Posted 08 October 2015 - 12:22 PM
Wow this hasn't been updated in a while. Well...
A little about myself; I help people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. My end goal in life is to start up a place of my own providing services to individuals with I/DD for them to thrive and accomplish everything they want in their life. My philosophy is that in order to know what you're doing in this field, you need to experience first hand what individual's with I/DD deal with every day. Therefore, I've bounced around all over the place with jobs, picking up 2-3 at a time, supporting individuals in their community, work, pre-vocational, etc. I want to know all aspects in an individual's life so that way, down the road, when I open up a non-profit, I know what I'm talking about.
So I've helped individuals in the community, pre-voc, life, and the last thing I needed to experience was helping individuals obtain and maintain employment. I moved to North Carolina because there was a good job that would help me experience that (and I wanted to finish my masters at UNC/Duke). Well, long story short, since I've been hired a month and a half ago, I've helped about 5 individuals with Autism obtain jobs, I've helped over 5 through interviews (complete side note, I have about 25 on my caseload and there have been no individuals with autism hired by employers in this company for the past 5 months before I got hired. I've found out that I'm a wordsmith when it comes to employers), and I've pretty much built momentum to help everyone else on my caseload succeed in obtaining and maintaining employment.
Today specifically, I got one of my individuals with Autism a job. I know he's gonna do amazing. If anyone is on the fence with what they want to do with their lives, I totally recommend working in the I/DD population. Oh my god does it make you feel like you've earned a place in this world. Makes you want to give that 110% day in and day out (even in a residence).
