Logo: Independent Living Institute (To www.independentliving.org)

Training as Vehicle to Employment: Newsletter, October 2007

Dear Reader

Welcome to the 3rd common newsletter to the EU wide project ‘Training as Vehicle to Employment’ (TVE).

This project is a two year EU wide project focusing on national government agencies’ traineeships. There are two basic aims:

  1. To promote training positions in the public sector and to open them to persons with disabilities.
  2. To list the training positions that disabled persons can apply

This project is being run in Ireland, Latvia, Germany, Finland, Greece, Spain, Sweden Poland and Bulgaria. You can find up-to-date information from the international website http://www.independentliving.org/training

TVE at disability conference in Athens

Nicoletta Zoannos, transnational coordinator of TVE, was invited by Athens prefecture to present TVE and its innovative method at a conference in Athens on the 22nd of October. The conference covered disability and employment through different perspectives.

Interesting American website: www.DisabilityStatistics.org

One can often read about the employment gap between people with disabilities and those without. According to the 2005 Annual Disability Status Report, the employment gap stands at 40.3 percentage points in the United States. However, little information is available about people with disabilities who are not working.

For instance, in the U.S in 2005, 6.4 percent of the working-age population with disabilities (or 1.4 million individuals) reported that they were not working, but were actively looking for work. Among these people, 49.4 percent reported a physical disability, 62.1 percent had worked in the past 12 months, 71.8 percent had a high school education or more, 24.7 percent were ages 44-54, 7.4 percent reported receiving income from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program benefits in the past year, and 7.3 percent reported receiving income from the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program in the past year.

These and other exciting statistics may be found on www.DisabilityStatistics.org. At this website, you will be able to compare statistics for people with and without disabilities.

The next Training as Vehicle to Employment Newsletter will be distributed in November 2007.

TVE project logo

Project documents

Information in Polish

Information in English

Information in Latvian

Information in Spanish

Information in Swedish

Information in German

Information in Greek

Information in Bulgarian

Information in Finnish


Training as Vehicle to Employment, TVE, was a two year project that started in January 2006 and ended in December 2007.