Autism Labs

Building the Right Team for the IDD Community: Lessons from Decades of Experience

• Autism Labs Community • Season 4 • Episode 9

Share episode

In this episode of Autism Labs, Mike Carr shares insights on the challenges and lessons learned from decades of hiring staff to support adults with profound autism. He emphasizes the importance of finding team members who are not only reliable and coachable but who also have a genuine calling to serve this community. Beyond experience, traits like optimism, trustworthiness, and a strong spiritual foundation often set the best caregivers apart. Mike introduces the current John 13 team—a diverse group including behavior analysts, teachers, climbers, therapists, tech professionals, and students—each bringing unique strengths and deep commitment to the mission. Together, they create a culture of trust, compassion, and purpose that families can look to as a model when hiring for their own loved ones.

Mike Carr (00:05):

Welcome back to another episode of Autism Labs, and we've been talking about our summer camp and all the community members that we're serving, but this week I wanted to talk about staffing. I think this is a problem that all parents have, whether you're looking for someone to come into your home and help out with your autistic adult child or whether you're considering different programs in your area, and you're very concerned about the staffing and the training and everything they get. And so we've been trying to do this for decades and we've hired hundreds of people and we've made lots of mistakes. So I wanted to share with you a little bit about our current team, over a dozen folks, and what we've learned and some of the characteristics that perhaps you want to look for too when trying to find people that can work with your kiddo or a program that you feel comfortable with.

(00:55):

So there are a lot of obvious things we look for, but I would say personality and a calling is certainly really important. We need someone that's upbeat, someone that brings in optimism, a tough job, and someone that also has a calling, I think, to serve this community, these types of folks, as we know, it's challenging, right? They're behavior problems, they're dirty diapers. Oh my gosh. There's all kinds of things that happen unexpectedly that you need to be prepared for and be able to handle. And then certainly reliability and consistency if you're planning on someone to show up if they don't call at the last minute and cancel on you. So that's something else to look for. Experience, of course, is something else. Coachability, right? We are training a lot of these folks, very few, if any of them have ever worked with someone like our child or other folks in our community, and so bringing them in and showing them how to handle certain situations and train them in advance when things occur is really important.

(01:50):

So they got to be coachable. Another thing that's maybe not quite as obvious is spirituality or religion. A lot of our team members I think, lean that way. Some of them are actively involved in their church, not that we would turn anyone away, that's not a Christian, but we certainly follow the Christian teachings in a lot of our programs and how we treat and respect individuals and care for the community and trust one another and all that type of thing. And trust is certainly not the last thing to think about. If you don't trust them, nothing else matters, right? So that's something that we always have to take a look at too. So lemme take you through each of our leaders and talk a little bit about what sets them apart, and this might help you in your search or in your evaluation of folks.

(02:38):

So our executive director of our nonprofit, the leader of our program is Hayden. Hayden is a unique individual. I have never met anyone quite like him for his job interview. I don't know, five years ago we actually did it running on a track at the high school. So the job interview was in motion after he'd spent a full day with a bunch of middle schoolers at a waterpark at a summer camp. So he spent all day with 8, 10, 12 of these middle schoolers screaming and crying and doing all kinds of things that they do at a waterpark all day. And at five or five 30 in the afternoon on a hot summer day in Austin, Texas, he still had enough energy to run around the track and have a job interview about our son. So boundless energy, boundless enthusiasm, but he also has the experience. He has A B, C, BA, so his masters, he's got training in a clinic setting.

(03:30):

So he came to us with a set of skills that he had acquired, worked for us for a little while, then often worked for this other clinic, got his BCBA, and then we recruited him back to sort of run the program. He has built a culture of trust. He is unique, as I mentioned already in a variety of ways. One of the things that he really brings to the table is a love for every community member and all the staff, and he really protects his staff and tries to train them and teach them and guide them down. A very difficult path as you can all imagine. He's even now taking nighttime instruction to become a deacon in his local church. So I don't know how he has enough energy to do that, but he does. Ellen is our second command. She's been with Michael longer than anyone on our team over 12 years now.

(04:22):

Just an incredible gal. She's sort of the autism whisperer. She understands this community, not just our son, but everyone else that's in the community sort of intuitively gets it right. You talk about the five senses. I think she has that sixth sense that just sort of, I know what's in their head, I know what they're thinking, and she can look at Michael, literally look at him and get him to do things that you could not prompt him to do verbally. And she can do this with a number of the other community members now. So she's a remarkable person. She has her masters, I think all the hours she needs to get her BCBA. She really is the mama bearer of the community, the autism whisper. She has that firm, but loving, I think loving is really important here, firm, but loving way to interact with everybody and just endless patients.

