Jobs, jobs and more jobs!

When we started meeting to plan Next Step Training Program, one of the things that came up often in our discussions was the desire for our students to get real world experience in a controlled environment. We talked about things like working in a coffee shop or at a farmers’ market where people would know why we were there and that the students were working on vocational skills.

Little did we know that God would provide many one-time jobs for our students to do (under our supervision, of course) to gain experience! Last session, we had a book sale and two opportunities to help people load trucks for moving. This session, we have two fence painting jobs and two moving jobs! We love that we are getting them in twos because that way, the students can use the first one to get their feet wet and the second one is more of a refining of skills.

The first job is today (pictures to come) and is in Shelbyville. One of the couples in our Sunday School class approached me about staining their fence. Of course, I said yes (after talking with the rest of the staff)! We will use today as a introduction to painting (the do’s and don’t’s).

The second job is in October and is in east Jefferson County. One of my pickleball friends reached out to me out of the blue about paining her split rail fence in her horse field. Of course, I said yes (after talking with the rest of the staff, see the pattern?)

Because this one will be a bigger job, we reached out to the management of Mattress Firm where one of my sons works because they love to give back to the community by donating time and effort to local non-profits! They are going to send 5-6 managers to work right alongside our students which will be a win-win-win!

I will have our social media intern post pictures of both of the events so you can see our students in action!

New Session Has Begun!

It is unbelievable to me how fast time flies and how much we have accomplished! Rather, how much God has accomplished through us :)

We have just started our sixth 16-week session of the pre-vocational training session and we are already looking to set our dates and start the application process for the next session which will begin in January.

Our current session has another 8 students (two groups of four students). We will provide all the “regular” classes for them: Thirty minutes of social skills/job skills training, sixty minutes of sensory integration therapy (OT), sixty minutes of Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment training (cognitive training) and sixty minutes of vocational classes twice a week until November 21st.

Each of these students will have an employment specialist assigned to him/her to complete the person centered employment plan by the end of September so that we can start the job process before our session is even completed! We have found that if we wait until the session is over, a lot of momentum is lost and there is not as much positive peer pressure :)

We have added an element to our program that we prayed about from the beginning: job opportunities during the session for the students to earn some money while getting vocational training. The Lord provided the first installment of this last Christmas season at the Outlet Shoppes of the Bluegrass when we got to wrap presents for customers for a donation.

Since then, we have helped to families move, manned a book sale and worked at the farmer’s market! The Lord provided the funds to pay our students from a foundation out of Milwaukee WI! We received an unsolicited donation of $5000 that we can use to pay our students to work before they get an official job!

Isn’t God good? (This is where you say, “all the time.”)

We are excited to see how God continues to provide finances and opportunities for us to best educate and prepare our students to be productive workers in the workplace.

If you or someone you know would like a job done by our students, please reach out! 502-257-2719 or nextsteptrianingprogramky@gmail.com

Yard Sale to Benefit Next Step Training Program

We have so many stories to tell about how the Lord is using Next Step to bless our students and our families and we tell them all the time! But, I forget to type them, too!

One of the recent stories is how we had was an impromptu yard sale. Some family friends called me and asked if they could donate some new and like items to our program to sell to make money. They suggested that we post things on Facebook marketplace and other sites to raise money. I prayed about it and consulted the board about it and after looking at the incredible number of items that they wanted to donate, we decided to have a yard sale instead!

We picked a Friday and Saturday (in between our farmers market Saturdays) and told a bunch of people and posted it in a bunch of places and the customers showed up! Three of our board members put in so much time to get everything set up and ready to sell and also helped with clean up! It was a wonderful team effort and gave us time for deep and meaningful conversations!

Pricing the items for a garage sale is an overwhelming task and quite subjective, so we decided to let our customers price the items. We told everyone who came that it was a donation only yard sale which also gave us the opportunity to share our ministry with them.

As many of you know, yard sales can be a lot of work with very little to show for it, but God sent us lots of customers and some were very generous! We brought in over $1700 in just two days! One of the neatest blessings was that we were able to give hope to families who came who have children with autism!

One other blessing was that we were able to donate the leftover items to non-profits who had specific needs :) We donated maternity clothes to ALC, shoes to Water Step, etc. It was all around a win-win-win!

So Many Great Lessons and Changes Made!

We are currently in our winter 2022 session of Next Step. Things are going pretty well from week to week, but even in the ups and downs of our 16-week session, we have learned a lot!

