Twelve Percent Is Not Employment First

I went to DC’s fifth Employment First Summit because Edward Dana invited me. I expected a conversation about disability and jobs. What I found was a much larger story about support, policy, technology, careers, and the distance between saying employment should come first and making that promise real in somebody’s life.

Washington, DC | October 7, 2026

I came to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library that morning because Edward Dana, a DC disability rights advocate, invited me into the room.

That detail matters to this story.

Before a microphone was turned on or a statistic appeared in a presentation, Edward was already helping me understand how many people and systems can surround one person trying to work. Service coordinators. Direct support professionals. Advocates. Attorneys. Providers. Employers. Schools. Government agencies. Families. People helping a young adult transition out of high school. People helping someone keep a job after they are hired. People thinking about benefits, transportation, technology, accommodations, housing, and the many things that can determine whether getting a job is even realistic.

One word, employment, can touch all of them.

The DC Developmental Disabilities Council convenes the Employment First Planning Committee, which plans the Employment First Summit, with the DC Department on Disability Services among its collaborators. Kevin Wright, chairperson of the Employment First Planning Committee, was part of the leadership behind the work and would later introduce one of the simplest tools of the day, a worksheet that ended up changing the way I understood almost everything that followed.

The summit theme was “Creating Opportunities: Connecting Talent to Careers of Today and Tomorrow.”

The room reflected serious work. Realtime captions were visible. Sign-language interpretation was present. Government officials, disability advocates, providers, job seekers, professionals, and people with lived experience were all moving through the same space.

I had the program in front of me. There were sessions about careers, networking, employment support, technology, and understanding the job market. Everything made sense on paper.

But as I sat there listening, I started thinking about what was not on the paper.

What happens when the policy sounds better than the outcome?

What happens after somebody gets the job?

What happens when technology that promises efficiency begins deciding who even gets seen?

And what happens when we talk about independence as though the rest of us are somehow moving through life without support?

Those became the questions I carried through the day.

Then Andrew Reese, Director of the DC Department on Disability Services, put a number into the room.

Twelve percent.

According to the National Core Indicators data Reese was citing that morning, only 12 percent of the people supported through DC’s Developmental Disabilities Administration were employed.

He stopped on the number.

“Twelve percent?”

He did not try to make it more comfortable.

That mattered.

There are moments when leadership means standing in front of a room and describing progress. There are other moments when leadership means being willing to name the distance still left to travel.

Reese said, in substance, that if DC calls itself an Employment First jurisdiction, 12 percent is not what Employment First should look like.

I wrote that down.

Because DC has officially embraced Employment First since 2012, with the principle that competitive integrated employment should be the first and preferred option for people with disabilities receiving publicly funded services. The District reaffirmed that commitment in 2022. The DD Council’s Employment First page lays out that history and the current network of agencies and advocates involved.

The Distance Between Promise and Outcome

Fourteen years is long enough for an idea to become part of the language of government.

It is also long enough to ask whether the language has become somebody’s life.

After the summit, I went back to the data.

The latest published National Core Indicators–Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 2024–25 employment report shows that 17 percent of respondents across participating state IDD systems had a paid community job. For the District of Columbia, the published figure was 11 percent among 374 respondents.

Reese said 12 percent in the room; the published report shows 11 percent for that reporting cycle. Those numbers are not necessarily contradictory because agency figures and survey periods can differ, but they point in the same direction.

And the broader disability employment picture is also difficult to ignore. The U.S. Department of Labor’s disability employment statistics show that in September 2026, the employment-population ratio for working-age people with disabilities, ages 16 to 64, was 40.3 percent, compared with 75.0 percent for people without disabilities. The unemployment rate was 7.8 percent for working-age people with disabilities and 3.9 percent for those without disabilities.

Those federal figures cover disability broadly, while the NCI-IDD data focus on people supported by state intellectual and developmental disability systems. They are not the same population.

But they are telling us the same larger story.

The employment gap is not theoretical.

Government can have the right philosophy.

People inside government can genuinely care.

Agencies can create working groups. Providers can receive training. There can be proclamations, annual summits, strategic plans, partnerships, grants, reports, task forces, advisory groups, and years of meetings.

All of those things can matter.

