Grant to fund training, equipment at job center

A $300,000 federal grant may help Chris Brown -- and thousands of other disabled workers -- find a job in the Southern Tier.

Brown has severe depression, severe enough that he's had difficulty landing a job since 1997. Yet when he went to the Broome-Tioga Works job center on Front Street in Binghamton, he came away feeling the resources weren't quite what he needed.

"If they could spend more time one-on-one, that would help," Brown said Monday.

The $300,000 U.S. Department of Labor grant, which Broome-Tioga Works acquired by working with the Southern Tier Independence Center and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, will help the one-stop jobs centers in five counties improve equipment and training to help people with a variety of disabilities. That may include talking computers to help blind workers, voice- activated computer software for people with dexterity problems, or training to help increase sensitivity to the issues faced by people with disabilities.

"As a country, we've got to do a better job integrating people with disabilities into the labor force," said Patrick J. Doyle, executive director of Broome-Tioga Works.

The unemployment rate for people with disabilities who are looking for work hovers around 50 percent, said Maria Dibble, executive director of the Southern Tier Independence Center. That's nearly 10 times the unemployment rate of 5.3 percent for Greater Binghamton.

"We're hoping to see an influx of people who want to go to work," Dibble said.

The center serves about 3,000 clients a year. Dibble didn't have figures immediately available to suggest how many might be potential workers.

Brown hasn't been sitting still for six years. He's been looking or going to school. On Monday, he mailed two applications to return to college, looking to complete a degree in hotel management.

For now, though, he'll gladly settle for a job washing dishes.

"A lot of (the difficulty) is the economy, but about 30 percent is discrimination," he said.

The grant will also be used to publicize the job centers in Broome, Tioga, Chenango, Delaware and Otsego counties, Dibble said. That would ease some of the burden on the independence center, which now tries to help disabled people look for jobs.

"It's nice," she said, "that they'll be able to go to the general services."

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