People with autism face an uphill battle, finding a steady job, and continue to be underemployed.

This Autism Awareness Month, we look at the local organizations creating job opportunities for young adults on the spectrum, while changing the way people view neurodivergence in the workplace.

That and more.

Stay with us as we dive into "Your South Florida."

Hello and welcome to "Your South Florida."

I'm Pam Giganti.

For several years, we've done shows on autism, highlighting the challenges children and families face when it comes to care and education.

But on today's program, we're doing something a little different.

We wanna shine a light on what's working when it comes to employment of young adults on the autism spectrum, jobs that give them a sense of purpose and belonging.

Also referred to as neurodivergent, these young people often face unfair stereotypes, which limit their full potential as employable, independent, contributing members of society.

Although some employers are just now learning the importance and the value of a neurodivergent workforce, young adults with autism continue to be underemployed at a rate far greater than those without autism or neurotypical people.

The latest data shows that roughly 85% of people on the autism spectrum in the United States are unemployed compared to just over 4% of the overall population.

And nearly half of 25 year olds with autism have never held a paying job.

It's an issue that weighs on many parents of people with autism, worried what the future holds for their kids, and what will happen to their adult child when they're gone.

How will they support themselves?

These are questions that the D'Eri family faced head-on.

Determined to help their son and brother Andrew live a life of purpose, they set out on a journey to not only create a place for satisfying and sustainable employment for Andrew, but for all people with autism.

Now, a decade and three locations later, rising Tide Car Wash is a successful business, not in spite of their non-traditional workforce, but because of them.

So the idea of Rising Tide Car Wash came because my brother Andrew has autism, and when he was turning about 21 years old, we were really trying to figure out what was Andrew gonna be able to do with his life.

And it became really clear, really quickly that in order for him to lead the full adult life that we knew he was capable of, that we were gonna have to take action as a family.

My father, John D'Eri and I started this business as really as a means to employ him.

And it's kind of grown from there.

We bought our first car wash location back in 2012.

It was a struggling car wash in Parkland, Florida.

It was only washing about 35,000 cars a year.

And over time, we were able to renovate it, really make it an excellent location run by 80% people with autism.

And the business took off.

Today, it washes over a 170,000 cars a year, and we were able to take that success and open two more locations that are just as successful as the first one.

This is my first job, so I was a little bit kind of nervous, but as I seen people motivating me, telling me that it would be easy not to worry about it, and now I'm really confident now.

[Thomas] They get pushed.

They might feel like I can't do this, but they're reinforced by our supervisors and by our managers to keep going.

Keep trying, you can do it.

And over time, we've seen transformation among many of our employees to be able to say, "Hey, not only can I be a good employee, but there's other stuff I wanna do."

And then they can go get that job because they have something on their resume now.

We've had over a hundred people over since we started leave us and move on to other employment, and that's because of the confidence that they gain here.

I pretty much learned how the customers on the outside world behave and how to deal with them, how to deal with customers.

Of course, I'm still working on that, but it just gives me a good, you know, insight on how customers are in real life and how to deal with them.

I think the thing that really sticks out the most about this whole journey is that our employees with autism don't require anything special.

They just require a really well run business, the same things that any employee would need.

They just might need it a little bit more.

By designing objective hiring, by being deliberately developmental in the way that we train our team members.

And when someone is struggling, by looking at how the business is failing that person, not how that person is failing the business, we've really just built a better operation for anyone that is in involved in it.

We're able to now take, let's say a really excited recent high school graduate or someone who's currently getting an associate's degree or something like that.

And we're able to turn them into a manager in like three months.

And that's because of how well we've really focused on designing things to work effectively.

We just opened our Coral Springs location in July of 2022.

And that location's really unique because it's actually run 100% by neurodivergent employees.

We've simplified operations, we've made things really clear, really consistent, very streamlined, and that's allowed us to be able to do that.

I've been working at Rising Tide Car Wash for a few years.

It's been a really fulfilling experience and has really helped me move forward in a lot of areas of my life.

This is a business that is very accommodating to our needs.