And still, 12 percent can sit in the middle of the room.

A policy can be good and the outcome can still be inadequate.

Acknowledging that does not erase progress.

It asks whether the progress has reached enough people.

Reese also talked about his own professional identity. He is an attorney. He is a social worker. Those identities have become part of how he understands himself.

That made me think about how differently we sometimes speak about employment when disability enters the conversation.

For most of us, a career is allowed to be complicated.

Your first job can be terrible. You can quit. You can change industries. You can discover you are good at something you do not enjoy. You can fail. You can start again. You can want a promotion. You can become ambitious. You can decide you no longer want what you once thought you wanted.

We understand that a career is a life unfolding.

But when we talk about disability employment, sometimes the question becomes much smaller.

Did the person get a job?

The placement becomes the victory.

That is not enough.

Did they stay? Were they paid fairly? Were they given enough hours? Could they advance? Could they move into another profession? Were they offered training? Could they leave a bad employer and reasonably believe another opportunity existed? Were they treated as a worker with a future, or as somebody’s successful disability-program outcome?

A job placement is an event.

A career is a life.

That distinction is also why the District’s State as a Model Employer work matters. The idea is that government should not only encourage other employers to recruit, retain, accommodate, and advance people with disabilities; government should be willing to model those practices itself. DC’s current 2025–2027 Olmstead Community Integration Plan places employment and State as a Model Employer inside the District’s broader community-integration work.

If government asks employers to see disability as talent, government has to be willing to examine its own hiring doors too.

Everybody Has Support

Then Kevin Wright asked us to look at the Integrated Supports Star included in our summit materials.

It looked simple.

Personal strengths and assets.

Technology.

Relationships.

Community-based resources.

Eligibility-specific supports.

Then Kevin began explaining it through his own life.

His phone is a support. It helps him manage his work, calendar, events, email, and the things he needs to remember.

His twin brother, Keith, is support.

Community is support.

Government services can be support.

Technology can be support.

And while he was speaking, I stopped seeing a disability worksheet.

I started seeing ordinary life.

Because everybody is supported.

Some of us simply have the privilege of not having our support written down in a service plan.

If your parents help you pay rent, you are supported.

If your spouse carries the health insurance, you are supported.

If an assistant organizes your schedule, you are supported.

If your employer buys your computer, pays for training, provides transportation benefits, and gives you paid leave, you are supported.

If you own a business and rely on an accountant, lawyer, staff, technology platforms, consultants, and investors, you are surrounded by support.

If your car breaks down and somebody comes to pick you up, you were supported.

If you have enough money to make a problem disappear by paying someone else to solve it, money became your support.

But when a disabled person needs assistive technology, transportation assistance, a job coach, benefits counseling, communication support, or an accommodation, suddenly support can be treated as evidence that the person is less independent.

I think we have that backwards.

Independence does not have to mean doing everything alone.

It can mean having enough control over your own life to know what you need, make decisions about it, and get the support without surrendering your dignity.

A person also does not stop needing support the day they receive an offer letter.

A job does not solve transportation. It does not automatically make workplace software accessible. It does not guarantee a supervisor understands accommodations. It does not make benefits easier to navigate when income changes. It does not solve housing instability. It does not create a professional network. It does not guarantee advancement.

Getting hired is one moment.

Employment is an ecosystem.

That is why self-advocacy belongs inside this story too. Project ACTION! is the District’s self-advocacy coalition of adults with developmental disabilities. Quality Trust for Individuals with Disabilities partners with the coalition and serves as its fiscal agent. Quality Trust is led by CEO Shawn Ullman, a Georgetown University Law Center graduate.

Why does that belong in an employment story?

Because people with disabilities cannot simply be the recipients of policy.

They have to help shape it.

Policy Has to Reach the Person

Reese announced that DDS would return to its person-centered organizational work on October 29 at 2:00 PM, with a renewed focus on employment.

I do not want that next phase reduced to artificial intelligence.

The broader work is about employment initiative work groups centered around policy innovation and stronger supports for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The DD Council already identifies the DDS Person-Centered Organization Employment Innovations Group as part of the District’s Employment First infrastructure.

AI belongs inside that conversation because technology is changing employment.

But AI is not the whole conversation.

