Students Lead Efforts to Boost Employment of Autistic Young Adults

By developing an employer manual and a series of training sessions, MERISTEM students who are part of an advocacy group in California aim to lower the high unemployment rates among young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

MERISTEM is a day and residential program in Sacramento that helps young adults with Autism and other developmental difficulties transition into independent living and employment. The program has 50 students from the ages of 18 to 28.

After California Assembly Bill 2840 was signed by the governor, funding an Autism employment pilot program, 12 MERISTEM students were invited to become part of a leadership lab. The group was eventually named Transformational Advocacy Project (TAP), and members interview employers and individuals with ASD to gather data for their manual and trainings.

TAP also partnered with the California Workforce Development Board, the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency and the California Workforce Association to help with the process and meets weekly with peer collaborators from Los Angeles County.

“In the time that TAP has been around, we’ve laid good groundwork to start doing the work we are doing now with the internship program,” said Zack Task, a TAP member. “We decided on a name, started getting things organized in a Google drive and we’ve done a few other things to help propel the project forward and give us a good base so we really can start collecting information and adjusting that. Hopefully soon, we can produce something that is readable to help employ more people on the Spectrum.”

According to a 2013 report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 90 percent of young adults living with ASD are unemployed or underemployed nationwide.

Valerie Baadh Garrett, TAP program director, said the low rates of employment are due to lack of jobs skills caused by little preparation in K-12 schools.