09/03/2026
Fewer than a third of people with disabilities are employed. For the rest, one employer willing to look past the DISability and see the ABILITY can change their life.
Last month we had the pleasure of joining Terry Roberts and LifeWorx at the Greater Topeka Partnership's HR Roundtable, in a room of HR directors, small business owners, and the programs that fund paid work-based learning in Topeka.
Terry opened with his own story. He has been in the disability world his entire life. As a child he never knew his father to be a healthy man — chronic pain, years of hospital rooms, and Terry waiting to turn twelve, because back then you could smoke in a hospital room but you couldn't bring a twelve-year-old into one.
His dad was a minister, used to being around people. When he got too sick to preach in his thirties, he withered, because he lost the contact he needed. What stayed with Terry was what happened when somebody gave his father something to do — an occasional sermon, or a construction company asking him to run a half-million-dollar check sixty miles across the state.
He had something to look forward to again. "I learned the value of anticipation in working with people with disabilities," Terry said. "I saw that with my dad."
He talked about what he weighs when he hires: aptitude, ability, attitude. Attitude matters most, because it spreads.
He asked how many people in the room were using the tax breaks available for hiring a person with a disability. Not one hand went up. That's a direct financial incentive on top of every other reason to consider people with disabilities for your open roles.
He shared a specific ask with the employers in the room: add a line to your job postings offering accommodations during the hiring process. Just seeing that phrase, he said, tells someone with a disability this is an employer they could probably work with.
Kinsey Anderson brought the data. Employer hesitation, she said, tends to fall into three buckets — work performance, social fit, and cost — and the research doesn't support any of them. Cost isn't meaningfully higher, accommodations included. Retention is better: lower turnover, higher reliability, better punctuality, which she and Terry see firsthand with their students, where reliability is consistently the top mark. And 72.5% of employers who have hired someone with a disability report an improved company image with customers.
She also gave an overview of reverse job fairs, how they flip the format so job seekers get the booth and lead with their own skills and goals, and what that opens up for candidates whose strengths don't come through on a resume.
Robin Hebl from Vocational Rehabilitation and the team from KANSASWORKS laid out what the state programs actually cover, and it landed. Between them, a placement can arrive with hundreds of paid hours already funded — in some cases the program is the employer of record and pays the wages directly. Payroll, workers' comp and timecards are handled. There's a training reimbursement of up to half of wages. And a job coach comes with the placement at no cost to the employer. As Robin put it: let us come in, find an opportunity, and put a student to work.
Jacob Haney told his own story of navigating a career as an individual with autism. He started coding at ten and earned a web development certificate from Johnson County Community College. Then he applied for twenty-six developer jobs and was rejected or ghosted by every single one.
Vocational Rehabilitation referred him to LifeWorx, who connected him to Moore RMG. Eleven months, two raises and a promotion later, he's a data services associate — a more technical role than the one he was hired into, and a step closer to the development work he's aiming for. He's twenty-two. "That opportunity," he told the room, "has changed the direction of my entire career."
Cathy Terrell of Mama T. Jams and Jellies and Jamie McKinley of Sparrow Coffee Co. made the case from the employer's side. Both run small businesses here, and both see paid work-based learning as a way to build them.
Then it was our turn. Terry came to us this summer with a problem: the hard part of placing someone isn't finding the candidate, it's identifying the specific openings an employer would consider them for, and then getting those in front of the right placement organization.
There are plenty of job boards. They just don't include the features that drive successful placements. So we proposed building one that does, and showed the room what it might look like. Then we asked what would make it useful, and the room spoke. A field on every posting saying whether it's okay to have a job coach on site with the candidate. Video resumes, for candidates who are better at speaking than writing their credentials on paper. And integration with the job boards employers already use, so it isn't one more platform to log into. Now we get back to work to design the solution that solves the problem and actually gets used.
Thanks to Trina Goss and the Greater Topeka Partnership for hosting, and to Terry, Kinsey, and the LifeWorx team for bringing us in. We look forward to continuing our partnership and seeing the results.