In the winter/spring of 2021, we learned that our parent sessions were an invaluable piece to the puzzle of our program. The parents of our students are encouraged and supported during our monthly meetings. We as teachers are able to help them know that they are not alone on this journey and that there is hope for their son or daughter’s future! The change that we have made to our program is that we have parent sessions scheduled into the 16-week session from the very start!

In the fall of 2021, we learned that we need all of our students to have the desire to want to be in the program. They don’t even need to initially see the value of the program; they just need to want to be here. When a student doesn’t want to be in the program, he or she doesn’t put in the effort and drags the rest of the students down. The change that we made to our program is during the application interview with the student, we make sure that he or she knows that we expect our classes to be treated like a job and the staff like a boss. We expect that he or she will put in the effort to learn and gain as much as possible during the class time. It has made a HUGE difference in the dynamics of our current session in a very positive way. We made the difficult decision to deny a student entrance into this current session because he was unwilling to accept the authority of the staff, but we can see that it was a very wise decision.

In the winter of 2022, when I was working to onboard a former student onto a job, I realized that he was not naturally greeting customers who walked into the place of business. He immediately asked them for their ID rather than saying good morning or even hi first! He was not trying to be rude; he just didn’t see the point of the socially accepted behavior of greeting someone (he told us that he didn’t want to waste their time, LOL!). We learned that our students take a while to assimilate behaviors and have to learn some of the basic “niceties” before they can learn the new skills of a job. The change we made to our program is that we ask our students to greet each one of us as staff every time we start a new class period. This has become a wonderful part of our program and some of our students are even initiating the greeting!

During this current session (spring of 2022), we have learned that initiating the social events is very important to the parents of our students. We have always had the discussion of the aspect of the social piece of the puzzle, but we have not had the piece in place to be effective. The change we have made is that we have scheduled the first social activity for this group and will have another event scheduled by the end of the session. We plan to implement this change at the beginning of each and every session so that our students (and parents) will expect a couple of social events during every session to further the bond of the students!

So, the Lord keeps teaching us lessons while we are teaching lessons to our students! We love learning these lessons and implementing the changes so that we can be as effective as possible in the training we provide.

Can’t wait to see what the Lord teaches us next session!

We have been approved to be a vendor for Voc Rehab!!

As some of you know, we applied to be a vendor with OVR (the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation) back in May. It is neat God story about connections and our faithfulness to just take the next step in our journey!

A friend of mine encouraged me back in 2018 or so to meet Paul who was the director of Bluegrass Center for Autism. I put off looking him up because making a call to BCA to talk with someone whom I have never met is a little intimidating.

Then in December of 2019, I was at a meeting of mentors for Love Thy Neighborhood where I was chatting with an acquaintance from our church. I ended up being introduced to the guest she brought with her and yep, you guessed it, it was Paul!

The amazing part is that Paul no longer worked at BCA so if I had contacted him there, I would have come up with a dead end! He agreed to meet with me and Susan and share the story of how BCA started and how it ended up being funded by insurance. He told us about one of the moms whose son was about 7 years old who fought like a bulldog to get insurance to cover the one-on-one services that her son and other students were receiving at BCA..

We parted ways after meeting for over an hour and Paul said to reach out whenever we needed anything in the future.

Fast forward to early spring of 2021. I was introduced to the woman who started Associates in Pediatric Therapy. She has been incredibly successful in helping many families of children 0 -21 get the therapies they need all over Louisville. At the end of our hour long conversation, she mentioned that we really needed to bill insurance for our services. She told me that in KY, insurance companies have to pay for a set amount of therapy monthly.

I was a bit down after our conversation because I know all the red tape that there is to bill insurance. There are many hoops to jump through and even when you jump through them properly, insurance companies deny payment for a variety of reasons. I also knew that if we were to start billing insurance, NSTP would have to hire someone to do all the paperwork and stay on top of it. I started to do some research on what insurance has to cover and how much they pay and I was getting more and more discouraged :(

So, after commiserating with Susan about this conundrum, I remembered Paul’s story about the mom who was a bulldog with insurance companies! I reached out to Paul who was true to his word that he would help us when we needed it :) He put me in touch with Janelle AKA the Bulldog. She was amazing!

She had moved back to Kansas with her son, but was more than willing to share her story and see how she could help. She had already read about our program on this website as well as checked out our Facebook page. Quick little note, we were in the midst of our first 16-week session and trying to figure out how to pay for everything!

