The center, which launched in June 2022, is housed within the MSU College of Education and the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education. The center's co-directors and other personnel work with individuals and partner with researchers, service providers, employers, and policy makers to provide and efficiently disseminate evidence-based practices of support.

Connie Sung is an associate professor of rehabilitation counseling at Michigan State University and one of the co-directors of the MSU STRIDE Center. Marisa Fisher is an associate professor of special education at MSU and the other co-director of the STRIDE Center.

“I have always been passionate about supporting adolescents and young adults with disabilities,” says Fisher. “It probably comes from my experience as a sibling of an individual with an intellectual disability. He's older than I am, so I saw his entire school-to-work transition and saw where the struggles were and saw what the successes were. I was really interested in it, and I want to help other people as well.”

“I'm passionate about the work because my mother has a medicine background,” says Sung. “I was trained in occupational therapy and psychology. I've worked with people ranging in age from the really young to toddler age and all the way to the elderly.”

STRIDE is an acronym for the MSU Center for Services, Training and Research for Independence and Desired Employment.

“I have to give credit to Marisa because she came up with the name and each of the letters,” continues Sung. “S stands for the services we provide. T is for training. As part of the land grant mission, we want to provide training for our students, but also for people who are now in service training. And then R is for research. As a faculty at MSU, research is a big part of our role, and we want to make sure all the service and training that we provide is research-based and the best practices for assisting the community. I is for independence and helping people live an independent life. The D and E stand for our desire to see people achieving desired employment because employment is not just about a paycheck. They can have a social network and a routine. Employment is a very important factor leading to positive mental health.”

“STRIDE is a dream come true for Connie and me,” Fisher adds. “We have been working together for 9 or 10 years on various projects. And through those projects we really saw the need for comprehensive services within the community. We spoke with several different community organizations and community members and saw where the needs were and what was missing. And we said, ‘Okay. How can we help fill those gaps?’ And we brought our heads together and said, ‘We need a center, a center that just focuses on all of this.’ And we took that idea to our dean and chair and said ‘This is our vision.’ And they said, ‘Okay. Let's see how we can support that.’”

How does the STRIDE Center define disabilities?

“People may have different understandings of disabilities,” Sung continues. “For us, we really look at disability across the board, including physical disabilities, mobility challenges, and mental illness. Our primary focus is on the intellectual and developmental disabilities because we have expertise and previous experience running programs and projects. We serve people with a variety of disabilities.”

Research will be a key component of the STRIDE Center's land-grant mission.

“As faculty members, our main goal is to conduct research and translate that research into practice,” Sung says. “We want to make sure we are relying on research and evidence to achieve the outcome that we expect to achieve. The work that we do, the service that we deliver, and the training that we provide are all research based. We want to fulfill the land grant mission of MSU to work with the community. We are not just in a lab. We’re doing what we think are the right things to do and getting input from our community stakeholders. We are not just producing research for the purpose of archiving it in the library database, but it's really being used in the real world by our community partners.”

“In the research that we do, as Connie said, we're not just asking questions to ask questions,” Fisher continues. “We're not collecting data just to write journal articles that then go into the library and are only read by other academics. We are conducting research to really support those who need support. Everything that we do is community engaged. We are working with individuals, with service agencies, and with other providers to not only find out what they need, but to find the best way to provide it and train others to also provide it. We're not saying, ‘This is our intervention and we're going to deliver it.’ We want to say, ‘Here's a great intervention, who else can deliver it? Let us help you learn how to do it and then you can provide it to others so that it's reaching the full community.’”

“We are open to the community coming to us to tell us what else we need to develop,” adds Sung. “Then we can hand off these resources and supports so others don't have to reinvent the wheels. We have the capacity and the expertise. We are really aiming to collaborate with communities to find out what the needs are and how can we fulfill the gaps and meet the needs of the disability community. One more thing that we want to really stress is we know sometimes people may get nervous about university faculty coming in and doing all this work. But our main mission is not trying to compete or to replace anyone in a community. We really want to collaborate with what is already in place and work together to improve the resources and support for people with disabilities because we believe we all share a common goal in better utilizing what we have to develop more new things to meet the needs. If our community partners need training, we are more than happy to provide it so organizations can take the programming or the interventions back to their organizations to benefit even more people with disabilities.”

Sung and Fisher describe the first services the center is offering. One is Assistive Soft Skills and Employment Training (ASSET), and the other is Employment Preparation and Skills Support (EPASS).

Who is the STRIDE Center for? Who should contact you for assistance?

“A lot of times people may have a misperception that we only work with people with disabilities,” continues Sung. “In order to have people with disabilities truly integrated into the community, we need to also work with other people around them. The goal is not just to deliver services to individuals with disabilities, but to really become a center of excellence in independence and employment and transition so that people can utilize the resources and support that we develop here. We would like everybody to know we are here. The main purpose of the center is to provide support and assistance to promote independence and employment and enhance quality of life for people with disabilities.”

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