The larger question is whether policy, services, providers, employers, technology, benefits, and support systems can work together well enough for employment to become the first realistic opportunity offered to a person rather than simply the first sentence in a policy document.

That same systems question appears in DC’s participation in the National Expansion of Employment Opportunities Network, or NEON. In 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor selected DC for a third consecutive year as one of seven core jurisdictions in the initiative, alongside Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, New York, and Tennessee.

NEON is administered by the Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy and provides technical assistance aimed at strengthening employment policy, coordinating systems, improving data, and expanding competitive integrated employment. For DC’s current round, DDS says the next three years will include a Districtwide strategic plan, stronger benefits planning, broader workforce and provider engagement, increased AI literacy for staff and job seekers, and improved employment data.

That is important work.

But it also sharpens the question.

If the District has Employment First, State as a Model Employer, NEON, person-centered planning, an Employment First Planning Committee, federal technical assistance, advocacy organizations, providers, self-advocates, and people committed to the work, why is the employment number still so low?

That is not an accusation.

It is the question the system now has enough infrastructure to ask honestly.

Then AI Entered the Room

Dr. Shannon Austin, Deputy Director of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, brought the conversation into the future of work.

She said something I wrote down immediately:

“We need to weed people in before we weed them out.”

There is an entire employment philosophy inside that sentence.

Our hiring systems are designed around elimination.

A résumé gets screened. Someone is missing a keyword. An employment gap raises a question. An assessment rewards one kind of communication. An interview favors one way of presenting yourself. A hiring manager sees disability before talent.

Now artificial intelligence is being placed somewhere inside more of those processes.

That can create opportunity.

It can also create another invisible door.

Austin shared another idea that stayed with me:

AI magnifies whatever system is already in place.

Artificial intelligence does not enter a perfect system.

It enters what we already built.

If the system is inclusive, technology may expand access.

If the system already contains barriers, technology can automate those barriers.

And that raises a question I do not think we are talking about enough when we discuss AI and the future of employment.

Everybody asks:

Will AI replace workers?

That is important.

But there is another question.

Who will AI prevent from becoming a worker in the first place?

A disabled applicant may never know a system screened them out. They may never meet the recruiter. They may never have the opportunity to explain an employment gap, an accommodation, an unconventional work history, or why their communication does not look like the profile an automated system was trained to reward.

Sometimes the rejection comes.

Sometimes nothing comes.

So where does discrimination live then?

Inside the employer?

Inside the algorithm?

Inside the data?

Inside the assumptions someone used when defining the ideal worker?

Those questions need to be asked now, not after automated hiring becomes so ordinary that nobody remembers where the decisions began.

The accessibility discussion made the same point in another way.

A website can technically satisfy an accessibility standard and still be miserable to use. An application can work with assistive technology and still create unnecessary barriers. A form can be accessible and written in language nobody understands. A system can pass a compliance test and still fail the human being sitting in front of it.

Plain language matters.

The device someone owns matters.

Internet access matters.

Who tested the system matters.

And when disabled people were invited into the process matters.

Too often, accessibility happens at the end.

The product is designed. The software is built. Money has been spent. Leadership approves it. Then someone asks disabled people whether they can use it.

That is backwards.

Disabled people should be present while the problem is being defined. They should help test the technology. They should be there when employers decide how automated hiring tools will be used. They should be part of government planning. They should help decide what accessibility actually means.

Nothing about us without us cannot stop when somebody opens a laptop.

In fact, that may be when the principle matters most.

Then one of the most important moments of the morning came from the audience.

Austin was talking about artificial intelligence reducing administrative burden.

It is a phrase we hear everywhere now.

Reduce administrative burden.

Increase efficiency.

Automate repetitive work.

Then a woman in the audience raised her hand.

She said she was looking for a job.

Much of her experience was administrative.

So when she heard people talking about reducing administrative work through AI, she did not hear only efficiency.

She heard a warning.

The work someone else wanted to automate was the work she was trying to get hired to do.

That may have been one of the most important moments of the day.

Technology sounds different depending on where you are sitting.

To an executive, automation may mean efficiency.

To a worker, automation may mean a paycheck.

Both can be true.

We hear constantly that AI will eliminate some jobs and create others.

