Employment Services

Deaf or Hard of Hearing people experience significant unemployment and underemployment. Relative to their hearing peers, Deaf adults have been found to experience more unemployment, and to have lower incomes. Deaf adults with other disabilities face even more challenges.

Mill Neck Services uses a three-pronged approach with its employment services to counteract these trends and to enable Deaf and/or multiply disabled adults to find and retain satisfying employment. Each of Mill Neck Services’ three employment programs – the Job Development program, the Supported Employment program, and the Transition program – serves a different group of Deaf adults facing challenges and barriers to employment.

An outstanding example of what Mill Neck Services’ employment services can help Deaf and/or multiply handicapped people accomplish is the story of Donald Mingo, which was recently featured on Good Morning America. Click here to see the video.

Donald, who is Deaf, unable to speak, and has physical disabilities due to childhood polio, attended Mill Neck Manor School for the Deaf as a child. As graduation grew closer, Donald took part in Mill Neck Services’ Transition program, which taught him the skills he would need to enter the world of work after school.

After graduation, with the help of Mill Neck Services’ Supported Employment program, Donald got a job at Honda City in Levittown washing, waxing and detailing recently purchased vehicles in preparation for customer pickup. He has been there for over 20 years, missing only five days of work in that time.

Mill Neck Services’ employment services are the only ones of their kind on Long Island, meeting a need in the Long Island Deaf community that would otherwise go unmet. It is almost certain that Donald’s life, and the lives of hundreds of others, would have been much different had they not been a part of Mill Neck Services’ employment programs.

Program Cost: $376,382 per year.

For more information, please email projects@millneck.org