We were lucky to catch up with Ami Taubenfeld recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ami, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I am the parent of an autistic daughter named Annie and felt that from the time of her birth in 1990 until she was 21 that we were forced to be pioneers. It was very difficult accessing information about things my husband, Mark and I were observing in her early development that were inconsistent with her two older brothers. She was late to walk, late to talk, was not terribly interested in developing relationships with any of us. She was a sweet, cooperative baby who preferred to stare at herself in the mirror for hours rather than being held by her own parents or siblings. At each doctor’s appointment, we described her as different. Our doctor had no answers except to tell us girls are so different than boys.

But we knew better. But this was 1990, there was no internet to research, autism was not discussed or recognized in girls, so we could not get an answer for so long about why she wasn’t talking, bonding, looking at us, participating in family time, etc. It was such an isolating, frustrating and devastating time, with no blogs to read, no parent groups to meet with, no other moms facing the same challenges with no answers to talk to.

But the answer finally came. She was diagnosed in 1995 as a child on the autism spectrum. We had so many questions, Why did this happen? How did this happen? What will her life be like? What will our lives be like? Our wonderful Psychologist set us on our path right then and there when she said, “You can only worry about what? What can we do now”? From that minute on, you push forward, looking at the best opportunities, schools, therapies, social opportunities, parent groups, and take on the role of permanent advocate. If there is something Annie needs that isn’t working, adjust it, if school stops being effective, change it, if programs don’t exist that she will need, create it. And we followed this path through 3-4 different schools, always advocating for Annie’s most pressing needs in real time.

Fast forward to 2006, this same Psychologist, who has since become a dear friend, invited me to join a group of eight other people from the Baltimore Chesapeake Chapter of the Autism Society, called AARG, the Adult Autism Resource Group to research the best practices that were currently available to autistic adults. Our first meeting started with the question, “What will happen to my child when I am gone?” This is the question all parents with autistic children ask themselves. There were many opportunities for school and education, but what happens when children exit the school system as adults, which was our charge. The services that families came to depend on, small classes, individualized instruction and support, much needed professional services such as Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Social Work and Behavioral Support comes to an end when students exit the school system. This devastating end in services is referred to as “falling off the cliff.” Itineris grew from a dream shared by the nine people from AARG. These founders included parents of autistic children and a group of professionals and self-advocates. We wanted to prevent this fall. We wanted to create a forward-thinking program, dedicated to the specialized needs of adults on the autism spectrum – a program that would fill this tremendous gap in services.

After years of visiting many programs in Maryland some surrounding States and researching other programs available Nationally, we determined that in order for our children to have the lifelong support they will need, we will need to create our own program and I was happy to take the lead on this. We had a team dedicated to this and opening up an agency definitely wasn’t our plan, trust me. We did find an autism-specific program that we wanted to model our program after. We asked them and several other programs to move here, schools to open adult programs, professionals to open programs with no luck. It took us three years to go through the licensing process, develop our guiding principles, “friendraised” so we had startup funding and hired a Clinical Professional to help us develop programming. So, in November of 2010 we opened our doors to our first client. I joined in October 2011 as Executive Director.

In our area, there were no programs specializing in autism services. At that time, most agencies took a one-size-fits-all approach, supporting a wide variety of disabilities under one roof. What we saw was that the autism-specific programs that were working, were extremely knowledgeable in one area, had teaching strategies, communication strategies and crisis prevention strategies and an expertise in autism were having success. We knew this was the way to go.

Enter Itineris (means the journey in Latin). When Itineris opened its doors almost twelve years ago, two governing principles stood above the rest: individuality and personal choice. All our founders knew the needs of their own children, and recognized that each person with autism is different, with unique talents and needs, particular likes and dislikes, and highly personal hopes and dreams for the life they want to lead. These founding families sought to celebrate this, creating custom-fitted programs, designed for the specific needs and choices of each individual Itineris client.