What disappears from that sentence is the human being standing between the old job and the new one.

Who gets retrained?

Who has access to that training?

Who can afford the transition?

Who receives the new opportunity?

Who loses income while the economy reorganizes itself?

Whose experience suddenly becomes less valuable?

And if people with disabilities already have a harder time entering the workforce, what happens when some of the jobs that once served as entry points change faster than our employment systems can respond?

We talk a lot about the jobs artificial intelligence may create.

We talk much less about who gets carried from the old economy into the new one.

Austin did not dismiss the concern.

She acknowledged that employment professionals have to understand where the labor market is going and help people prepare.

But the responsibility cannot sit entirely with the person looking for work.

We cannot tell disabled workers to become more technologically literate while employers purchase inaccessible systems.

We cannot tell people to adapt while public systems remain difficult to navigate.

And we cannot speak about the future workforce as though everyone is standing at the same starting line.

They are not.

Austin eventually said something that connected much of the day for me:

“I don’t want to plan for someone else.”

That is person-centered thinking.

It should also be AI policy.

It should be employment policy.

It should be disability policy.

The people affected by a system should have a meaningful role in shaping the system.

One Person. Many Systems.

By the time I looked again at Kevin Wright’s Integrated Supports Star, it no longer looked like a worksheet.

It looked like the whole story.

Technology.

Relationships.

Community.

Personal strengths.

Formal services.

And one person in the middle.

Then I thought about the way institutions divide somebody’s life.

Employment belongs to one office.

Transportation belongs to another.

Housing is somewhere else.

Education is somewhere else.

Benefits are somewhere else.

Technology may belong to another department.

Healthcare is somewhere else.

But the person living through all of it has only one life.

A missed bus can become an employment problem.

Housing instability can become an employment problem.

An inaccessible website can become an employment problem.

A benefits mistake can become an employment problem.

A supervisor who does not understand disability can become an employment problem.

Lack of broadband can become an employment problem.

An algorithm can become an employment problem before the worker even knows an algorithm was involved.

Maybe Employment First cannot fully work if every other piece of somebody’s life is always treated as somebody else’s department.

Maybe that is another question hiding inside the 12 percent.

Not whether people care.

Not whether DC has good programs.

Not whether the right committees exist.

But whether all of the systems surrounding one person actually work together well enough for employment to become possible.

What Happens After Everyone Leaves?

I entered the summit because Edward Dana invited me.

There is something fitting about that.

A relationship brought me into the room.

And part of the day was spent reminding us that relationships themselves are support.

Now the question is what happens after the room empties.

The Developmental Disabilities Council will continue its Employment First work.

DDS will return to employment innovation.

DC will continue participating in NEON.

State as a Model Employer work will continue asking government to lead by example.

Project ACTION! will continue insisting that people with developmental disabilities have a voice in the decisions affecting them.

There will be more data.

More meetings.

More strategy.

More technology.

But the real measurement will happen somewhere else.

It will happen when somebody applies for a job and gets through the system.

When they are not eliminated before a human being sees their potential.

When the accommodation they need is available.

When they keep the job.

When they advance.

When they leave a bad job because they believe there can be another one.

When a first job becomes a second job.

When a job becomes a career.

When technology opens a door instead of quietly closing one.

When receiving support is no longer treated as the opposite of independence.

When a person with a disability has the same freedom many of us expect without thinking about it: to work, grow, fail, change direction, try again, and decide what kind of life they want to build.

Andrew Reese put 12 percent into the room.

When I looked at the latest published NCI-IDD report afterward, I found 11 percent for DC.

Nationally, the latest NCI-IDD average was 17 percent.

And in the broader working-age disability population, the federal employment rate remains dramatically below the rate for people without disabilities.

Those are different datasets.

They are telling us the same larger story.

The promise has not reached enough people yet.

I am glad the number was said aloud.

Because sometimes the next stage of progress begins when we stop repeating what we believe and start examining what people are actually experiencing.

Employment First cannot simply mean putting employment first on the agenda.

Eventually, employment has to become possible in the life of the person sitting at the center of all these systems.

And that, more than anything else I heard at the summit, is the conversation I believe we cannot afford to leave outside the room.