You get a lot of places where you find that you need to meet very lofty expectations, whereas at Rising Tide Car Wash, you get a lot of the sense of they want to know what you can do and how best you can do what you can, as opposed to asking you to do more and more and more.

It's a matter of setting boundaries and then pushing those boundaries in ways that are constructive instead of destructive.

Our employees with autism, they absolutely, positively need structure and clarity in the expectations of the role, in how they do a role.

But when they have that, they're exceptional employees.

But every employee needs that.

Every employee needs clarity When there's ambiguity in a role, we tend to focus on the wrong things or get frustrated or stressed out for no real reason.

And so we need to frame the things that people with autism need, not as accommodations, special accommodations for this person, but as insights into making our businesses better for everyone who works there.

For Andrew, this has become a community for him.

He works four days a week.

He loves the people that he works with and more than anything else, he's really proud that he's the inspiration for this business.

This is for the first time for many of our team members.

They really have a community of peers that have had similar lived experiences that they have, and they're all striving for the same type of goal within the organization.

Recently we did a team event, our Christmas party, and we promoted one of our neurodivergent team members into a supervisor role.

The atmosphere of how absolutely ecstatic the whole team was for Shaun to be able to move into that role.

It was incredible.

Shaun was so excited that he actually lifted me up over his shoulder to celebrate.

And that's the type of commitment that we have from our team members, but also the type of really supportive community that we have in our culture.

I felt excited.

I felt like, oh, this was never gonna happen to me, but here I am, I'm a supervisor.

I have more confidence now than I did when I first worked here at the Rising Tide Car Wash. And it's due to the fact that I'm used to customers now, and I'm used to working and like the amount of training, the amount of years of experience being here, it's made me feel comfortable with working.

I hope, when people come and visit us, first thing that they realize is that we've got happy and engaged employees who are doing a professional job and a really good service.

And hopefully that will show them that people with autism can be exceptional employees for any organization.

On a busy day at this location, we'll wash well over 1,000 cars.

That's a lot going on in an 11-hour day, and it's run almost entirely by neurodivergent team members.

And that should tell you that the capability that people with autism have has been radically undervalued.

And that's what we really want people to take away when they come here.

Well, incredible.

And as you can see, the D'Eris not only found success with their business model, but showed the community what people with autism are capable of doing.

Because of this, Tom and his father, John, in partnership with the UM-NSU Center for Autism and Related Disabilities, or CARD created Rising Tide U, a training program to help business leaders see the value of an inclusive workforce.

And with his new book, "The Power of Potential: How a Nontraditional Workforce Can Lead You to Run Your Business Better," Tom offers a step-by-step guide to help employers hire and train the best workers, no matter their neurological capabilities.

Joining me now to share more is Tom D'Eri, co-founder of Rising Tide U and the author of "The Power of Potential."

And joining us virtually is Dr. Michael Alessandri.

He is the executive director of UM-NSU CARD.

Welcome to both of you.

Thanks, Pam, it's pleasure to be here today.

I saw you nodding your head and smiling watching the piece.

What was going through your mind when you were watching that?

I mean, it's just so great to see our team members get the opportunity to highlight their skills and I just feel a lot of pride every time I see things like that and they're so articulate and they're such great advocates, for not only the work that we do, but the capabilities that people with autism in general have.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you've learned so much creating this business with your dad.

We said the journey was really to create something for Andrew, and then it just got so much bigger than that.

You wrote this book, "The Power of Potential."

Talk a little bit about why you wrote the book.

Yeah, so we've been doing this for about 10 years now, and a few years ago, we realized that the things that we were doing to support our employees with autism weren't really autism-related solutions.

They were general solutions that could be applied to a variety of different businesses that could really help other business leaders build their businesses in a more effective way.

And whether that be becoming better and more inclusive in hiring, becoming a more clear organization so people know what they're supposed to be working on in any given situation, a more developmental organization.

So we don't rely so much on past experience and we can invite more people, more engaged people into our organization and then teach them how to do things.

Or whether it be how to deal with team members who are really struggling and actually using that as a lever for insight in your organization.

