Like many individuals with autism, Jonathan Eichenholz has limited job skills and is unlikely to receive a high school diploma. How, his father Jason worried, would he ever get by on his own?
“Realizing we’ve got a lifelong journey with Jonathan with autism, what am I going to do with him after I’m gone? That’s the thing that used to keep me up at night,” Jason Eichenholz said.
As a tech entrepreneur, Eichenholz believed he had the wherewithal to address this problem for Jonathan and others like him. In November he launched Techtonic Workforce Academy, a Central Florida-based initiative to train people with autism to repair cellphones and other electronic devices so they can become financially independent.
If it succeeds, he hopes to expand it into a broader school curriculum that can train a much larger number of individuals than the academy can handle.
The program is partly funded by a $1 million state appropriation given to Eichenholz’s foundation, the Jonathan’s Landing Foundation, in 2023 to get more adults with autism into the workforce. That’s a demographic that has an unemployment rate of 85%, according to the Autistic Americans Civil Liberties Union.