Janelle and I spoke for a long time and right off the bat, I shared with her about the possibility of needing to bill for insurance. She had the same reaction that I did and she had firsthand knowledge of how difficult a feat this would be! The Lord directed our conversation and right at the end she said, “Wait! You don’t need to bill insurance! There is a program through the state that pays for programs like yours! You are already doing what they pay for!” My heart leaped for joy and I had hope that we were on the right track! Janelle agreed to send information about the program and she also would help us apply, for free! She mentioned that she had a family wedding to go to over the weekend but would email the information by the end of the following week.

On the Tuesday of the following week, I was on a call with two women from OVR. They had heard about our program and wanted to hear more about it. It was a good call and I was very encouraged. They asked me if I was interested in becoming a vendor and although I had absolutely no idea what that meant, I told them that I would pass along written information about our program for becoming a vendor (honestly, I was thinking it would have something to do with showing up at a convention and having a booth, LOL!) I was even more encouraged when I found out that OVR was the state program that Janelle was telling me about and that these women were wanting us to become a part of it so that we could service young adults and get paid for it!

A month or so later, NSTP was invited to be on a regional call with OVR counselors and vendors and present our program. It was a great call and they encouraged us by saying that we have a valuable service that will benefit these young adults. The woman who invited us to the call said that she would put in the application for us and that she would put in a good word for us.

Then, we waited. And waited. I reached out to her every couple of months, but the answer was pretty much the same. The state was working on it. So we waited some more.

Throughout the spring and into the fall, I had been attending monthly Zoom meetings for CWD (Coalition for Workplace Diversity). It is a fantastic organization that connects employers and employees who may have a disability, who may have a criminal record or who may be a veteran. I have found the meetings helpful, but Zoom is a difficult way to network, so I was thrilled when we finally had a meeting in person! I love the face to face interaction and the organic conversations and networking that occurs at a live meeting.

At this August meeting, I “happened” to meet Eric from OVR who is a supervisor. When I explained who I was and what we were waiting on, he told me that he would help us out as he would be our supervisor when we got approved! What an answer to prayer! Eric and emailed back and forth several times and he helped us submit an online application (they switched to those after our original one was submitted) and also strongly encouraged us to take an online course regarding OVR and supported employment.

Fast forward to October 24th, we got the email that our application was approved, and then on Oct 27th, I finished the online class regarding supported employment and am not certified to offer these services! There are still some hoops to jump through and paperwork to fill out, but nothing like regular health insurance and I have a supervisor to help us through the process!

If you are still reading this, thank you. I love sharing the thread of our journey because you can see God’s hand in it and how He works everything out for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.

Our First Student Gets a Job!

One of our students from the pilot program got his first job!!

The Lord provided an unexpected connection for me through a bible study. The first person I met in my group asked me a simple question, “What do you do for work?” I kind of laughed because I have had numerous part time jobs and businesses over the years and right now is no exception. I told her that I teach piano, but what I am really excited about is the Next Step Training Program which is a vocational program for young adults on the autism spectrum. She started smiling and couldn’t wait to tell me that she worked for OVR which is well known as “Voc Rehab” a place for those with disabilities to find employment!

About three days later, she emailed me that she heard about a possible opportunity for our students. She invited me to a call with a new group called The Coalition for Workplace Diversity and on that call I met a wonderful woman who runs an employment agency specifically for JP Morgan Chase to hire those with autism! The applicants who apply for the jobs that she fills have to have autism! I have never heard of such a thing and I know that God put me in that bible study to meet a new friend, Trish, to connect me to Jana, to connect one of our pilot program students to get a new job!

God is good all the time and all the time, God is good.

Pilot Program Was A Great Success!!

In November of 2019, we had our pilot program. It went well and our two guinea pigs (I mean, students) seemed to benefit from the short 6 session trial run! We organized the sessions so that the students had one hour of cognitive training (Feuerstein method), one hour of vestibular therapy (Think, Move, Learn) and one hour of vocational training in the kitchen sandwiched by a connection time and a recap time.

The cognitive training went as well as we knew it could (the cognitive trainers have been doing this for awhile, so this was not their first rodeo!) ! The students were very receptive to the challenging pages of dots and shapes to be identified as well as the thought process that was taught regarding problem solving.

Tracy Murray, the occupational therapist who developed Think, Move, Learn was able to adjust the task or exercise for having two students who were full grown young men. She was used to working with little ones so it was a bit of an adjustment for her. The agility ladder, the balance boards and the bean bags were a hit, and the students were willing to try anything she introduced!

