Teach healthy living skills to adults with autism

We are so excited to be nearly halfway to our overall project goal of $15,000 for this project! Since it's winter time, the gardening aspect of our "Garden to Table" program is in hibernation and planning mode- but program managers are working on plans to expand our gardening program to an additional house garden in the spring, and we are hoping to hire a landscaping/garden specialist to assist us with developing additional gardens at the homes we support and advising the overall gardening club component.

We had some fun over the holidays with our cooking classes, including offering special holiday treats cooking activities for the individuals currently participating in this program and opening it up to other individuals served by CSS programs. Food plays a huge part in our holiday events- we serve Thanksgiving and Christmas Day dinners to the individuals who are unable to be with family during the holidays- and we definitely had some great ideas come up about how might preserve and can garden produce this season to use year-round for meals and events such as these.

Since we started fundraising for the "Garden to Table" project on GlobalGiving, we've added new snack group classes, and dinner groups have been started here at our resource center and also in our residences. Participants use the recipes and skills they learn in their cooking classes in their homes, invite their friends, and they all enjoy a healthy, homemade meal together. I recently spent an evening in one of our homes with two of our supported individuals, Brian and Jose, and they eagerly showed me their meal plan for the week, the recipe they were going to use, and were excited to have friends over for the meal they were preparing with assistance from their support staff. It was amazing to see not only their independence in creating a healthy meal for themselves, but also to see how the skill of cooking has opened up their social opportunities as well. After all, don't we all enjoy sitting down to share a meal with friends and family? It's awesome to see that happen amongst our supported individuals as well.

I invite you to check out our digital annual report, which we wrapped up this past week- it has links to some great video of our cooking classes and gardening groups, as well as additional photos. We are always thankful for the continued support and interest in this program and our services- and we hope you will feel inspired by your impact and share this project with your friends and family! We are just $7,577 shy of our $15,000 total goal for this project, and meeting this goal will ensure this program will continue to grow steadily and adapt to the changing needs of the individuals it supports.

Thank you, on behalf of the "Garden to Table" participants, and everyone at CSS!

Links:

• CSS Interactive Annual Report

First off, we want to give a HUGE thank you to all the donors and supporters who made it possible for us to reach our thresholds in September and earn a PERMANENT spot on the GlobalGiving website! We're so excited about the opportunity to share our story through GlobalGiving with donors like you! We raised $6,224 in September and this money is going to help us do the following:

• Expand our cooking classes to include more adults
• Begin the work of expanding/modifying our curriculum and class structure so that we can include youth in the Garden to Table program in the future
• Set up a new house garden at Sandy Lake
• Create new cookbooks for additional program participants

We still have a little over $8,000 to go before we meet our $15,000 goal. Our Garden to Table program is the only program in the county providing comprehensive nutrition education to adults with autism, and one of the few opportunities for individuals with developmental disabilities to participate in a community gardening program, so the demand for this program is huge. We want to extend these opportunitities to many more adults, and in order to do so we need to hire a PT gardening/cooking coordinator and the remaining $8,000 in our goal will help us immensely towards hiring that person. Please keep spreading the word!

We recently captured some video of our cooking classes in action- if you want to check those out, please visit our YouTube page http://www.youtube.com/user/CommSupportSvcsInc?feature=mhum

Holiday Needs

As the holidays are approaching, we are also shifting the menus in our cooking classes to include festive, holiday-themed items like turkey, stuffing, and seasonal fruits and vegetables like pumpkin, squash, and apples. We have a cooking group who helps us with baking cookies and cakes (we use diet-friendly, low-fat recipes!) for our coffee house events, which are fun "lounge" nights where we have live music, coffee and tea, and baked goods for sale (proceeds benefit our recreations programs, including the Garden to Table program!) for supported individuals and their families and friends to enjoy.  We also host Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner for the individuals we support in our residential program who are unable to go home with their families or do not have family to go home to for these holidays. Like all our recreation programs, none of these activities are funded through DDA, so we rely on donor support to make the holidays special and keep this program and others like it thriving. Throughout the month of November, we are adding an additional category in our project page for you to donate towards our Holiday Food needs- funds will be used to cover costs for the holiday cooking classes and the Thanksgiving and Christmas Dinners, if you would like to support these activities. You can also view a complete list of our holiday activities and ways you can help and volunteer, if you are interested in getting more involved with CSS, by visiting the link below. 

Thank you, again, for all your support and enthusiasm for our supported individuals and our program. We are excited about the future!

Links:

• CSS Holiday Events
• Garden to Table cooking class videos