For the past several years, I’ve had the privilege of being a member of the Board of Directors for an organization founded in Southwest Florida. The acronym for the name of the organization is HAAPE, and this stands for “Helping Autistic Adults Perform & Excel.”
HAAPE is an organization that has developed programs that were created with individuals on the Autism Spectrum in conjunction with several partners, including Little Friends.
Some of the partners include Aspiritech, Summit Aerospace, Broward County College Center for Supply Chain Education, University of Central Florida Center for Autism and Related Disabilities, Stanford University, and Georgia Tech just to name a few. My count on their website was twenty-seven (27) different organizations are affiliated as partners working with and through HAAPE programs.
The intent of this work is to change the lives of people with autism by creating, nurturing and supporting educational, training and employment programs that promote financial and personal independence. One of the HAAPE partners that I’ve written about in recent months is our affiliation with Ken’s Krew, where we will be the Illinois representative providing support for individuals who have interest in working in Customer Service positions, primarily at Home Depot.
While our work with Ken’s Krew is just getting started, the need to expand access to HAAPE programs remains both a challenge and opportunity for those we serve. Over the past year HAAPE has been working on creating an infrastructure that will allow for the expansion of its job training programs into other markets beyond its primary location in Florida. Over the past year, new chapters intended to expand access to programming have opened in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Dallas, Raleigh, and Central Illinois. The group is not in Chicago, but there is news worth sharing.
This past month, Little Friends Connecting Adults with Communities program along with Aspiritech and Autonomy Works agreed to work together as founding members to create the HAAPE Chapter located in Chicago. It is our intent to collaborate in ways to make available training programs and initiatives that enable individuals on the Autism Spectrum to learn new skills and secure Community Integrated Employment.
Aspiritech and Autonomy Works both work with software testing and evaluation and have a wonderful history of success with what they do. Little Friends has provided access to Supply Chain and Logistics Management courses and currently is working to provide/support CNC Computer Numeric Control operator programming classes. There are other classes that we are getting access to and plan to evaluate including Avionics Repair and Commercial Drone piloting.
Helping individuals on the Autism Spectrum prepare for and secure employment that enables them to lead meaningful and independent lives is our goal. I look forward to sharing more about what’s coming in the time ahead.