Ahn and his job coach, Erick Ramirez, are building something at Santa Maria Urban Ministry: independence that starts with being trusted with real work.
When a food delivery arrives at Santa Maria Urban Ministry, the work starts fast. Boxes come in. Vegetables need a place to go. Somebody has to put it all away.
Ahn does. “I help a lot with the loads,” he says. It is hard work. He enjoys it anyway.
“I do it for love. I’m not doing it for money.”
Erick fills in why. Ahn’s family runs a restaurant — a popular one, the kind of place everyone around here knows. He could work there any day he chose to. He doesn’t want to. He wants to be independent, and he wants a place that values him for himself, not for who other people are. That is the love he means, and the money he is turning down.
Ahn is a student in Calero High School’s Adult Transition Program, four years in and in his second year at Santa Maria. He does not use many words. Ask him a big question, and he gives you a few. Erick Ramirez, his job coach, knows how to hear the rest.
Erick learned that years ago. A friend told him about the work, and he signed on as a one-on-one aide for a single student who did not speak. As a one-on-one, he learned what that student needed. Over time, the student’s days began to make sense to him.
“The longer you stick with somebody, you kind of figure out what they’re saying without them saying anything at all.”
Erick encourages his students in how to help make others feel welcome. He asked his students to say hello to people who are alone because he has seen what a greeting can do. Students gravitate toward Erick. Somehow, he says, they do. When someone says hello and means it, they realize, in his telling: Hey, you care about me? My disability doesn’t bother you at all?
“‘Hello’ goes a long way,” Erick says.
Erick has a stutter, and he says that is part of how he understands them. Then he says what he is feeling: “I’m tearing up.” He keeps going, because the rest matters.
“I did bad at school. No one assisted me.”
So Erick became the person who does assist others. He moved from one-on-one aide to job coach because he saw needs no one was meeting. His first year in the role, students landed jobs at Walmart, FedEx, and a restaurant. By 2022, the jobs came more often. Today, three young men he coached work at a Safeway near the school, and have from the start.
One former student still sends Erick his work schedule every week. It began during school, when Erick needed to know whether he would show up. It never stopped.
“To this day he still sends me his schedule and I just say thank you.”
That is the model. Erick does not ride the bus with his students. They meet him at Santa Maria, on their own, and he tells them what he tells all of them.
“You can call me at six in the morning, call me at three, it doesn’t matter, call me.”
He is their ‘little lifeline’. Messages come in on weekends. Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s what’s going on. His answer is always the same: it’s scary out there, but you’re not by yourself. And because they know they can just show up and that no one will judge them, they do.
For Ahn, “on your own” is the goal. He has interviewed at the SAP Center and is waiting to hear back. Erick has signed him up for about thirty jobs. It has been slow out there, and Louis noted that the job market is hard for everyone right now. “It has to be a fit for both sides,” Louis says. “It will just be a matter of finding the place that’s lucky enough to have you, Ahn.”
What would independence mean to Ahn? He answers with a picture:
“Up early. The bus in the dark, off to work. ‘Go early, wake up early, get up early and have to go to work.'”
How would that independence feel?
“I don’t know how to explain it. It’s hard,” Ahn says.
So Erick explained it the way he has learned to. Ahn would rather not talk about it at all. He wants to go straight to work, to a place where someone would, in Ahn’s words as Erick tells them, “actually, you know, would value me.” It is the same thing he turned down at the restaurant — ease, a guaranteed spot, a family name that opens the door — in favor of being chosen for himself.
Santa Maria is where Ahn practices being trusted. Erick’s students keep asking to come back, and he has thought about why.
“The fun-ness of it all. The adult-ness of it all.”
Other work sites are structured and linear, he says. Every day is the same. Here, the loads change. The volunteers change. The backgrounds in the room change. And there is room to explore. Erick can leave his students alone without worry, because he has taught them one thing: there is always something to do. Wipe a window. Ask somebody, “Do you need assistance?”
The results show up in small, brave moments. A former student, slight in build, once told a much bigger man working nearby that a box was not being smashed the way it should be. He said it plainly. No shame. Erick saw a milestone.
“That right there is like the next step on becoming an adult is that you can speak up.”
Another former student now works long hours sorting shipments at a full-time job. It does not faze him. Boxes come in, and he sorts them. People at the new site are not scary, because he learned that here.
“Hey, we did this at Santa Maria.”
Erick told of another former student who filled online orders faster than anyone on the floor. He did not scan the aisle for a blue box. He read the small serial numbers instead. It speaks about how we think about people who are different from us.
Different is not less. Sometimes different is faster.
Ahn’s next step may be the SAP Center. It may be somewhere else. Erick asked Louis whether Ahn could keep showing up at Santa Maria in the meantime. Louis answered right away.
“We would not turn him or anyone away who sincerely wanted to be here.”
As the interview ended, Louis thanked Ahn and asked him to say goodbye before he leaves for a new job. Ahn had one more thing to say, and it summed up everything he had been showing all along.
“I like you [Louis]. But everybody here likes me.”
Erick pointed out what happened next. Ahn, who is shy and very quiet, had said they should hang out. Louis said he felt honored. Then he turned the moment back on himself.
“Maybe that means I need to find a way to be more present with you guys when you’re here.”
That is what Santa Maria is, at its best. A place where a young man puts away the food that feeds his neighbors and learns, load by load, that he is needed. A place where the Executive Director says I need to be more present, and means it. A place where a job coach who got no help when he finished school makes sure his students do.
Ahn does this work for love. Erick coaches for love. Santa Maria opens its doors for love.