By GLYNIS HART
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NEWPORT — The Aurora Bakery on Main Street has been open a little over a year, making Robert Mallett one of its senior participants. The bakery provides employment skills practice to people like Robert who have disabilities that are barriers to employment.
Mallett, 22, enjoys having a job. On Tuesday he and bakery manager Megan Walker were making pie dough while his father, Bob, waited to take him home at the end of his shift.
“It’s an awesome organization for these kids,” said Bob. “He wants to come. He wants to work and be productive.”
As he learns baking and moves around the small kitchen with Walker and another helper, Michael Sielewicz, Mallett is also improving his communication skills. When he began coming to the bakery a year ago, he almost never spoke.
“Now he actually talks to us and says ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye,’” said Walker. When they make cookies, they use an ice cream scoop, which was difficult for Robert at first. “Now, he can do a sheet’s worth of cookies. He can do a lot, and he can pretty much do it on his own.”
The bakery grew out of the nonprofit Road to Independence, which focuses on helping individuals with disabilities through working with donkeys on a local farm. Road to Independence (RTI) has three main focus areas: farm work, working with donkeys, and now the Aurora Bakery.
RTI director Margaret Coulter emphasizes that the bakery, despite Walker’s hard work, doesn’t pay for itself. With its main objective being to help individuals with disabilities practice job skills, it would be difficult to accomplish the level of production needed to maintain a self-supporting commercial bakery.
“We’d love to pay Megan more,” said Coulter. “And I need to find grants and funding to keep us going through the winter. We are on a budget.”
Walker produces all the baked goods in the shop, as well as goods for the farmers markets and wedding cakes for Pleasant Lake Inn. At the same time, there are about 20 hours of each 30 hour week that have participant/volunteers like Robert. That means while Walker is working, she is also teaching to a variety of skill levels. Some participants can only manage to stay for a half hour, but the value of that half hour can’t be measured.
“They feel progress like we do,” said Bob Mallett. “But they show it in a different way. Preparing to come here, getting dressed, getting out; they need that structure.”
The whole thing started seven years ago, when Coulter, a lifelong horsewoman, met Penny de Peyer, a breeder of rare Cleveland Bay horses. De Peyer also had about 15 donkeys.
Coulter helped take some of de Peyer’s donkeys to shows. “I have a brother who’s differently abled,” she said. “The donkeys were something we could do as a family, and his job coach at the time thought that working on the farm was a good thing for him to do.”
Informally, Coulter began bringing a few people with disabilities out to the farm, where they learned to do farm work and handle the donkeys, if they wanted to. Depending on the person’s abilities and situation, just getting outdoors with the animals could be a victory. “Even if they just walk to the mailbox with me to check the mail, that can be a good thing,” said Coulter.
“People have also come to the farm for mental health reasons,” she said. “They find work on the farm is meaningful. For others, coming to the farm keeps them from making poor decisions, such as getting involved in bad relationships.”
Learning to handle the donkeys is a healthy experience, too. Participants learn to brush and care for the donkeys and lead them. The donkeys, said Coulter, are cooperative if they trust you, so earning that trust challenges the people handling them to manage their own emotions. “If you find that jerking on the lead over and over doesn’t work, you may have to come back to yourself and think about how you are doing it.”
“Many of the skills we teach for work on the farm, such as how to dress — they need boots to go in the mud, and winter clothes for winter – and planning, and communication, working as a team, are all types of life skills that can transfer over to other life skills,” said Coulter.
In order to apply for a grant from Sullivan County, Coulter needed to form a 501(c)3 — a nonprofit corporation — so she reached out to a lawyer who helped set that up for free. They started bringing produce from the farm to the Newport Farmers Market, at the same time the donkeys were being shown.
“From there we got that there was interest in going on the road with the donkeys,” she said.
Nowadays, the donkeys go on the road to local nursing homes and assisted living facilities, bringing a breath of farm air to elderly residents. At the same time, the participants in RTI’s programs can teach new participants the skills they’ve learned, whether it’s how to brush, halter and lead a donkey to how to measure 1 cup of flour.
“For us, it’s being part of the community and showing folks the skills these individuals have,” said Coulter.
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