What are the NTAR Leadership Center’s guiding principles?

The Center’s mission and initiatives are grounded in five principles drawn from six years of ODEP research and form the basis for the Center’s technical assistance and training activities:

1. Effective leadership, collaboration, and partnerships are the foundation for system change efforts and are at the heart of every best practice.
2. Cross-agency and cross-system collaboration results in opportunities for leveraging expertise and resources — especially important to serving job seekers with complex barriers to employment, both those with and without disabilities. This “blending and braiding” of resources enables service providers to respond to the unique strengths and needs of individual job seekers.
3. To the extent possible, the principle of universal design should apply not just to removing physical barriers but also to practices, services, and programs of the workforce development system and other environments, including the workplace, resulting in improved efficiency and better customer service.
4. Tax incentives, financial literacy efforts, benefits planning, and other incentives encouraging work can increase the prospects for employment success for people with disabilities, as well as improve their longer-term economic outcomes.
5. Customized employment strategies and flexibility in the workplace can enhance employment opportunities and job success for people with and without disabilities. Using customized employment strategies to individualize the employment relationship between the job seeker and the employer can meet the needs of both, and can greatly improve employment opportunities for people with disabilities.