One of the most important services Connect Plus Therapy offers is helping adults and teenagers with autism gain increased independence. We accomplish this by incorporating specific goals that lead them towards independence by building transferable self-care, social, communication, and behavioral skills in a safe setting with clinical oversight.
Members of our adult program have the opportunity to create handmade products and sell them at farmer’s markets and online. All year round, our clients develop these products at our specialized adult center, including seed bombs, candles, coasters, paintings, ceramic jewelry, and plants they’ve propagated and cared for. To make their products, clients follow a written task analysis, a step-by-step guide, which helps them work as independently as possible. Being able to follow a set of instructions without prompting is an invaluable and generalizable skill that will help individuals gain increased independence across many aspects of their lives.
With access to community-based opportunities, such as farmer’s markets, participants gain a unique opportunity to practice generalizable, life-long skills that are imperative to transitioning to adulthood. The goals within our community-based ABA services allow them to focus on social, self-management, and pre-vocational skills like greeting customers or peers, answering customer questions about products, ringing up merchandise, calculating the total, providing change, and completing financial transactions with customers.
Each client has individualized programming with specific goals that are meaningful and significant to them and their quality of life. For example, a client may be working on attending to and following multi-step directions. During various activities throughout the day, multi-step directions are embedded naturally. The client’s Behavior Technician would prompt them, as needed, to attend to the entire direction and provide positive reinforcement when the client responds appropriately. As the skill is acquired, the Behavior Technician will systematically fade out the level and intensity of prompting until the client responds independently to the multi-step directions.
Community experiences, like those we provide at various farmer’s markets, are just one example of the opportunities available to our adult clients. Lastly, the proceeds from their hand-made products and efforts are used to fund field trips that our clients collectively choose.