Itineris is now supporting nearly 110 adults, and each year, fielding hundreds more inquiries annually for our highly tailored services. We recently opened Itineris Community Living Services to begin providing the much needed 360 degrees of services that our families currently need or certainly will need. As we look toward the future, we are determined to find ways to share our hard-won insights – our successes as well as our learning experiences – because so many families, all across America, are still grappling with the question that brought us to this point: “What will happen to my child when I’m gone?”

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

So, my background is totally in sales and marketing and entrepreneurship! I worked in our family’s hospitality business off and on for over 25 years. I was the Director of Sales and Marketing and created our off-premises catering services and ended my hospitality career working for our local event and cruise business. I worked closely with clients planning their most important and meaningful events, developed our logo and marketing materials, developed budgets and managed and supported a team of sales professionals.

When Annie was diagnosed with autism, my dear friend Jill and I started a mail order catalog, which allowed me to spend more time at home with Annie and her brothers Evan and Drew. This helped me develop a whole new skillset in customer service and took advantage of my creative side. This was another opportunity to create something from an idea, develop the strategy, determine the offerings, and create internal structure. I think building things from a concept or idea is a strength and area of interest for me, which removes fear from entering the unknown.

So, when the meetings started in 2007 about looking at agencies for best practices, and we determined that we needed to create something from scratch, this was a challenge I was happy to accept. Opening Itineris was an excellent opportunity to support the local autism community by providing specialized and individualized support to adults who were otherwise underserved. I am definitely most proud of the quality of supports we provide, the person centered and individualized nature of our supports, the growth of our clients and the professionalism of our team. We use evidenced-based practices and have created a model program that provides continued growth and learning for adults on the spectrum.

I am so proud to lead a team of the utmost professionals who believe in our mission and always think of better ways to do things.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Covid-19 changed everything!! We were in an amazing 10-year groove: building our client numbers, growing our staff, increasing our infrastructure with new positions and then everything changed in March 2020. We were forced to close our on-site services and supports, clients were laid off of work and we furloughed over 100 staff for the first time ever. But our team took this time to look at how to pivot and keep our clients engaged and develop a virtual option to continue helping them grow without the personal hands-on attention and support. We started small with 12 classes per day, taught in four time slots with every available Director, Manager and Supervisor jumping in to teach or support classes. We had this up and running in two weeks of our closing on site supports. Everyone pitched in to address the continuing needs of our clients and had this as our main focus.

Each week more clients joined, and we continued to bring back staff monthly. We were teaching over 40 classes per day to meet the needs of our clients and the interests that they requested. Some clients were more successful with virtual learning than others, so we continue to expand our offerings slowly to include in-home supports, community supports and learning pods. We all thought this would be short-lived but as time kept stretching on, we recognized that many of our clients really needed some in-person supports back in their schedules. We systematically added clients back into the onsite services, added job sites back in, increased time in the community and even managed to open our Community Living Program during this time. As we are over 2 1/2 years into this pandemic, we are facing an unprecedented workforce shortage. This has greatly impacted our business and how we support our staff. But as always, our team pitches in and we currently are supporting almost every client again in a combination of supports. This was a pivot that could not be planned for or practiced and has humbled all of us to what excellence in service actually means.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I think when we were opening, most adult agencies had a one size fits all philosophy. They were a mix of multiple disabilities with a variety of needs, expertise and training. We opened with one area of expertise and dedicated ourselves to learning everything we could about how to address the needs of autistic adults. As autism is a spectrum disorder, this means there was much to learn. There is an expression that says if you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person. Our business model was community based, employment focused, and utilized best practices for supporting people on the spectrum. For families with loved ones on the spectrum, having an agency dedicated to personalized support needs with this expertise was something that was extremely important. Our adults were showing tremendous progress, increasing their skill level, and word began spreading that we were having successes with our clients and gained a reputation for being best suited for supporting adults on the spectrum. We are flexible enough to recognize when something is not working and look for solutions for improvement. We have built our business remaining mission driven and adapting when needed.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.itinerisbaltimore.org
• Instagram: instagram.com/itinerisbaltimore
• Facebook: facebook.com/ItinerisBaltimore
• Linkedin: LinkedIn – linkedin.com/company/itinerisinc
• Twitter: twitter.com/itinerisbmore
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=itineris+baltimore