Legacy Farms is a small non-profit with an educational garden at Fabbioli Cellars, just outside of Leesburg. Our neurodiverse team of staff, mentors, and apprentices grow and deliver herbs, flowers, and vegetables to area businesses and food pantries. Select businesses even partner with us to employ our apprentices. This specific job will be working with an apprentice outside the garden on-site to develop work training skills and job experience.
Do you have a background in special education, social work/mental health, therapeutic work, or gardening with a desire to support neurodiverse individuals? Have you ever worked in a commercial kitchen? Are you available to work 3-5 hours per week, coaching one to two neurodiverse apprentices seeking to develop their job skills, self-awareness, and ability to self-advocate in future employment positions?
Growing Together, our mentor/apprentice program, is focused on hiring, training, mentoring, and facilitating increased personal development for neurodiverse individuals including those with Autism, Asperger, ADHD, specific learning disabilities, and related challenges that make landing and keeping a job difficult.
We hire mentors for 8-week job contracts, structured around a clearly designed 7-step framework. Provide job coaching for neurodiverse individuals to introduce work skills, personal awareness, and address specific challenges each individual has experience in getting and keeping a job. This is an opportunity to give back to your community, while increasing your own skills in working with neurodiverse individuals. You do need patience, calm communications skills, and understanding of the executive function, self-regulation, and self-awareness challenges and gifts associated with neurodiversity.
We prioritize a relationally based work environment where reciprocal communication is key to learning and self-development. We welcome challenges and set-backs as learning opportunities. And we believe that a balanced, well-regulated nervous system is the first step in increasing executive function, organizational, and emotional regulation on the job.
Sample duties include:
○ Attend review meetings with Legacy Farms leadership to receive apprentice assignments, develop plan(s) of action, and discuss philosophical principles related to mentoring
○ Identify each assigned apprentice(s)’ “edge of independence” to refine goals and deliverables
○ Create supports, materials, communications, guided instructions and networked relationships that move apprentice(s) along a continuum of progress and independence in job skills
○ Attend work with the apprentice for two hours per work day; up to 2x/week. Coaching and working alongside the apprentices to complete assigned work tasks
○ Dedicate an additional hour per week to prepare for consults with assigned apprentice(s) on areas of challenge and strategies for success in relation to agreed-upon responsibilities (by phone, email, or in person during garden hours)
○ Keep basic notes about each apprentices’ progress and complete quantitative and qualitative review of apprentices’ performance at the end of the 8-week period.
Hours: 2x per week (TBD) 5:30pm-7:30pm (on site); one hour per week on your own schedule to prepare/coach off-site.
Location: An assigned commercial kitchen in Ashburn.