School Programs
Building Skills for Work, Community & Independence
Backyard Players partners with school districts to offer four programs designed to provide students with meaningful, hands-on experiences that support career exploration, workplace readiness, and community engagement. Through these programs, students engage in real-world learning and collaborative projects within inclusive environments, building confidence, independence, and transferable life skills each week.
Community Connections
Community Connections & Career Exploration is designed to build vocational readiness through real-world, community-based experiences. This program emphasizes the generalization of workplace skills, helping students apply what they learn across careers. Through hands-on participation, students develop employability skills while actively engaging with their local community.
Students participate in product development and business enterprise, community service projects, retail and budgeting activities, cooking-based experiences, and career exploration with community professionals. Students practice safety awareness, consumer skills, leadership, and civic responsibility while gaining exposure to a variety of career pathways. Students build confidence, independence, and transferable skills that strengthen long-term vocational and post-school outcomes.
Work-Based Learning
Students participate in community-based job site experiences to develop transferable employment skills, workplace awareness, and appropriate work behaviors across a variety of real-world employment settings. Students participate in structured, community-based work experiences at a variety of job sites including food service, retail, trades, businesses, and recreation facilities. Experiences are designed to build transferable employment skills, workplace behaviors, and career awareness through real-world tasks and routines.
Foundations For Work & Community
Foundations for Work & Community is a bi-weekly pre-vocational program that builds teamwork, community awareness, and foundational workplace skills through collaborative projects, product development, and real-world learning experiences.
Through structured routines and authentic tasks, students develop transferable skills that support long-term success in employment, education, and independent living. The program emphasizes inclusive participation, purposeful work, and experiential learning while helping students identify strengths, build confidence, and prepare for future work-based learning opportunities.
Love, Nana
Love, Nana is the community service initiative of Backyard Players. The program collects donated new and gently used baby clothing and transforms these donations into baby bundles for mothers and babies in need.
Through participation in Love, Nana, students build skills aligned with career development, integrated learning, and universal foundation skills, preparing them for success across a range of employment settings.
Love, Nana participants wash and dry clothing, pick and fulfill orders, assemble bundles, and plan and host field trips and experiential visits for schools and community organizations. Through this work, students are introduced to workplace readiness, community participation, and shared responsibility through authentic, hands-on vocational experiences.