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Branching Out celebrates five years of supporting Orangeville’s neurodiverse community

January 2, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Sam Odrowski

Branching Out Support Services (BOSS), an Orangeville-based social enterprise that provides programming and purpose to individuals with disabilities, is celebrating five years in the community.

BOSS held a five-year anniversary party at the Westminster Church in Orangeville on Dec. 13, with an open house and dance, sponsored by IODE Headwaters.

The organization has grown significantly since first opening its doors in December 2019 when it started with just 10 clients. BOSS now consistently serves more than 50 people with its daily programming, mental health platform, and one-on-one support services. BOSS also does education and advocacy about how to best serve people with disabilities through training sessions at businesses, not-for-profits, corporations and municipalities.

Speaking with Kimberly Van Ryn, BOSS’s founder, she said celebrating the organization’s fifth anniversary feels surreal when looking at its early beginnings.

“It’s a little unimaginable considering how we started, with so much anticipation, and then COVID happened four months after we opened,” she explained. “We had to do programming in a way that we’d never even considered for neurodivergent people… and we did that for three full years.”

Van Ryn said BOSS’s evolution has been much different than she expected but in a positive way.

“It made us slow down a little bit and really think about what this was and how to build it well, so that we could last five years, 10 years,” she remarked.

Speaking on her journey towards starting BOSS, Van Ryn said she was already working in developmental services, supporting people with disabilities, but wanted to drive positive change in a more meaningful way.

“When I decided to start my own business, it was a real drive to start it as a social enterprise, not a nonprofit, so that we could provide the amount of transparency we wanted to in our services,” she said. “The drive was to be able to serve neurodivergent people in the community, but to also be able to do it in a little bit of a different way, so that choice was paramount.”

Deciding to take a more non-traditional approach to serving people with disabilities, BOSS’s clients have a great deal of autonomy in choosing what their days look like.

A key example of this is the Architect program, which provides BOSS’s service users with the ability to plan out group activities themselves and choose what best aligns with their interests.

“The Architect program has become a very cohesive group of adults that can navigate this community with limited support, essentially. They have their support professionals with them all the time, but there has been an amazing amount of success in what we’ve seen from that group,” Van Ryn told the Citizen at BOSS’s five-year anniversary party. “They organized this entire party. I gave them some money but the slide show, the advertising, the flyers, the decorations, the setup was all decided by our service users.”

She added, “We’ve seen really expansive growth in that group of people and that is only going to lead to more opportunities for them.”

In addition to providing choice to the group’s participants, the Architect program helps to build communication skills and life skills through a variety of activities.

Most of the activities are social or recreational but there’s also a focus on building employment skills and independence.

Some of the activities include fitness classes, art classes and trips to places in the community like the library or recreation centres.

Christopher Goss, who’s been with BOSS since June 2024, said he participates in art classes, tai chi classes, swimming and bowling through the Architect program twice a week.

“I really love it – all the programs that we get to choose,” Goss noted. “The options for programming that we have on a monthly basis is absolutely fantastic.”

He said planning the celebration to mark BOSS’s fifth birthday has also been rewarding.

“Making the slide shows for this and planning this fifth anniversary event, along with five others, was a wonderful experience,” Goss smiled.

Shaan-e-abbas Jamal, who’s been with BOSS since its inception, said he enjoys volunteering at the Orangeville Food Bank through the organization’s day programming.

Dakotah McPhee, who also started attending programs at BOSS shortly after it was founded in 2019, said it’s been a great experience.

She told the Citizen, she enjoys the sense of community created at BOSS and making friends through its programs.

When looking at BOSS’s impact, Van Ryn said a lot of it is around advocacy.

“We’re showing what neurodivergent people are capable of and how we can empower neurodivergent people in the community,” said Van Ryn.

She added, “The impact on caregivers is that they have a trusting organization they can safely leave their adults or children with, so that they themselves can get respite.”

BOSS also has a positive impact on Dufferin County’s economy as a source for good through its B-Corporation status.

BOSS received B-Corporation accreditation last summer, meaning a third-party organization has certified that it is a mission-driven company that aims to balance purpose and profit. It also demonstrates BOSS’s commitment to accountability, transparency, environmental sustainability, ethical service practices, employee benefits and charitable giving.

“Getting the certification meant a year’s worth of assessment of our business from an outside assessor and accreditor, and they looked at our social, environmental and ethical impact, into how we run our business, how it impacts our staff, all of our stakeholders.

Van Ryn said it wasn’t easy to gain B-Corp certification but well worth it.

“It sets us apart by having an outside organization that has looked in at our ethics and holds us now to a certain standard. Because we’re not accredited by a Ministry in Ontario or Canada, this is an important piece to build trust with our customer base and set a really good example.”

BOSS is the second business in Dufferin County to achieve B-Corp accreditation and is among the first 12,000 companies to gain the title globally.

The accreditation was made possible through funding BOSS received from the federal government’s Investment Readiness Program.

Going forward, Van Ryn said BOSS plans to maintain the consistency it has built with its programming and expand further into building employment opportunities for its service users and other neurodivergent people in Dufferin County.

She added that BOSS will also focus on sustainable growth in the coming years.

“We pretty consistently serve about 50 families or people with their chosen support circles,” Van Ryn said. “I hope to see that grow, over the next five years, so that we can call that a consistent 100 people that we’re helping all the time.”

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