Green Guidance in working with adults with mild intellectual disabilities in Slovakia
When the green guidance toolbox was being developed, we did not have a particular kind of practitioner in mind: we were thinking of someone working with different clients choosing their vocation or navigating career transitions in a labour market that is slowly, insufficiently and unevenly greening. What happens when you take those tools and work with ten adults who have mild intellectual disabilities, are Hungarian-speaking, and live in a small town in southern Slovakia? That is exactly what one counsellor set out to find out. The intervention described here was carried out within ZPMP – the Association for the Support of People with Intellectual Disabilities in Dunajská Streda – in collaboration with the organisation Spoluprácou pre lepšiu budúcnosť (Cooperation for a Better Future), based in Veľký Meder. It ran across three sessions of four, two, and two hours respectively. The ten participants, aged between 25 and 54, had educational backgrounds ranging from special primary school to practical school (roughly ISCED 2). None were registered at an employment office, though most had some experience of seasonal or occasional work and were active volunteers within their association.
Starting where the clients already are
ZPMP members had already participated in the ECO-COMPASS project, developing environmental competencies, and had gone on to create a community garden where they grow flowers and vegetables. Many were already doing the kind of work – lawn maintenance, outdoor cleaning, simple horticultural tasks – that sits naturally within a green occupational framework. Some were involved in reviewing easy-read materials for people with intellectual disabilities, a skill the practitioner later categorised, with the participants, as an occupationally “neutral” green contribution. This prior experience mattered enormously. The practitioner notes that “their previous experiences from education, the community garden and voluntary work supported their understanding” from the very first session. Green Guidance did not arrive as an abstraction but as a language for something the group was already living.
Adaptation as professional labour
Translating the materials into Hungarian was only the beginning. The real work was transforming them into easy-read format – plain language, supported by images, with key concepts repeated and abstracted questions replaced by concrete, local examples. The practitioner is candid that this was time-consuming, requiring not only simple language but “searching for suitable images to support and illustrate the content of the presentation.” This is a form of professional labour the field rarely talks about explicitly. Adapting Green Guidance for non-standard populations is a substantial design task that belongs in any accounting of implementing green guidance, as mentioned by all practitioners.
What the methods revealed
The activity sequence moved from icebreakers rooted in relationship with nature, through values identification, into structured exploration of occupational categories and self-positioning. Each step was calibrated for the group. The values work produced immediate results. When participants were asked to recall situations in which they felt satisfied or proud, they named nature, helping others, family, community work, cooperation, love of animals, and the importance of local products. These mapped almost directly onto green occupational values. The WALL-E clip, originally designed for vocational training contexts, proved unexpectedly effective. The film’s visual storytelling and humour were accessible, and participants were able to articulate why “cleaning up the planet” matters and to connect that explicitly to their own voluntary work. The leap from fictional robot to community volunteer was short, and they made it themselves. The occupational categorisation exercise – sorting professions by environmental impact into green, yellow, neutral, and brown categories – generated occupationally grounded discussion. Participants spontaneously identified an interest in outdoor work, gardening and waste sorting. When they came to classify the easy-read text reviewer role – something several of them actually do – they placed it in the neutral category and were able to explain why.
Encountered challenges
The practitioner Ildikó Hanuliaková does not oversell the intervention. Some participants needed more frequent guidance than others. Abstract questions about long-term climate impacts did not land well and had to be replaced with concrete, simple examples. Attention cycles were shorter than in typical adult groups, requiring more frequent activity-switching. The balance between more active and less active participants needed ongoing management. Several of the activities used here were designed for primary or secondary school students. The practitioner reports that they “proved effective” with this group nonetheless. It suggests that the accessibility of Green Guidance methods is considerably broader than their original scope implies – provided the practitioner is willing to do the adaptation work and to read the group carefully. The recommendations the practitioner offers at the end of the case study are grounded and practical: more activities in real outdoor settings, local employer photographs in worksheets, a simple green vocabulary resource, systematic use of participants’ easy-read expertise, and inviting local workers (municipal staff, gardeners) to present their work or organising site visits.
A closing observation
The practitioner ends the case study with a sentence that is worth sitting with: the clients perceive their community as a large family, built on values of cooperation, help, safety and mutual care – of which love of nature and environmental values are a natural part. Green Guidance does not install new values into people, but finds the ecological commitments that are already there and gives them occupational form, reconnects them with their careers. In Dunajská Streda, those commitments were visible in a community garden, in volunteer hours, in the careful tending of things that grow. The work of the counsellor was to help the participants see that what they were already doing had a name, and that the name mattered.
This article is based on a case study submitted as part of the Exploring Green Guidance project’s methodology testing phase.