By Melanie Rossi
Contributing Writer
GREEN BAY – Project SEARCH, a program designed to help young adults with disabilities prepare for and enter the workforce, recently hosted two graduation ceremonies for nine interns in the Green Bay area.
On Tuesday, May 30, five interns — Ashley Hollrith, Ashley Phillips, Hannah Platkowksi, Fabian Smith and Grace Weyenberg — graduated from Bellin Health/HSHS St. Vincent’s Hospital, where they had worked as on-site interns for nine months.
At the Aurora BayCare Medical Center on Wednesday, May 31, four more interns — Angela Crowder, Drew Gustin, Kalista Izzard and John (David) Jones — graduated from their on-site immersive work experiences.
Beginning at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital in 1996, Project SEARCH is now an international program with 733 sites spanning 48 states and 10 countries.
In Wisconsin alone, 200 young adults had the opportunity to work at 28 sites during the 2022-23 year.
Jessica Klemens, the Project SEARCH program manager with Aspiro, said, “It really started as a program to serve individuals with developmental disabilities but also to help them find a purpose and be part of their community.”
The program is highly collaborative, working with partners such as the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) and Aspiro, the “license-holder for the Green Bay sites,” Klemens said.
Green Bay’s two sites, Bellin Health/HSHS St. Vincent’s Hospital and Aurora BayCare Medical Center, allow their interns to develop transferable skills that can be adapted to work in a variety of departments.
“It starts in the beginning of September, and it goes until the end of May,” Klemens said. “In that time, there are three ten-week internships, and there are also some work weeks in between where they are doing job development, which includes filling out applications, creating a resume, gathering workplace references and then there is volunteering, job tours, interview skills — a variety of different things happen during those work weeks.
“The goal is to gain some of those hard skills that are needed; we call them transferable skills because the skills they are learning are skills that they will be able to take anywhere with them in work and life in general. So they are doing a lot of tasks in the different departments, but they have a variety of different environments that they are in throughout the hospital… They are in the NICU; they are in the ICU; they are also in environmental services and Food and Nutrition and everywhere in between.”
The recent graduations marked the end of each intern’s nine month training experience at their respective site and recognized each intern for their achievements, granting them their certificates of completion.
Klemens said, “Both celebrations had probably 80 to 100 people in attendance, and those people in attendance included some of the collaborative partners of the program but also many of the hospital’s staff, including supervisors and mentors and interns’ families, friends and other supporters that they have in their lives.”
These graduations—the culmination of each intern’s training—mark a shift in the lives of each intern, as they prepare to enter the workforce.
“The goal of the program is to obtain competitive, integrated employment in the community — at least 16 hours a week or more. We have until February 28, of 2024 to help them to obtain that employment for it to be considered a success on Project SEARCH’s terms.”
For four interns, Project SEARCH can already be considered a success.
“Four of the nine interns are already hired and will begin working,” Klemens said. “One has already started, and the other three will be starting in the next couple of weeks. The remaining interns who are still looking for employment will continue to look for employment weekly with our career specialist and attend interviews to help them find employment in the very near future.”
While the financial benefits offered by future employment already highlight Project SEARCH’s value, Klemens noted the more personal, subtle effects the program has been having for its interns.
“They find purpose, and they gain confidence — and, really, it shows. They go to interviews and are able to communicate effectively to advocate for themselves, and a lot of times employers will contact us and ask us, ‘Is there any Project SEARCH intern who is in this type of work?’ They are highly sought after based on the skills that they learn through the program. A lot of the interns that complete the program, the jobs that they get following the program is the job they stay at long term… Many of the jobs that they’ve obtained they are still in today.”
Project SEARCH works hard to help young adults with developmental disabilities find and secure stable jobs — and the graduation of the nine recent Green Bay interns acts as a testament to this goal.
To learn more about Project SEARCH, visit www.projectsearch.us.