After his son with autism began to age out of the educational system, Alvin Green ’89 started a cookie company. His aim: to secure a better future for his son.
Illustration by Bruce Morser ’76
What happens when the bus stops coming? It’s a phrase that parents of children with special needs often use, referring to the time around age 22, when a person ages out of the American educational system. Parents must grapple with decisions about continuing care for their adult children: Will they hire a live-in nurse? Or quit their jobs to provide care themselves?
They also have to think about the inevitable circumstance of how their child will be taken care of once they no longer can provide for them — through aging diseases like dementia or their own eventual death.
When their child began to age out of school, marketing executive Angela Ferguson suggested to her husband, Alvin Green ’89, that they start a business to build generational wealth for their son, Aiden, who lives with autism. “Why don’t you just combine your two loves?” she suggested back in 2022. “Your love for baking — especially cookies — and Aiden.” Al’s Cookie Mixx, an online company specializing in build-your-own cookies that employs people with special needs, was born.
The couple were no strangers to the small- business world: Green, a Colgate economics major, worked in transportation at a Fortune 500 company for a decade before leaving New York City, making a stop in Savannah, Ga., and finally settling in his wife’s hometown of Chicago. There, the couple started a catering company built on Green’s self-taught cooking skills.
When Aiden was diagnosed with autism in 2005, Green shifted to private chef work so he could have more flexibility to spend time with Aiden. He soon became Aiden’s primary caregiver, shuttling him to therapy appointments and handling insurance claims. As Aiden began to age out of school, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Green realized he needed to shift his career focus to create a lasting impact on Aiden’s future.
Green has always been interested in making the perfect cookie. Living in Spanish House at Colgate with classmates, “we used to make warm cookies and run them all over campus” for fundraisers, he remembers. “We thought about doing something with a business model back then, but life takes over, and we went different ways.”
Green transferred that passion for baking, combined with his culinary know-how, into Al’s Cookie Mixx. “Everyone likes something different in their cookies,” Green notes. “Other people tell you what they put in your cookies, we let you tell us what to put in your cookies.”
On the website, customers can choose a base flavor (chocolate, vanilla, or oatmeal) and any number of mix-ins (chocolate chips, fruit, candy, etc.) to create the perfect- for-them premade cookie. The company also offers flavors of the month, like April’s lemon blueberry cookie in honor of Autism Awareness Month.
According to Forbes, the unemployment rate for people with autism is roughly 85%. Aside from creating a future fund for Aiden, Green also set out to create a place for other people with special needs to spend their time. “There’s never enough opportunities for adults with autism or any special needs for employment, especially when you live in urban areas and especially [for people] of color,” Green says. The company recently moved into a permanent commercial kitchen, and Green is hiring people with special needs to do jobs like packing orders, sticking labels, and helping with pop-up events.
“Somebody needs to do it, might as well be us,” he says.