On a recent afternoon, Alvin Green packed cookies over the hum of the refrigerators in a commercial kitchen in Beverly. He gingerly laid out parchment paper at the bottom of a large bin and gave careful instructions to employee Jasmine Glover.
“We’re gonna try to fit as many as we can on here, all right? Looks like we can get about four, OK?” said Green, a 57-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard and an easy smile.
“Yeah,” Glover responded quietly.
Green is the owner of Al’s Cookie Mixx, which he calls an “online gourmet customizable cookie company. You pick your base — vanilla, chocolate, oatmeal. You go through our list of mix-ins. We say, ‘You mix, we bake, we ship.’”
The “we” includes Green’s dozen or so part-time employees, all of whom have special needs — including 26-year-old Glover, who has Down syndrome.
Al’s Cookie Mixx opened in a shared kitchen last fall and employs people with disabilities in his own community. This is personal for Green because his son Aiden, 20, has autism, and Green knows the struggle of many parents with special needs children. They wonder what their kids will do to earn a living once they age out of the educational system. For adults with autism, studies show the unemployment rate ranges from around 40% to 85%.
After working as a caterer for 15 years, Green heeded the advice of his wife: “Combine your two loves: your love of baking cookies and your love for Aiden and his friends.”
With his knowledge of raising a child with autism, Green understands employing people with special needs takes more than just hiring and signing their paychecks.
“We want to take into consideration all of their needs,” he said, listing different accommodations for people with sensory issues, verbal limitations, wheelchair usage and other issues.
“We’re going through the process right now of breaking down every task from start to finish and trying to see where we can fit in our kids,” he said. Aiden prefers sealing the cookie wrappers and putting labels on them to baking or interacting with customers at pop-up events or farmer’s markets.
Disability advocates say businesses like Green’s develop because there isn’t a reliable system of helping people with special needs find and keep jobs.
“We see a lot of these homegrown projects from families or smaller community initiatives,” said Holly Wiese, of the Autism Assessment, Research, Treatment & Services Center at Rush University Medical Center.
She said young people on the autism spectrum, and those with special needs in general, face numerous barriers to employment — including transportation, the interview process and environmental challenges.
“We see that difficulty in transitioning out of school-based services,” Wiese said. “Folks generally are on this cliff, and many kind of fall off with very little support.”
Wiese cited a study that said more than two-thirds of youth on the autism spectrum did not transition into either employment or education in the first two years after leaving high school.
For Green, this statistic is what he is aiming to chip away, one cookie at a time. He said Aiden understands “this is his company, this is for his future.” But his bakery is also a way for the family to help the community.
When Green announced he was starting Al’s Cookie Mixx, he heard from a number of people — just in Beverly alone — who said “I got a kid, they are sitting at home.”
“The need for employment opportunities is a lot greater than what we can supply right now,” he said. But he hopes to grow his business and be able to hire many more like Aiden and Jasmine.
“Our tagline is ‘Your enjoyment provides employment.’ The more cookies we sell, the more kids we can hire,” Green said.
