our mission
Providing support to individuals with disabilities and our community through education, employment, and the arts.
Evolve provides highly specialized coaching services to more than 200 people each year in the Pittsburgh area, helping these individuals become integrated and productive members of the local community.
Neurodiverse adults require a spectrum of support that is just as diverse as the people themselves. Living independently, navigating the college environment, making friends, and transitioning to the workplace are common challenges faced by the population we serve. Through one-on-one coaching services, social groups, and peer mentorship, Evolve provides each client with individualized support to help them meet their goals.
Through our work we strive to address and remedy institutional, cultural and cognitive systems of oppression. We seek to hold organizations, institutions, and ourselves accountable for repairing cultural erasures and harmful assumptions. We work to educate our communities and raise awareness of neurodiversity in its many intersecting forms. We do this by working to close the services gap created by systemic inequities that marginalize communities of color, low income communities, and New American communities.
Our efforts to remedy these disparities also encompass work to remedy the structural inequalities that result in the
-under-employment
-over-incarceration
-lower levels of educational attainment
-lower levels of health
-higher levels of poverty
that are experienced by the entire spectrum of neurodiverse people in the United states and Pittsburgh.
Still, we recognize that we at Evolve have tremendous room to grow as an organization. We will continue to look inward, value the voices of our community members, and make changes that allow for access and full inclusion for every community member.
a note from evolve's co-founders
Before founding Evolve Coaching, we worked as therapists supporting people of all ages with developmental disabilities in their schools, homes, and communities. As our younger clients grew up, we grew with them, adapting our approaches to meet their changing needs.
When it came time for our clients to graduate from high school, we quickly realized that there was a lack of support systems in place to help these young adults successfully transition to college or the workforce. Because our clients require support that is customized to their individual needs, the typical one-size-fits-all therapies and programming weren't going to cut it.
We established Evolve in an effort to provide a support service that is vastly different from the norm: a service that empowers neurodiverse college students and job seekers to feel confident in their abilities to advocate for themselves, manage their workloads, and achieve self-defined success.
While our team’s focus is on our clients' success and fulfillment, we know that it’s equally important to promote inclusion at the community level. We work with educational institutions, employers, and community organizations to educate them about the power of diversity and how they can become partners in creating a culture in which all people are valued.
We look forward to continuing to learn and grow together!
Joe & Heather
1000+ clients served
our impact
92% of college coaching clients have graduated from a post-secondary programs
90% of clients seeking work have been gainfully employed
Delivered arts programming to more than 400 youth and adults aged 10+
Provided corporate trainings, delivered on-the-job support, and promoted the hiring of adults with developmental disabilities for more than 100 Pittsburgh employers