And we felt that this could not only help small and medium sized business leaders really gain access to better talent and also differentiate their brands, but would hopefully lead to more jobs for people with autism.

Yeah, and we can talk more about that a little bit later as well.

I love how you really kind of turned the whole hiring process on its head with not really doing interviews, but more of auditions.

So I wanna talk a little bit more about that, but, Dr. Alessandri, welcome.

It's great to see you as well.

Talk about why it was so important for you to get involved with the D'Eri family in this project.

Well, first of all, thanks for having us and thanks for, once again leading the way in talking about autism.

You guys have been so supportive for so long.

You know, I think of myself as the great protector of the autism community here in South Florida.

And so I'm always very cautious when people approach the community with new ideas because autism is now an industry and I think there's a lot of opportunity for people to be misled and mistreated.

And so I was very careful when I met the D'Eris.

I heard that they were looking to meet with me, eager to talk about their vision, and almost instantaneously, I just knew these guys were good guys with a great idea, with the intent to really change the world.

And I think it all comes from the love of their son and brother.

And that just spoke to me.

And also, the vision of the car wash made so much sense from an autism perspective because it's all about systems and processes and creating a work environment that makes sense to the person with autism.

So for me, it was just a no-brainer.

We jumped full throttle on board and have been partners ever since, and we're so proud of the work that they've done for our community.

No, and they've been wildly successful.

But I think what is so important is the process, the clarity.

You even talk in the book about how you color coded things.

So let's kind of talk about, I mean, it's successful now, but this was a journey for you.

You even mentioned in the book, like, you yourself didn't even know really how to use a wrench, and the car wash is very mechanical, so everybody had to learn new skills and things.

But walk us through what some of the challenges were.

Yeah, I don't think anyone had to learn more new skills than I did.

But I think right away, it was really learning how do you run an effective customer service on demand business and then do it in a way where it's clear enough and consistent enough where it's going to be able to support neurodivergent talent.

Frankly, our employees with autism were the least of our worries to start.

It was very much more our ability to do kind of the fundamentals of this business.

But our team members really taught us how to do it in a lot of ways because they needed things to be clear.

But I also needed things to be clear.

It was not going to be effective for me to be able to lead any group of individuals if I wasn't able to articulate what we needed, if we weren't able to be vulnerable and work in service to our team members and try to develop our team members.

This is how good service organizations really run.

But our staff was really able to, at least for me, help me kind of take off the armor and not feel like I had to have all of the answers.

Oftentimes, leaders feel that they're compelled to just know everything, even though they don't, obviously, none of us do.

And you were all learning along the way, right?

Exactly.

But in this situation, it was a lot easier for me to say, okay, like, I don't know how to do this.

Like, I messed up there, it's okay to mess up.

See, I'm modeling the same thing that I need you to do because you're gonna mess up too, and that's okay, and we're all gonna learn together.

And I think that really became the foundation of a lot of the practices that we ended up putting into place.

Dr. Alessandri, what have you learned watching the D'Eris go through this process in hiring so many neurodivergent folks and they're all working together?

I think, for me, you know, because I approach this from kind of the non-profit service, you know, university based world of autism, it's a very different approach.

And I think for me, the most important lesson that I will take with me for the rest of my life is that Tom and John and his family taught me that if we're gonna create viable businesses and viable employment opportunities for adults with autism, you can't approach it from the perspective of a charity.

It has to be presented to the public as a viable business, right?

So the business model is everything.

And I think what we've learned and what we put into our course and all the other work we're now doing at CARD is that autism is good business.

This does not have to be pitched to the business world as just a good thing to do or something that you do for social return on investment.

This really is good for the bottom line because you have employees who can work efficiently, who can work reliably, and who actually want to do the jobs that they're doing.

And you know, the success rates when we do meaningfully engage people in employment with autism are just astounding in a lot of ways.

So I think that's the most important lesson that this has to be about business at the end of the day.

And I think too, and both of you can answer this, or Tom, to you, you were told too that people who are on the spectrum like to work alone, but you've learned that they actually like to work in pairs and groups, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I think, you know, early on when we were starting this, there weren't a lot of other examples of workplaces that had really embraced neurodiversity.

