Hand in Hand Farm, operated by Dave Berger and Athena Perry, was recognized in March by the World Alliance of Asian Women during the 69th Session of United Nations Commission on Status of Women.
Berger and Perry flew to New York to accept the Special Contribution Award for International Public Welfare and Charity for their work transforming Asian families with autistic children, and to speak at a forum hosted by the Beijing Guangming Charity Foundation.
Since 2021, the organization based in Lacomb has seen an increase in the number of Asian families attending their family camp and parenting classes who are coming from out of state. Perry explained that most of the parents are Chinese-American, but some families have come from as far away as China and Singapore to attend the farm’s family skills training.
“It’s for any parents, but we’re turning into kind of a magnet for families with autistic kids from Seattle and Bay Area,” Perry said of the program.
Seattle-area teacher and writer Ling Jin is responsible for alerting the Asian Alliance about the contributions Hand in Hand Farm was making.
She had been writing a blog about her experiences at the farm and her stories made their way to key leaders who nominated Berger and Perry for the award.
Following the conference, Ling published an article for the World Alliance of Asian Women, sharing the details about the event and the structured methods Berger and Perry use to change the course of a family’s life.
According to Ling, Berger and Perry shared at the forum examples on how to help autistic children improve social skills, and manage emotions and physical coordination through agricultural labor and equestrian treatment.
“David’s speech touched a mother with autism, who said it was the biggest gain for her to come to the United Nations meeting and see the hope of independence for autistic children,” Ling wrote.
The way Ling described Hand in Hand’s method, she wrote, “The method is unique. Do not use sandpaper to grind the glass bottle, but to give parents a hammer, find a breakthrough point, break the bottle, pull the child out of the inside, and then help them grow.”
As Berger succinctly puts it, “Raise the bar. Expect a lot. And take whatever time it takes to get them there.”
Yu Zeng and Jason Feng, a Chinese-American couple living near Seattle, have been visiting Hand in Hand Farm regularly for five years now.
It was Zeng who first brought their oldest child, Albert, to the farm’s week-long family camp in 2020.
At that time, he was a teenager who couldn’t sit still, ignored people if he didn’t want to do something, expressed tics through flailing-arms and hissing noises, had a short attention span, talked for hours on his favorite subjects, and argued for months if his parents had tried to show him how to do something correctly.
But, Berger noted, Albert is not that way any more.
When Zeng returned home after one week at the farm, Feng noticed something.
“The most significant change that I remember after the first week is the tic,” he said. “It’s the tics that’s driving us crazy, he always does that. And then after that one week, I think that’s very well under control.”
Feng recalled noticing his son was conscious about his tics and was trying to control them.
“We told him, ‘You can’t do that, you can’t make the noise’ how many times, I don’t know. But he never made an effort to actually control that. But after that week, I can see the effort to control that,” he said.
Berger explained that Albert met two other “very autistic” boys at the farm who had learned to control their own tics. According to him, Albert told the boys he’s supposed to have tics because he’s autistic, but the boys told him it’s not true.
“We have people in different stages of progress, and the people that are further ahead that have gotten through it further, they become kind of like role models for the people that are in the middle of it,” Perry said.
The training at Hand in Hand, Feng said, gave his family a foundation that allowed Albert to take correction and make self improvements.
“Through their training he was able to recognize that sometimes he’s wrong, and then the reason why we try to correct him is because we love him, we want him to improve,” Feng said. “And somehow he got that idea from these two (Berger and Perry).”
Zeng returned to the farm with her other kids, and soon the whole family was making regular trips.
“We realized this is a tremendous place for the whole family,” Zeng said.
Six months later, a social group the Fengs belonged to for families with autistic children also drove down to Lacomb to see how Berger and Perry could help them.
“They saw Albert and nobody could imagine the huge difference,” Zeng said.
About 20 families from the social group attended family camp in April 2021. Today, many of those families and others who’ve heard about Hand in Hand by word of mouth continue to return for family camps and parenting classes.
In the five years they have been attending, Zeng and Feng said they have changed as parents and their son Albert has changed so much that he can now hold down a job and live independently to a great degree. They say he lives on his own, can take direction with a good attitude and focus on a project for long periods of time. And, of course, the tics are under control.
“He is totally another person from five years ago, and I believe I also have changed a lot,” Zeng said.
Berger and Perry are not only training children, she said. They are also training parents.
“My conclusion of why this system works is they’re not just fixing the kids,” Feng said. “All the other places, they treat the kids; they never teach the parent how to correctly handle all sorts of situations. We are learning how to parent while we’re here. I think that’s the reason why we keep coming back.”
Feng and Zeng now operate Seattle Hand in Hand, an extension of the organization that provides training closer to home for the families who have gone through the Lacomb camps and classes.
In the two-plus decades that Berger and Perry have been teaching families how to live in a society with expectations, they’ve learned that some people may disagree with their straightforward methods, and that many “experts” believe it’s better to leave children unfettered.
Berger said he even received a call from a couple of Albert’s teachers, berating him for giving his parents hope that Albert could be employable and that Berger is “removing the essence of Albert’s being.”
“We kind of operate on a different paradigm,” Perry said.
“Autistic people are people. We can have the same expectations of them as far as people go. It might take them a while longer to learn, that’s all. It takes more patience, more persistence, more tries, maybe a lot more time, but we have the same goal for everybody.”
That was a message that Zeng and Feng said they’ve never heard from any of the other groups they’ve talked to. Before Hand in Hand Farm altered their course, they were being taught that they should prepare to place Albert in a care home where he would be taken care of for the rest of his life, Feng said.
“This is the place that gave us hope,” he said. “And plus we have those role models in front of us that says, ‘No, Albert doesn’t need to just sit in the house all day for the rest of his life. He can actually maybe hold a job. He can actually be independent to some degree.’”