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Oakdale’s Smile Farms this month celebrated two years of offering meaningful employment to individuals with developmental disabilities.
The farm, located at 405 Locust Ave., is a collaborative project between Smile Farms, a non-profit arm of 1-800-Flowers.com, and Skills Unlimited, an affiliate of Family Residences and Essentials Enterprises (FREE) that provides vocational training programs for adults with developmental disabilities.
“We [at Smile Farms] help to raise money to build and sustain farms, while [Skills Unlimited] are good at delivering care, and having the infrastructure necessary to help people,” said Jim McCann, founder of 1-800-Flowers.com.
Smile Farms at Skills Unlimited typically hires 10 employees to run its garden program, which grows a variety of vegetables and herbs.
This month, the nonprofits invited the local community, elected officials and the media to tour the property, as well as see its new greenhouse and hoop house.
“Work is a lot more than a job,” McCann told GreaterSayville.com at the celebration. “It’s social, it’s a paycheck, it’s a feeling of self-worth, and it’s a sense of community.”
McCann, who has four younger siblings, launched Smile Farms about 15 years ago as a way to help find employment for his developmentally disabled brother Kevin.
“To see my brother and his co-workers love what they do, be excited talking about ‘the business’… it just realizes we all have another purpose,” Jim McCann said.
At Smile Farms, its employees develop a host of skills, while helping to acclimate them better into the community.
“Some of our employees have never even thought about employment before,” explained Stephanie Lewis, assistant vice president of vocational services of FREE.
One farmer, Berdina Wright, was excited to share her daily duties.
“When we get here, we settle in, and come out [to the farm] at 8:30 a.m.,” she said. “[We] pick the weeds, pick fresh produce out from the garden… and we have fun doing it.”
The program in Oakdale has grown tremendously over the last year, Lewis said.
“It started as doing something supplemental … to provide skill-building and the therapeutic impacts of gardening,” she said. “We really focused on making it into something much more structured by providing very robust vocational services with evaluations, work training programs and placement services.”
In addition to growing, maintaining and harvesting fresh crops, workers with Smile Farms at Skills Unlimited learn retail via the farm’s new mobile farm stand. The mobile market sells produce to underserved communities across Long Island and provides bilingual nutritionists who speak Spanish.
“Everyone that goes through the program really blossoms,” Lewis said, smiling.
Scroll down to see photos from Oakdale’s Smile Farms.
To learn more about Smile Farms and its seven other locations, click here.
Top: 1-800-Flowers.com’s Jim McCann (tan jacket) cutting the ribbon with Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone at Smile Farms at Skills Unlimited in Oakdale.
