Where do students go after high school? Some may go to college straight away, others may take a gap year, get a job or even study abroad. Where do students with special needs go after high school? For a lot of these students the answer is much more complicated. Extraordinary Ventures is working to make the answer more clear.
Extraordinary Ventures is a non-profit organization based in Chapel Hill that provides job opportunities for people with Intellectual and Developmental Disorders (IDD), such as those on the autism spectrum. People with IDD are consistently turned away from jobs because of the stigma that they cannot work.
Lisa Kaylie, the executive director of Extraordinary Ventures, is working to spread the message of “universal design” to the community. Universal design is the idea that jobs can be designed to be accessible to people, regardless of age, disability or other factors.
“[You] know people with disabilities at school, you see them all around. Then they disappear after school because all of the supports that people get in schools are gone when you graduate,” Kaylie said. “A lot of times [employers] don’t want to employ them and [they] just end up hanging out at their parents’ house all the time. It’s sad because everybody needs purpose; everybody wants to be part of the community somehow.”
The way a majority of current jobs are structured can be alienating for adults on the spectrum, to the point that 79 percent of adults on the spectrum are unemployed. Extraordinary Ventures is working to close the employment gap by sparking systemic change and spreading their message that everyone is employable to small businesses. So far, Extraordinary Ventures has provided over 200,000 hours of work and paid over $1.2 million in wages over 15 years, have held routine gift markets promoting local businesses that are run by and/or hire employees with IDD and continue to educate people on the importance of inclusive jobs.
After leaving the environment of the school system, which has built in supports for students with special needs, adults with I/DD and autism fall off the cliff into adulthood. These adults suddenly lack the services, structure and social interaction that they received in school. Extraordinary Ventures has made it their mission to expand these supports into adult life.
“We want to show that everyone is employable; we [employ] people who are nonverbal, who are really great employees,” Kaylie said. “Everybody just needs the right job, so our mission is to provide meaningful job opportunities with the philosophy that everybody is employable. I always tell people that there’s this great movement for diversity, equity and inclusion in all businesses, [and] we are the inclusion.”
Extraordinary Ventures’ jobs include a laundry service at UNC, candle making, dog walking, bulk mailing, and even cleaning the Chapel Hill Transit buses.
“It’s just an amazing overlooked workforce. So many employers are saying, ‘Oh, we can’t find anybody to do these jobs,’ [so] we’re trying to spread the word that these people are there,” Kaylie said. “You just have to change the way you do things, and give them the opportunity to do the work because they’ll be great.”
Kaylie emphasized that having employers change the way they hire and what they ask of their employees benefits everyone, not just people on the spectrum.
“Making jobs more accessible by structuring them around the employee and their needs makes it [possible] for many different people to do a job.”
Photo courtesy of Extraordinary Ventures
