Self Employment: the Spirit of Individual Enterprise, Part II

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. This is part two of this two-part interview. Part one 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 two 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] Sue Babin: Yeah. I can talk about some lessons that I learned early on. When I mentioned that that family, a couple of families had approached me I’ve always had some pretty good research skills and I had been in touch with Griffin Hammis and I knew a bunch of people from Griffin Hammis. And so I reached out to them initially and I asked, who are the states that are doing anything in the area of self-employment? And I also Googled self-employment and found some stuff on the small business administration and a few other national site site sites that had listed a couple of states. And I contacted them. So I talked to people over the telephone. I didn’t just look at what they had, but I actually called them and said, Hey, can you talk to me? And I asked a question that you asked, which is, what are the things that you would’ve done differently? What did you learn that from running this project that you didn’t have up and running? And what the number one thing that people said is it’s not so much about helping people to learn the business development skills as it is figuring out how to provide them with the ongoing support that they need from the purchase of materials to the selling platforms, to the assistance in thinking creatively about marketing and changing your marketing strategy, depending upon the needs of your customers. And then how do you provide people with the individualized support that they might need through staff or through a specific business expertise that they might have. And so, as I had said, we found that people that had self-directed supports had the most flexibility because they could hi...