Enterprenuer
Elizabeth has been working in Special Education for 12 years.
She has previously taught in Chesterfield, Powhatan, and elsewhere.
She spent half of her time in traditional schools and half in Transition.
Elizabeth earned a B.S. James Madison University awarded Elizabeth a B.S. in Psychology and a M.A.Ed.
The College of William and Mary. Her best friend, a Deaf child, inspired her to study Special Education.
Chamber R.V.A. named Elizabeth the Change Agent of The Year in 2017.
Style Weekly also listed her on their 2018 Top 40 Under 40 List.
Elizabeth was honored by St. Catherine’s School as the 2019 Distinguished Young Alumni and featured in the 2020 Bold Women of Richmond List.
She is also a speaker, consultant, and advocate.
Elizabeth loves to kayak, collect records antiques, and walk Violet, her Pit Bull.
Forest Hill is her home, and she enjoys cycling to Tablespoons Bakery every day.
What is the story of the Next Move Program?
As a special education teacher, I was often curious about what would happen to my students when they left school and the many services available to them at 22.
The data and what I witnessed firsthand is that most graduates want to sit at home.
To address the high unemployment rate of young adults with developmental disabilities in Virginia, I co-founded the Next Move Program in 2015.
This model was created in 2012 by me in-house at a biotech company.
They wanted to offer a support program for these individuals and a feeder internship program.
Mary Townley and I then spun off the agenda.
We expanded our services to provide vocational training opportunities for young adults and increased our partnerships.
Since then, our state department has approved our model and curriculum.
Tablespoons Baking was founded in 2017 as an N.M.P. Alumni offering.
It has since expanded to include a brick-and-mortar bakery.
It will be open next month. In a dream, I had the idea for Tablespoons Bakery’s name.
After many hours of brainstorming possible names for the program, I finally came up with this name.
It was perfect. A tablespoon is a baking tool, but the word able is embedded in the name.
It’s subtle, but it is powerful. Every day, our organization strives to unleash the potential of our students and help them shine in the community.
Tablespoons Bakery falls under the Next Move Program, a larger nonprofit.
This larger nonprofit manages our Community Externship Program, Alumni services, and other programs.
We also offer consultation to businesses looking to hire from this group or other organizations who want to create programs similar to ours.
Our curriculum is also available for licensing.
How do you stay productive?
The best thing about my job is the variety.
It could be teaching Baking in a commercial kitchen to young adults with developmental disabilities or developing recipes.
You could also be asked to substitute for one of our special educators at the community externship sites.
As part of the organizational productivity, I spend a lot of my time doing administrative tasks.
These include branding, social media, and H.R.R. development.
I can also consult and give presentations on disability services.
How do you bring ideas to life?
We believe in data. We believe in data. We are trying to modernize traditionaD.D.D.D.
Services, both in terms of how they work and sharing information about them with the community.
We can then incorporate the personality and fun that our students show us every day into everything we do.
What’s your favorite trend?
We want the community to see our work and feel connected to the students and adults we serve.
We have accomplished this through social media while simultaneously modernizD.D.g D.D. services.
We have embraced many social media trends.
What habits make you productive?
Lists shared, and personal have been something I believe in since childhood.
It’s a great way to delegate and accomplish many things as a small group.
What’s your advice for the Noob?
It is okay to take some time off and allow for time to balance your personal life.
There will always be work to do, and a few of them are in an emergency.
What is one thing we can all agree on?
Raisins and coconut are not suitable for cookies.
Our baking team has a lot of fun and heated discussions about creating the best cookies.
What do you recommend as an entrepreneur?
We spend a lot of time reviewing and collecting data.
We collect data on student growth, program outcomes, and cookie recipes. Lean into it.
It can give you a sense of affirmation or provide the feedback that you need to move in a different direction.
What’s your rich strategy?
We felt it was crucial to add Tablespoons’ services to Next Move.
Although our Community Externship Program has been a great success in placing students with disabilities into jobs, the host business often saw the full benefits.
Tablespoons have enabled us to be more visible in the community.
Our community can now see the Bakery in action and interact with them via social media.
We can now share more of their experiences and invite volunteers differently than we can with a corporate host for the externship model.
Now we are more connected to the community. There are many ways you can support our mission.
You can still make a direct donation, but we also offer swag, catering, and a monthly subscription program.
We can also take our vintage camper, The CookieCamper, to corporate events or rentals.
How do you overcome Failure?
We tried to tap into traditional funding streams via government contracts when we started.
This was how we had done our programming in the past.
These systems have proven to be less inclusive and progressive and significantly reduce paperwork for our staff.
After realizing that it wasn’t what we were as an organization and the best use of our time, we’ve changed our minds.
It took many difficult conversations and more steps to move in the right direction to reach that conclusion.
Our collective failure was not listening to our collective intuition as an organization and instead of doing the same thing we have always done.
Can you share a business idea?
We often discovered that we did not have all the latest information about the locations of different projects during the construction of the Bakery.
People would pay if a service or system could give this information to clients with little overhead on the construction team.
What’s your recent best buy?
Recently, I bought a fancy new drill. The Bakery has seen many small renovations.
It was great to be involved in the upgrades and add our personal touch.
What are your favorite Softwares or Apps?
Square is our favorite point-of-sales solution.
It is so simple to use. It’s a great time saver as we have many large orders.
It is also easy to present it to our students.
Which book would you recommend?
The Unrepentant Memoirs of Disability Rights: Being Heumann
Judy Heumann, one of the most passionate self-advocates within the disability community of today, has written this memoir.
She speaks out about her groundbreaking legislation, which has helped my students succeed at work and have greater access to their communities.
It shows how far we’ve come since she could not attend public schools as a child and where we are now.
It also highlights how far we still have to go, particularly in terms of employment.
What’s your favorite quote?
“Diversity is being invited at the party; inclusions are being asked to dance.”
Verna Myers
TL;DR by Elizabeth Redford
- Disability Services must be inclusive, evidence-based and integrated. They should also be fun. It is time to change the way these services are funded and designed.
- Lean into data. It can give you a sense of affirmation, or it can provide the information that you need to make a change.
- Our collective failure was not listening to our collective guts as an organisation and instead trying to do the same thing that has always been done.
