A Tudor-style building at a downtown Evanston corner. Photo: Eric Fredericks from Rancho Cordova, CA, United States / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
A new job-training program for young adults with autism was taking shape in the kitchen of an Evanston bakery in the fall of 2014. Have Dreams Academy, run by the autism nonprofit Have Dreams, placed participants in internships at Sugar and Spice Extraordinary Sweet Treats, 829 Foster St., where they packaged cakes and cookies while learning how a workplace runs.
The grant and the partner
The Coleman Foundation announced in August 2014 that it was giving $125,000 to pilot and launch the academy. The Illinois grantmaker, founded in 1951, funds entrepreneurship education, cancer care and services for people with developmental disabilities. According to the announcement, the money also paid for a manufacturing curriculum and a soft-skills curriculum developed with the bakery, adaptable job-assessment tools, and a Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management intern.
That intern’s task was to track how participants performed at the bakery and use the data to build a business case for hiring people with autism. Have Dreams hoped the findings would help recruit employers for graduates.
Sugar and Spice, which owner Jean Kroll has run in Evanston since 1999, also sells under the ILOVESWEETS name. Kroll told the Daily Northwestern in January 2015 that a friend’s struggle to keep a job after college inspired her. She ran a six-week pilot over the summer with three people with autism and offered all three seasonal jobs afterward.
What the program involves
As described in early 2015 coverage, the class ran 10 weeks, with participants at the bakery three days a week and at Have Dreams the other two. The training covered interaction, teamwork, goal-setting, problem-solving and working both alone and in groups. Kroll described the bakery as a safe place to practice workplace behavior, where errors become lessons. Staff began holding Friday team lunches, and she said it was initially difficult to blend the new hires into the existing crew.
Have Dreams, based at 2020 Dempster St. in Evanston with a second site in Park Ridge, was founded in 1996 as a nonprofit for children and families affected by autism. It runs programs in communication and social skills, trains teachers and professionals, and provides consultation, diagnostic and family-support services. The academy extended that work into employment for high school graduates and young adults preparing for jobs or further study.
The organization has said its vocational programs include internships. Its website has reported that 75 percent of participants landed jobs after completing them.
Program details are drawn from the Coleman Foundation’s Aug. 4, 2014 announcement and the Daily Northwestern’s Jan. 28, 2015 report.
Rachel Lindqvist covers community life, the lakefront, dining and the arts for The Evanston Edge.
