I’m Johnny Craig, I’m the Executive Director of Teens Inc. Teens Inc. is a 501(3)C non-profit that work with our youth and kids with disabilities. Our biggest feature is we allow our children to give back to our local community. We provide ’em job skills, training, job training, we go out and teach ’em social soft skills, how to dress and prepare for a job interview, our staff works with the kids individually, so we design each and every program just for our kids and our students.

One of our tools is a three thousand square foot greenhouse, where we sell and we grow from seedling to harvest, lettuce, bib lettuce, tomatoes, and we sell it down here in Winchester at the local Farmers’ Market, and we sell it at Schenk’s Farmers Market during the summertime.

Before we started Teens Inc. I was a local therapist in the area and continued to work with young youths in our community, through juvenile justice system, through the local school systems and our teenagers all struggle with mainstream education, and finding a worth, they just had so many significant failures in their life. So we wanted to create Teens Inc as a positive way to bring up the kids who are not geared towards going off to college, they struggle in the mainstream education. So at Teens Inc, we came up with the Vocational Agriculture Program that will help all kids work with AG, to bring back the AG industry, and also to help kids be successful in mainstream society.

Also some of our children have done things in our local community that they were ashamed of, like graffiti or doing something of the sort, but with Teens Inc. we allow the kids to give back to elderly who can not do things in their yard work, or we go out to local municipalities, do weeding and mulching around their homes. So the kids are learning these job skills, which makes them very valuable.

At Teens Inc we provide them with a job reference then that they participated in our program, and we give them a reference whether they are a good hire, and 90 percent of our children who do go out and get jobs, their employer always come back and contact us, like “Johnny, they’ve done a wonderful job, you guys have done a wonderful job with them,” so it’s a good thing that’s going on.

The biggest thing we would like the people to know is that we serve that our kids, they first came in, they were not hireable types, but hope when they leave our program, that they are successful and they left with something more than what they came with, and just give them a chance and they will be able to do, help create some positives in your lives.

Most of our teens are referred to us by school officials, local law enforcement, probation, and just contacting us through our website, TeensIncVA.org, and look down the contact and send a referral form, and you can see all the logistics and look at the projects we’ve done in our community.

At Teens Inc. we take on kids with autism, kids who struggle with socialization, we take on kids who struggle with mainstream education, and we take on kids that are in our local juvenile justice system. We work with kids with anger management problems, so we take on quite a few different personalities and behaviors that work education programs, normal education program does not work with.

We had quite a few kids that came in our program, and one of my famous ones, we always do end of the program, what could we have improved yourself on, and one of the kids said thank you Teens Inc. for teaching us landscaping and job writing and skills, because before that, the only thing they knew how to do was sell drugs in our local community, so it gave them a career, something to look forward to. That young man currently works for a local landscaping company and he’s doing very well, and we’ve had several kids who came in our program who’ve worked with us for years, and he currently works at a local restaurant here in town, and he is very successful, he helps train their new staff coming in, and prior to that, his parents did not think he was gonna be able to obtain a job and maintain a job. So our kids have shown us through a lot since we started in 2013, that they have been able to become very successful, and what skills we’ve given ’em.

Through donations, you can get involved with Teens Inc., or you can contact us on our website TeensIncVA.org, and donate that way, or you can participate in our local fundraisers that we have throughout the year, we have a day of giving, day of caring that we do every year in the month of November, so contact us at Teens Inc.

We currently reside on Hedgebrook Farm, so one day we would like to have a miniature farm of our own, who can, teens will come out and they can come out for generations and there’ll be a place that all our teens grew up on, so we would like to have a piece of land that we could provide job skills, carpentry skills, teach ’em how to grow in the AG business, provide produce to our local homeless, that’s what our goals will be this year.

We have several community partners, we have Valley Protein that have helped us out, we’ve had American Woodmark, which is a major contributor, Stingray Motors, Winchester Amish Connections, who have helped us out throughout the years, Anderson’s Nursery in Berryville who have done a lot of great things for us, Kern’s Motor Company. Our community partners that always allow us to provide jobs skills and job readiness activities for our students, and for those who I’ve forgotten, we don’t deserve you. We appreciate all your help.

We accept kids from 12 to 18 years old in age, based often on ability to get quality socialization from our staff, and we also like to get students placed in a job where they can leave our program and successfully move into something, so we like to get ’em as early as 12, and 18 is always the, 17, 18 is always our magic number, but we’re willing to work with ’em from around those age ranges. Last year in 2018, we served 45 students that are from our local Winchester, Frederick County area, so we are always trying to look and improve our numbers. But our quality is what we really thrive to do so we can provide that one seed that’s gonna take off and grow into a beautiful plant, so we look at all our students as seeds that are gonna grow and blossom onto a positive adult, which we hope our program is allowing that to happen.

One of the things that keeps me going is, always in the past I’ve always had, through my athletics, my community helping me, supporting me and go to national championships, and helped me grow up as a young youth, I would like to always give back three times fold to our local community. Winchester’s a great community to give back to and there’s a lot of people around here that need supports and just that little extra push. Our teens give back by volunteering their time at local shelters, local programs, this summer we were down at Family Day, our kids gave out water to the athletes that were working there, and to the workers. We give back by going to local churches, providing landscaping, on the job training, we plant trees, trim bushes, and we volunteer at that local Apple Blossom this year, we’re gonna be part of the Apple Blossom Parade and our kids are gonna be there giving out water to the workers and the soldiers that help out during the parade.