So we were kind of operating off of a lot of the research that was from school-based settings.

And it's just, it's a different context where we knew that we needed to have teamwork in an organization.

Most organizations need to have teamwork.

So even though there were some experts that were saying, you know, people with autism need to work solo, independent tasks, we said, okay, well let's really test this hypothesis.

Let's see what it's like in the real world.

So we did a prototype in Florida City in 2012 in partnership with CARD as well as Sonny's Enterprises, which is the largest manufacturer of car wash equipment in the country, and it's actually based here in South Florida.

And we'd put that to the test.

And what we found really quickly was that in a community of peers with a shared mission, people with autism love to work with other people with autism, with other people, right?

Because we have a shared goal, we have shared competence, and just like any other community, people might be a little different, but in our case, our team members, a lot of them have similar lived experiences and also similar hobbies and interests that they may not have experienced in other places.

So yeah, definitely I think shed some misconceptions there and we're not the only employer that's learned that to date, either.

Yeah.

Dr. Alessandri, has it changed the way you operate at CARD at all?

It absolutely has because we have a whole new fresh perspective about meaningful employment for adults with autism and also the potential, you know, Tom talks about the power of potential, and I think we've always known about the remarkable skills and capacity of the people that we work with here at CARD.

But I think seeing it in action, seeing what they've built and seeing how they've inspired so many other businesses to do the same has just given us such a, just a larger landscape on which to understand, you know, just the possibilities for all of our clients.

We serve almost 16,000 families, about half of them are adults, and you talked about the unemployment rate, but to some extent, even worse, is the underemployment rate.

Many of these folks are much more capable than even the jobs that they do have when they're able to get them.

So, you know, we're just thrilled with what we've done.

We're thrilled with the inspiration that's come out of this.

We now have launched lots of employment training programs, both on the preemployment side as well as once people get jobs, keeping them, keeping those jobs and keeping people meaningfully engaged in the life that we all intend to have.

We're also now working on teaching banking skills and financial literacy because now people are wage earners and they weren't before.

So just a lot of opportunity has come from this and we're just so, so grateful and just continue to be inspired.

And certainly is giving hope to the parents and the families of people who have somebody on the autism spectrum.

Quickly again, this is the book, "The Power of Potential."

Are you taking this out into the community and trying to reach more businesses to let them know about how incredible it can be to have neurodivergent workers?

Yeah, so with the help of platforms like this, as well as some other social media and, other organizations that are helping us spread the word, we're really trying to explain to other businesses that, like Michael said, like we've been talking about, this isn't just a good thing to do.

It's a better strategy for your business.

Many organizations, especially small and medium sized businesses really struggle to find people to fill their roles, especially entry level roles.

There are service organizations right now all over the country that are limiting their service offerings, limiting their operational hours.

There are car washes that have closed their interior cleaning departments simply because they can't find people to do this stuff when there's really no such thing as a labor shortage, in my opinion.

It's just a really ineffective approach to hiring and inviting talent into our organizations.

And I think we've learned some really great tactics that any organization can use, whether they're immediately ready to hire neurodivergent people or they just want to improve their operations for the people who are currently working there.

Congratulations on the book and all the work that you're doing at Rising Tide and Rising Tide U.

Thank you so much, Tom, for being here.

Dr. Alessandri, thank you as well.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you, Pam.

Thanks so much.

Well, for decades, Easterseals, South Florida has been helping neurodivergent students.

Their culinary arts high school program has given hands-on training to neurodivergent students in the kitchen with the goal of providing vocational and social skills, self-confidence and independence.

"Your South Florida" recently spent the day at Easterseals, South Florida to learn how this initiative is lifting the barriers to employment for students while giving families hope for the future.

Easterseals is a nonprofit organization.

We have been providing services for individuals with disabilities for about 80 years in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties.

We have three daycare centers, two in Miami-Dade, one in Broward, where we provide services for seniors with memory impairment disorders.

We provide in-home respite in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, and we provide headstart services for families in need in Miami-Dade County in six different locations.

We also provide special education for children and young adults with disabilities from birth to 22 years old.

