The Butterfly Effect — A new system and possibilities for employment support—

Aya Tomokiyo
Manager, Kiratto Employment Support Centre, Asucomit Social Welfare Corporation
Saho Soma
Director, Konan Area Disabled People’s Employment and Daily Life Support Centre,
Asucomit Social Welfare Corporation

The “butterfly effect” is a phenomenon in which extremely small changes lead eventually to results far greater than could have been predicted.
There may be people who think “Employment choices support project? That’s no different from the employment assessment.” However, through our involvement with the FY2023 model project from the national government, we sensed that this change might become the trigger (the detonating agent) for a radical rethinking of the system for employment support. Due to a labor shortage, companies have a growing need to hire disabled workers, and employment support services for disabled people have seen increased private sector participation and diversification. While seeing this as a move in a positive direction, there have also been more days when we were anxious about whether it was fine to keep going in the same way, and whether we were heading in the right direction. This was the situation at the time we heard about the national government’s model project.

FY2023 model project

Leading up to the full-scale implementation of employment assessments in FY2015, we had shared ideas about the direction in which we should aim in our social welfare service area within our independence support council. We trialed the employment choices support flow and tools newly laid out by the national government, basing them on methods for the employment assessment established during that period, and at the same time as reflecting on the employment assessment which has been carried out in our area thus far, we thought about the nature of employment choices support going forward. Our desire to work with an endlessly diverse range of people (in terms of both disabilities and life situations) was of great importance to us, and so we formed partnerships with various organizations, including government and welfare agencies, and chose 14 model cases.

Through this model project, we came to realize that the perspectives of collaboration, information-sharing, and guaranteeing impartiality and fairness through multi-agency partnerships were extremely important. We had been under the mistaken impression that we were “doing all these things.”

Asucomit’s position in the local community

Since 2008, we have specialized in two areas of work – support for the transition into employment, a kind of social welfare service, and an employment and daily life support center, providing employment consultation support – in order for the work of disabled people in our local area to become richer. Because our corporation is small in scale, we could not rely on internal manpower, but instead have been supported by various agencies within our social welfare service area as we have worked on initiatives within the local community until the present day.

Current initiatives in preparation for the start of the employment choices support project

In our area, we launched a project team called “Study group to prepare for the employment choices support project” in July 2024, with each city’s disability welfare division, main consultation support center, outsourced consultation support services, special schools, employment transition support services, and others as the constituent organizations. In the study group, after learning about the background and context in which the employment choices support project came into being in order to gain a shared awareness across the area as a whole, we explored our area’s vision for the employment choices support project. Placing great importance on the ideas that “We will not make this into a procedure for going to an employment support service” and “We will rectify mistaken directions taken so far, bringing things back to the way they should be,” we set up two working groups within the study group, and all the participants took ownership and set to work on building a concrete system. At times, the discussion within the working groups did not move ahead as we had hoped, or people’s ideas clashed, and we could not find a consensus. To be honest, we sometimes felt like giving up. Nevertheless, we feel that there was a meaning in every step of this process, which was invaluable in terms of building a consensus for the area as a whole.

In conclusion

We have moved up another gear in our area in preparation for the project’s implementation in July 2025. Whatever the results, we feel that the way in which the area managed to come together to work on this could be considered a great achievement in itself. This period is a turning point when a system is newly created. We feel pride in having been involved in building a system and building our local area; at the same time, we hope to go on working together with our colleagues in the area, with a sense of mission, as we take on the challenge of “work” for people with disabilities.