University of Montana Center Earns $4.25 Million Grant to improve the ability of people with disabilities to live independently in rural America

A University of Montana research center that works to improve the ability of people with disabilities to live independently in rural America has been awarded a five-year, $4.25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

The funding went to the Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities http://rtc.ruralinstitute.umt.edu/ (RTC:Rural). Established in 1988, the center is part of UM’s Rural Institute, which supports the independence, productivity and community inclusion of persons with disabilities.

“Some 56 million Americans live in rural areas, and nearly 20 percent of those live with a disability,” said Tom Seekins, director of RTC:Rural. “While rural America is their home, living there can place them at a disadvantage compared to their urban counterparts.”

Seekins said the grant will fund a sustainable plan for quality research and training that will continue to enhance state-of-the-art practices in rural disability and rehabilitation.

“We really believe this grant gives us the ability to improve the lives of rural Americans with disabilities,” he said. “Our projects were developed in collaboration with a wide range of community partners across the nation.”

The grant will finance a variety of activities, such as evaluating rural health promotion strategies that could lead to improved employment outcomes, conducting a randomized controlled trial to evaluate ways to improve rural consumers’ use of health care services or identifying strategies to improve rural transportation.

The grant also will create a program to disseminate RTC:Rural’s research findings and spark the use of evidence-based rural practices by policymakers, advocates, service providers and persons with disabilities. A key component of this program is the RTC:Rural Web site (http://rtc.ruralinstitute.umt.edu), which averages more than 14,000 hits a month.

“We plan to add a rural disability ‘wiki’ to our Web site to build a rural disability knowledge database,” Seekins said. “We also plan to embark on three focused training initiatives in Texas, Utah and South Carolina, and we will use Web technology to conduct an innovative state-of-the-science conference.”

The new grant specifically comes from the Education Department’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

RTC:Rural has made myriad discoveries in its field during the past two decades. For example, center researchers learned that people with disabilities are self-employed at higher rates than the general population and that people with disabilities in rural areas have the highest rates of self-employment. This groundbreaking find led to the widespread recognition and use of self-employment as a legitimate job outcome for people with disabilities.

For more information on RTC:Rural, call 888-268-2743.

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