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Every adult with an intellectual disability knows the moment. The day after the last day of school. The day the calendar goes blank. We have a name for it now: the post-22 cliff. And it is exactly as steep as it sounds.

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I came to this work through friendship, not necessity. Kitty Correll is one of my closest friends — and when she began to feel what she describes as an undeniable calling to serve adults with intellectual disabilities, I did what you do for someone you love: I showed up. I brought my nonprofit background, my experience building organizational systems, and every skill I had accumulated across two decades of leading and launching. I put it all in service of her calling.

What I didn’t expect was how fast that calling would become mine too. Because the more I understood the landscape these families were navigating, the more I couldn’t look away.

Here is what I learned. For the first eighteen to twenty-two years of life, the system shows up. Not perfectly — parents of children with intellectual disabilities will be the first to tell you about the gaps, the fights, the IEP meetings that drained years from their lives. But the system showed up. There was a bus. There was a classroom. There were teachers who knew their child’s name. There was a peer group. There was a Tuesday.

And then, the day after graduation, it was gone.

No bus. No classroom. No peer group. No Tuesday. Just a family standing in a living room, looking at a calendar full of empty squares, wondering what comes next.

In the United States, approximately 6.5 million people have intellectual disabilities. In Georgia alone, around 226,000 families are navigating life with an adult who has intellectual disabilities. After age 22, public support for education and structured programming ends. What replaces it, for most families, is a combination of home care, private programs where they exist, and an exhausting search for community that rarely ends with a clear answer.

“You can find a job for high-functioning people with special needs, but you can’t find community for them.”

That observation came from a parent in our program. He wasn’t speaking abstractly. He was describing years of looking for something that looked like belonging and coming up short. Employment programs exist. Vocational training exists. Day services exist in various forms. But the thing that most adults with intellectual disabilities say they want — what their families say they watch them ache for — is not a job alone. It is friendship. It is a room full of people who are genuinely glad to see you walk through the door.

Factors compound the isolation. Sensory sensitivities. Communication differences. Difficulty navigating spaces that were never designed with them in mind. Adults with intellectual disabilities are not isolated because they don’t want connection. They are isolated because the connection was never built for them.

After high school, they graduate to the living room. That phrase comes from a researcher studying this population, and it has stayed with me because of how precisely it lands. The world doesn’t end for these adults when school does. But for many of them, it gets very, very small.

Kitty refused to accept that. She watched families she loved — families from her church, parents who were her longtime friends — carrying this weight without a real answer. She visited a program in Kansas City that had built something different. She started baking in her own kitchen with a handful of families who trusted her enough to show up on a Tuesday.

What Kitty had — and what Peachtree Church had the wisdom to recognize — was a vision rooted in something deeper than programming. Kitty is an ordained elder at Peachtree Church, and that calling carried real weight. The church heard her, donated the space, and helped renovate what had been a coffee shop into a commercial kitchen and gathering place. Wonderfully Made launched in September 2024 with six Wonder Makers and has now grown to serve 22 families in its first year.

That is not the ceiling. That is the beginning.

The post-22 cliff is real. But it is not inevitable. With the right space, the right structure, and the right community, it becomes something else entirely — a doorway into the kind of belonging that most of us take for granted. We are building that doorway. One Tuesday at a time.

Help us close the gap

Wonderfully Made exists because 226,000 Georgia families deserve better than an empty calendar. Your donation builds programming, sustains the bakery, and keeps the doors open. Give today at wonderfullymadecommunity.org.