Working in the kitchen on cooking and cleaning skills was very important to our sessions as we used some of what we cooked to sell at events as well as donate to a local Christmas celebration. The young men didn’t balk at cooking muffins or washing dishes or putting the kitchen back together :)

To start our evening, we had a time of connecting and conversation. At the end of the evening, we closed our time by recapping what was taught and what the students learned throughout the time.

It was the best pilot program we could have hoped for! We had put so much prayer, time and energy into planning the program, and the Lord blessed it beyond our expectations!

Soap Story

My husband is not a soap snob. As long as the soap I buy doesn’t have a floral scent, he will use it!

But he has a thing about not using the last bit of the bar. So, when it gets too small for his taste, he simply sets it aside. The below picture is what I see in the shower until I do something with the small pieces of soap.

The other day when I looked at those various pieces of soap he has cast aside, I thought about the fact that they’re still good, they still have purpose, and as long as we know how to use them correctly, they are worth having around! When I was younger my mom would put small pieces of soap like that in an old nylon and hang it from a shower caddy. We would then rub our hands on it and it would lather up just like it was intended to. It was a great use for those unwanted pieces of soap.

People who have disabilities are sometimes pushed off to the side like those small pieces of soap. When they don’t fit the mold, we just feel like we don’t have any use for them. When they look different, we aren’t sure how to relate to them. But, just like those pieces of soap, they are very useful and have purpose! Sometimes we have to think outside the box, but they can have a long and purposeful life, too.

We have to keep in mind that God has created us all with a unique set of gifts and talents and abilities and disabilities. It is our job to glorify Him through each of those. I also feel that is our responsibility to help others find their purpose and ways to glorify God through their abilities and disabilities.

Next Step Training Program is just one of the ways we can help those with a disability find their calling and purpose!

Resource: Virginia Commonwealth University

As I was searching the internet for resources to improve our program, I "stumbled" upon the Virginia Commonwealth University site. They have some incredible resources that address a myriad of issues that people with disabilities face applying for jobs, getting jobs and keeping jobs. It is also a phenomenal resource for businesses who are willing to hire those with disabilities. It is a win-win situation much of the time if both parties are knowledgeable about how to make necessary accommodations when necessary and have the communication lines open about the onboarding and mentoring needs of the employee.

While reading some articles posted and listening to some free webinars that are offered, I realized that when we are at the stage of helping these young adults interview for a job, we have numerous resources to point their prospective employer to! Also, I was unaware of how beneficial it is for employers to hire those with disabilities of any kind. Retention is much higher, customer satisfaction and loyalty is higher and employee hiring base is larger!

Here is one sample of what is available on the website:
https://vcurrtc.org/resources/viewContent.cfm/1376

There are resources there that will help parents, students, businesses, therapists, teachers and support personnel.

What an amazing website, thank you Virginia Commonwealth University!

An Idea!

As Susan and her husband, Bill, were coming to terms with their son’s diagnosis of Asperger’s, they made the decision to go to an autism convention that had come to Louisville.  Susan went to a breakout session that was about students with autism learning the necessary job skills for employment while working on a farm!

Because she grew up on a farm, she knew the amazing benefits of working in the dirt, lifting bales of hay, planting and harvesting and the myriad of other chores to be done!  She was sure that a program like this is what would be the next step in her journey of life.  She connected with the “director of the program” who turned out to be a dad whose son was working on a farm and doing very well and who was convinced that this could be a great program.

She called me, Suellen, from the conference and told me all about this farming program and was almost in tears because she was so excited!  Together we talked about how good this could be and that my husband had talked about wanting to be a farmer and how neat that would be to spend the rest of our working days on the farm.

Fast forward a year or so, Susan kept researching how to make a program like this successful.  Together we contacted a few farms who were training those with special needs.  We heard stories that were really encouraging, but we still weren’t sure how this was going to work here.  Greg and I had the God given opportunity to work on a hobby farm and were given full reign over the massive garden with training from the farmers.  

In December of 2017, we had our first board meeting!  We were following leads to using farm land and building a house and living on the farm where the program would happen.  

That next spring, we had the unique privilege of selling our harvest at the local farmer’s market and although some veggies were sold, it was a slow and frustrating time.  Our harvest was pitiful and because we were trying to farm organically, bugs were a huge problem!  We had a lot of head knowledge because we read a lot of books and watched a lot of videos on how to successfully farm organically, we just didn’t have green thumbs.  Mine is actually a shade of black!

