For years, Teren’e Chambers struggled to find employment.
She applied for cashier positions and jobs in the service and retail industry.
But whenever she’d seemingly get close to landing a position, it would go to someone else.
“The interviewers are neurotypicals,” Chambers, 27, of Los Angeles, said. “They don’t know my story at all. I wish they knew my story.”
Chambers has autism, a developmental disability caused by differences in the brain. People with autism may behave, communicate, interact, and learn in ways considered different from others.
For Chambers, it also means often being misunderstood by people without disabilities.
As the job rejections piled up, Chambers discovered a nonprofit called ROSIES Foundation.
“Their slogan and mission really caught my eye,” Chambers explained. “And then a few days later, I got rejected from a retail/food job, and I went into ROSIES to see if they had any resources for me, and they did.
“I needed those resources so I could, you know, get better at doing retail, customer service, and handling money.”
ROSIES Foundation, located in the Culver City Arts District, began with two people – Lee and Nechama Chernotsky – who dedicated their lives to improving the realities for people with disabilities. With philanthropic support from Jeffrey Sobrato, ROSIES was established in 2014 to create employment and learning opportunities for people with disabilities in the Los Angeles region
“ROSIES is our life’s work,” Lee said with a smile.
Before ROSIES, Lee spent two decades working in more traditional settings to support people with disabilities and their families. Nechama grew up with a disabled younger brother.
“To reach a lot of his milestones, he [her brother] needed a lot of support from individuals in the family. I was part of his progress, and it was a way for us to interact meaningfully. It was very much part of my upbringing.
“It shaped who I am. I definitely think that he has impacted my life for the better and in meaningful ways.”
Eventually, Nechama and Lee would meet each other and even work together teaching Hebrew school to people with disabilities. They would then get married and, years later, create the ROSIES Foundation.
ROSIES has two core programs. The first, they call HiREd, is an apprenticeship and training program focused on building professional and personal skills for generating practical employment experience. The foundation’s other program is POP! – a social enterprise generator that supports collaborations across industries and in-house workforce development opportunities.
“Our dream is really that the business is the program, and the program is the business,” Lee said. “It’s re-imagining the model of support. It’s more of a model of strengthening and learning how to diversify your own abilities to do things.
“We use the term diverse abilities, which is controversial for some. We’re not saying disability is a bad word, but when you really break it down, the idea is to recognize that everyone experiences disability. And we intentionally designed each of our programs to encourage accessibility within opportunities through the lens of a group of people having diverse abilities, bringing those perspectives together.
“It’s a term to promote an open and positive approach to working with all colleagues, including those with a disability.”
ROSIES has about 15 people learning and working at their brick-and-mortar almost daily, with those people changing throughout the week. They also partner with numerous businesses in the community to provide their participants with internships and jobs. Some companies they partner with include UCLA, Microsoft, and the Shay Hotel, a boutique hotel by Hyatt.
And TING, a fiber internet company.
TING offered a ROSIES participant, who loves installing cable, a position with their customer care team to learn on-the-job skills in the fiber internet field. The company is creating an apprenticeship program for future employees. But the best part of the ROSIES/TING partnership, Nechama said, is that their current participant will be coaching TING employees on how to be more accessible for when they welcome their next round of apprentices with disabilities.
“It’s really exciting for us because we get to go into a much larger company, an organization, and really work from the ground up throughout the entire company having this ROSIES mindset of just making everything more accessible for everyone,” she said.”And another beautiful part of ROSIES is that we’re not trying to fit somebody into an opportunity. When that right person comes around for a job or opportunity, we can make collaborations happen.”
When ROSIES isn’t placing people with disabilities into various roles around the community, they hire people to work for them and pay them above minimum wage.
After Chambers graduated from college, where she got a bachelor’s degree in film and media studies, she was hired to work part-time for ROSIES. She’s been with them for six years, some of which she’s worked as a digital content producer/editor, creating content.
“I feel comfortable here,” Chambers said. “I feel comfortable where I can, you know, I can finally stim. I can, you know, create. I know, I know. I like to stim. When I was stimming at a retail job, people looked at me funny, especially the customers.
“ROSIES is a place for people who want to, you know, change their outlook on their careers. Usually, people with disabilities or people on the autism spectrum they’re usually unemployed, which is very sad. But ROSIES is here to change all that.”
Stimming, otherwise known as self-stimulatory behavior, manifests as repetitive body movements and can bring enjoyment and help people – specifically those with autism – cope with uncomfortable or stressful situations. Stimming may include nail-biting, tapping, or repetitive movement of objects.
According to the U.S. Department Of Labor, the unemployment rate nearly doubled in 2021 for the disability community versus those without a disability: 10.1% to 5.1%, respectively.
In 2020, ROSIES hired 37-year-old Lex Paul as their crew lead after he was laid off because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Paul identifies as someone with ADHD and said he’s learned so much from working at ROSIES.
“It doesn’t matter what your disability is, it doesn’t matter what it is that you’re struggling with or what obstacles you have in front of you. It’s a matter of learning the tools to work with others and finding the places where you can thrive,” Paul said.
ROSIES has big plans for the future. On the side of their brick-and-mortar, they have a bus
that they plan to open and use to create an accessible podcast and content design studio. The ROSIES crew designed the bus’s interior, logo, and even a 3D bus stop mural on the wall next to the bus.
Some of the ROSIES crew will be hosting individual podcast shows, including “The Bus Stop,” where they share their stories. Aside from hosting, the crew will also be shooting, editing, and producing all the content.
Some other future projects include accessibility workshops, a siblings initiative to create opportunities for siblings of people with disabilities and their families, and even comedy apprenticeships for people with disabilities, specifically those who are deaf and want to be comedians. They hope that the comedy initiative also inspires non-disabled comedians to learn American Sign Language (ASL), and include ASL in their shows.
For ROSIES, it’s not just about finding people with disabilities jobs, it’s also about educating the non-disabled world on how to be more accessible and inclusive.
Chambers is thankful ROSIES exists and hopes more businesses follow suit.
“An organization or a company is supposed to have diversity. They shouldn’t just think of diversity with race but also include people with disabilities.
“If they [companies] included people with diverse abilities, people on the spectrum, their company would do much better.”