Our program follows the Sunshine State Standards, but we do have modified curriculum.

The classroom looks like a regular class.

They have reading, language arts, math, science, social studies.

Once they go to high school, it varies a little bit because it's a culinary arts program.

So even though they have this academic component, they go to the kitchen every day either to prepare the food for the entire school.

They prepare breakfast, lunch, and snack, or to do the cleaning part of the kitchen that is necessary.

They also have the Living Skill Center, which is where they learn about their independent skills.

They practice how to work in an office, how to prepare an order, how to take a break, because some of them don't know how to take a break.

You have free time and they don't know what to do.

They learn the measurement unit, we'll teach them all of the cooking terms, the cooking method, the cutting method.

In career preparation, we teach them how to success in a job interview, how to follow through in a job when they get a job, how to apply for job openings.

Most of the time when we go to the kitchen that the chef assign them to do any type of job, Miss.

Wendy say, "Jackie supervise the student."

And I say, "Guy, you are, you know more than me about the culinary program."

They feel that they are important in the thing that they are doing.

We wanna make sure that everything we do is organized, right or wrong?

Well, like , no.

Okay, then we need to do the same because there's a standard that we live by, right?

So my method is it doesn't matter what kind of job you're gonna get, it needs to be a process.

So there needs to be discipline, there needs to be a sequence, and there needs to be steps in everything you do.

And I find that most of them, even if they don't like the kitchen or they don't like cooking, they take on these steps which is gonna like equip them for life.

Even if we need to tweak something, it's doable, you know?

So I don't put limitations on them.

Sometimes I push them a little hard, but for me, there is no limitations to what they can do.

You can see that, you know, from our students, they grow into adults that are functional.

They just need to be given that chance.

I think that identifying the unique abilities of our students, it's critical to everything that we do.

Once you identify how good they are at certain areas, we are able to place them in locations.

Either it's an internship or a job where they can themselves feel fulfilled because they are doing something they are good at and they are doing something that they like.

So it comes full circle.

When we believe in them and they know somebody's believing in them and they see themselves, the result of the things they can do.

It's pretty obvious and it's pretty seamless how accomplished they are going to feel.

Right now we have a partnership with Nicklaus Children and two of our current students are doing their internship there in the cafeteria where they're practicing their skills they are learning here with Chef Wendy.

They're putting into practice there.

I like to to cook , chili, pasta.

I like to learn new ingredient.

I like to cook and I like to help other people too.

It make me feel good.

I wanna go to college and get my education, then I wanna have my own restaurant.

We currently have Shakinah and Sebastian, two students that have worked in a couple different areas within our department, knowing that they've been trained so that they know how to use kitchen equipment.

Sometime there's a fear, oh, they can't use the slicer, they're gonna burn themselves.

They've been trained so that they know.

So taking that step back and just like you would do any new hire, keep an eye, are they using the equipment properly?

Are they not?

And that's been one of the best parts is that they know and they're familiar.

So now it's like putting them in the real world.

They wanna work, they wanna learn, and they want to be in the real space.

So it's making sure that they feel comfortable so that they're able to grow.

It's super rewarding for me when a student comes back to the program after they've graduated and said, "You know, Miss.

Wendy, I'm working in the community and thank you so much for what you did."

And, you know, also, my coworkers, the academic teachers, you have no idea how fulfilling that is for me.

You know, because my goal is to equip them and set them up for life, you know, for success.

We need them to graduate and be part of the workforce.

They're really good workers.

So we need them to be included in the community and be part of that, and eventually be independent and be able to have a life on their own.

I think from the parents in particular, they see their child with a mission now, now they have a purpose.

They are able to identify their abilities and their skills, and they now know that they can get a job.

They were able to see the full potential of their own child.

So to any parent, I think that my advice would be to trust in their child's ability to always strive and help them gain independence in various aspects.

And also believe in organizations that provide services Like Easterseals.

We are here to support them now and in the future, and they are not alone.

To learn more about the programs discussed on today's show and additional autism resources, find us on social media @yoursouthfl.

I'm Pam Giganti.

Thanks so much for watching.