Resources

Assessing Retention Outcomes

This resource provides formulas for measuring tenure, turnover, vacancy rates, and the percent of employees who leave within six months of hire. Accurately calculating your turnover is critical to evaluating what intervention strategy will be most effective and useful to your organization. This tool can also be used to determine the vacancy rates for your organization overall and for specific program areas.

Direct Support Workforce Solutions

Direct Support Workforce Solutions is a national consulting group addressing the workforce needs of organizations providing community-based supports for individuals with disabilities.

Frontline Initiative

Frontline Initiative is a newsletter series covering the issues important to direct support professionals and supervisors who support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and other disabilities in a variety of community settings. Each feature issue contains resources, perspectives, and strategies to advance the profession of direct support.

Invaluable

Invaluable is a documentary about the direct support workforce, the "unrecognized profession of direct support." Please see the Invaluable website and ask your UMN consultant if you would like to have a screening. We can provide access to this resource along with guidelines on how to use it.

Self-Advocacy Online

Self-Advocacy Online is a resource created by and for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This site is often used by individuals, groups, families, and self-advocates to learn about and discuss issues, supports, decisions, and preferences. The site uses a lot of short videos to share stories of self-advocates, teach about self-advocacy, and explain research.

Moving Mountains Award

Moving Mountains Awards are presented annually to organizations that demonstrate best practice in direct support workforce development. In partnership, the National Alliance for Direct Support Professionals (NADSP), the Research and Training Center (RTC) at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Community Integration and the American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR) recognize best practices in direct support workforce development by awarding the annual Moving Mountains Award.

The purpose of this award is to recognize organizations using leading practices in direct support workforce development that result in improved outcomes for people with disabilities. Organizations applying are required to illustrate how their direct support workforce practices and philosophy align with the principles of the NADSP.