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NEWS

Garden project opens hearts of disabled young adults

Jessica Bliss
jbliss@tennessean.com

Dirt cascades through glove-clad hands as a group of community volunteers prepares a winter garden.

But with each forkful of earth they fling, they cultivate more than just the small plot behind McGruder Family Resource Center.

They grow self-confidence, self-awareness and a sense of community.

For most of their lives, the young adults in this garden — all students with intellectual and developmental disabilities — have relied on the services of others to meet their daily needs.

This fall, through the Next Steps program at Vanderbilt University, service has become part of what they do, instead of just what they receive.

The two-year nonresidential certification program teaches social skills and offers vocational training to help this population of young adults transition into independent lives. Now, for the first time as part of the curriculum, the students participate in a monthly service project to meet a different area of community need.

As people who know what it's like to be looked out for, they're now doing the looking out.

"I have people in my life who take care of me," 24-year-old Hardin Manhein said, his warm smile thawing the chill from the garden outside, "and I want to return the favor."

Most everyone wants to be part of something that is bigger than they are.

And that begins with a crisp afternoon in the garden digging holes for lettuce sprouts, despite a strong dislike for worms, and scattering fistfuls of hay across the ground.

Vanderbilt Next Steps student Anna Grafan hands out sprouts of lettuce to be planted for a winter garden for the Nashville Food Project at the McGruder Family Resource Center.

Actions like this, where others are the focus, "opens up their world," said Lisa Hale, a second-year master's student in social work who helped implement the service component as an intern for the Next Steps program.

"It opens up their hearts," she said.

And it opens the community to understanding who these people are.

They are not their Down syndrome, their autism, or their speech and language impediments.

They are intelligent, funny, crazy, feisty young adults in search — as are so many students their age — of acceptance and opportunity.

Like all people who enter into the landscape of community volunteer work, these disabled adults are pushing themselves to try new experiences, enter into new environments and consider life from other perspectives.

That means an October afternoon spent with Open Table Nashville assembling survival kits for the Nashville homeless. Or raising $150 for Vanderbilt's Habitat for Humanity build fund, and then completing a 5K in support of the cause.

It didn't matter that they were the last group across the finish line.

And a few weeks later, it didn't matter that most hadn't gardened before.

Helping the Nashville Food Project was about initiative.

Here's compost. Here's a shovel. And here we go.

"The ability to blow stereotypes out of the water is phenomenal," Hale said.

And, at the end of each activity, they are proud and slightly more confident — an important trait for their own self-advocacy as they seek jobs in an integrated work world and discover how to stand up for themselves in situations where acceptance is lacking.

Putting memories behind that — instances where they worked for something and someone, reinforces that they are "able and capable," said Next Steps director Tammy Day.

They, too, have skills and perspective to offer.

"It makes me feel good," 21-year-old Nicholar Pinter said as he recovered from a mulch-filled afternoon, "making a difference for other people."

And when they have completed an activity, they are drawn to another.

Barely a few minutes had passed at the completion of the garden activity when the jacket-clad group discussed the projects they would pursue next.

Serving soup to the needy or sorting nonperishables at a food bank.

In December, they will support a family through the Angel Tree program.

Maybe in the spring they will harvest the greens they planted.

There is so much more to reap.

Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and on Twitter @jlbliss.

Learn more

To learn more about Vanderbilt's Next Steps programs, visit http://vkc.mc.vanderbilt.edu/vkc/nextsteps/.