(05:16):

Then we have our two Vanessa's and they're different, but they do have some overlaps. So they're both extremely organized, extremely disciplined. One of the Vanessa's ran swimming programs, so she did all the hiring and firing for lifeguards, the training of the staff. She's given swim lessons to hundreds of swimmers over the years. So she really understands all that administrative paperwork kind of background, and she just very naturally methodical, organized person, which brings incredibly important skillset, I think, to the table when it comes to running both our day program, summer camp, respite program, those types of things. The other, Vanessa is actually getting her doctorate now as a physical therapist. She's halfway through her three-year program, extremely disciplined, as I already mentioned. I mean, she'll work with Michael on a Friday night or a Saturday night until eight 30 at night, and then she'll go home and do homework for a couple hours on a weekend before she goes to bed because she really wants to get good grades.

(06:18):

She really wants to excel in getting her doctorate, and that's the kind of, I think, rigor and just discipline and drive that you're after in someone in a program like this. Then we have Lily. Lily is a cool gal. She's a rec therapist, recreational therapist, and a love for horses. She brings to the table. So the kiddos actually went out last week to her place and got to pet the horses and sort of experienced the barn. They mucked out some of the stalls. They actually volunteered there helping out around the stables and whatnot. Everyone loved her. It was a fun event, and Lily was able to sort of help guide everyone. She likes to do a lot of outdoor stuff. She's very into physical fitness, which of course is an important aspect of this population that tends to be very sedentary and not necessarily get into the physical side of things quite as much.

(07:09):

Then we have Angie Angie's our climber. She came to us from crux climbing gyms here in Austin, who've been an incredible supporter of our program since we started it. She worked there. She knows more about climbing than probably anybody else on our staff, except for maybe Hayden and Izzy, who are two other climbers. She also has a very kind and tender heart, and she just loves Michael and I think works very well with the other community members in helping guide them, whether it's inside doing puzzles and that kind of stuff, or outside rec, sports, that kind of thing. Then we have Izzy Izzy's a guy that's a tech it guru. I mean, he is an AI programmer, Python coder, extremely sharp technologically or technically, but he also has a calling for this population and all the guys just love him, right? All the community members, all the guys just love it when Izzy shows up because he's fun to be around.

(08:09):

He's a climber, as I mentioned, and so he has sort of this interesting mix of both the technology savvy to help us on some of the IT stuff, but also this desire to serve. And everyone I've mentioned so far, boots on the ground. I mean, these are folks that are out there interacting with the crew, working with the community members, going out there on field trips, but then they also had this other skillset when you're not necessarily in front of the crew. That's so important to make the whole program work. Then we have Jasia Jasia is a teacher during the normal school year, but during the summer she comes back to be with Michael and help out with the community some. She's a ball of fire, endless energy, very sharp, very disciplined. She brings a lot of her teaching skills to the crew, and I think takes what she's learned in working with middle schoolers, I believe, or maybe it's grade schoolers.

(09:00):

I can't remember what grade she's teaches. But anyway, she's a great teacher and she brings that skillset to the table to work with our group. Olivia is our newest member. Olivia is going to be starting nursing school in the fall, which is really pretty interesting, pretty exciting. So she'll be an RN here in a couple of years, which is awesome, and which we're really excited about. She's got an incredible smile, just always optimistic, always upbeat, and really a joyous person that adds that sense of enjoyment and excitement and just pure joy to everything that she does. And then Tim and Cole is our second dynamic duo. Tim's got his BCBA. He manages a clinic, and we only get him on some weekends, but he's all about physical fitness. He's six four, big guy and really works well with his better half Cole, who is a physical personal trainer, rather personal trainer who works with Michael and others on keeping them in shape.

(09:55):

And then lastly, we have Ashley and Ivy. They're our social media whiz. Ashley has over 10 years of teaching experience with the deaf community, handles all our social media stuff. Ivy is her secondhand her executive assistant, who's incredibly skilled at video editing, podcast editing, blog posting, and together they get all the social media stuff taken care of across all the platforms. So that's a little bit about our team and how special and exciting and cool they are and what they bring to the table to make the John 13 community and Autism labs So special. Talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.