Toward the end of the market season in 2018, Susan and I had a long conversation about the direction of the program because I was very discouraged about our lack of farming prowess and the bleak outlook on actually making enough money by selling fruits and vegetables to sustain a program.  It was during that conversation that God revealed to us that Greg and I were not meant to be farmers, we were meant to cook and run a restaurant!    What had happened at the market was that I got my sampling license which meant that Greg could make a recipe that included an ingredient that we grew and we could sample it to our customers.  What we discovered was that people wanted to buy the cooked food and not the raw ingredients.

We decided that we could probably incorporate both the farming (because the students would still learning so much through it) and the restaurant (because this is what we know and the students would learn a lot through it)!  

In the summer of 2019, Greg and I and the other board members all participated in the farmer’s market again, only this time, we sold cooked food (yes, we got a temporary food license) and it was a hit!  We developed a customer base that loved our food and that was aware of our ultimate goal of using a restaurant and a farm to help young adults gain the skills necessary to secure gainful employment.

In essence, we are still on the first steps of our journey, but the plan is more focused by focusing on young adults with mild to moderate autism, and more integrated by including cognitive skills training, vestibular therapy, parent training and vocational training.  We are on the cusp of putting our preliminary program into play and although it feels like a long time coming, God has been behind the timing the entire time!  He knew what we needed to learn and what needed to happen in order to be successful in helping these very special young adults.

My 23 year journey with a son with undiagnosed Asperger’s

You know how when you are a new mom, you just assume that some of your child’s behaviors are a result of your parenting?  Or that the oddities you see are just fine because they will grow out of them?  Or that maybe that your child is just stubborn and not wanting to obey?  And you just explain away signs of a problem because you can deal with it and it’s not such a big deal?

Well, all of these things applied to me as a young mom.  I had a couple of well-meaning friends suggest different parenting techniques that could help.  It wasn’t until my second son started walking and talking and doing “normal” things that I realized that our older son maybe had some issues.

Our oldest passed his milestones at the doctor’s office so I wasn’t too worried.  While some were a little late (walking at 17 months), some of his milestones were way earlier than other children (knowing teal and magenta by three years old).  His speech came a little late, but by 4, he was reading board books and by 4 ½, he was reading full Dr. Seuss books with ease!  I just thought he was a genius and could only work on one thing at a time (physical came late while intelligence came early).

I really didn’t know that autism would be a diagnosis that would ever belong to my son.  My best friend’s nephew was autistic and only ate certain foods and was non-verbal.  That’s what I thought autism looked like.  I had seen Rain Man.  That’s what I thought autism looked like.

How could my relative normal son (quirks and all) really be autistic?  Sure, he could hyper focus, sure, he was low muscle tone, sure, he didn’t seem to care about having many friends, sure, he had a major meltdown in a restaurant because of how his pasta was cut, but autism, really?

We were called to homeschool back when he was 4, so although he was with other children his own age at Sunday school and at co-op, he didn’t have to do too much peer socializing.  He didn’t have to keep up with his peers physically and he didn’t have to be held back intellectually.  Don’t get me wrong, we were not isolationists, far from it! We were always on the go which was probably stressful for him, but also, it did push him socially but not constantly like it would have been in a school setting.

Looking back, I am pretty sure that some therapies would have helped him and some support from other parents in the same situation would have been helpful for me, but hindsight is 20/20 and we cannot change it now.  In a way, it was somewhat good for him to have to work things out on his own and for us to find ways to manage his quirks, oddities and struggles together.

One of the most difficult things that he has had to deal with is employment.  Just thinking about his struggle brings tears to my eyes.  It was so painful to watch him be rejected over and over.  I just wanted to explain to the prospective employers what a great employee he would be, but I am the mom and that is just not appropriate.  I truly didn’t come to grips with the fact that he had ASD (autism spectrum disorder) while he was going through the employment struggles.  It didn’t dawn on me that others didn’t see him and his abilities like I did.  They only saw his disability in the form of social awkwardness and his nonconforming appearance and his inability to answer the questions “correctly” on the computerized applications.

His struggles are not over, but he has been employed full time for a few years now and does catering on the side.  He is also in the process of applying for a trade where he would get on the job training.  He makes changes slowly and although his ultimate goal is to be a voice actor or a translator, he cannot seem to put himself out there and walk away from the safe jobs and guaranteed money (sounds like a lot of young men though, doesn’t it?).

I could write about so many things I have learned over the past 23 years, but what I want to do is give other parents hope and to use what I have learned to help many other young adults navigate the mine fields in the employment journey when they have ASD.