the director of the Rhode Island Down Syndrome Society, her daughter had a real big interest in music and she had over a thousand songs in her computer and wanted to be a DJ. And so her mom said, well, how can we help her to start this business up? She’s gonna need some startup money and she’s gonna need to know some things about business. So they had approached the state Division of Developmental Di...