It’s late afternoon on a hot summer day and the cafeteria at Baptist Hospital is buzzing and clanking with workers preparing patients’ dinner trays. Oblivious to the commotion around her, Anastacia Mcloud, in hairnet and gloves, is plopping large spoonfuls of yellow rice, topped by chicken, on plate after plate after plate.

“She’s really in the zone,” jokes her boss, Stan Hodes, manager of dining services. “When she’s doing something, she really concentrates.”

And that’s a good thing. It was her ability to get the work done under pressure that got her the job on the serving line after she interned for four months at the Kendall hospital. Mcloud, 22, of Florida City, is one of a handful of young adults with physical and developmental disabilities who have been given the opportunity to work through the Miami-Dade EmployAbility Network.

Formerly known as the Miami-Dade Business Leadership Network, the volunteer group has established an internship program that reimburses business partners 100 percent of an intern’s earnings, up to a maximum of 240 hours. The only requirement? The intern must be a disabled person. The intent is to educate businesses on the employability of the disabled while also providing an avenue of employment for interns.

“The idea,” says Bob Bromberg, the founding president of MDEAN, “is to push beyond the reluctance that some companies have because they can’t afford to hire. We provide the money so companies can do this.”

The network, made up of human resource executives and labor lawyers, made its first placements in 2007 at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics. The three interns worked in data entry and as staff assistants. All three were hired after the internship ended. Since then, Bromberg figures that the organization has worked with 30 employers and placed more than 60 interns, some of whom eventually were hired permanently.

Employers cover a broad cross-section of industries. There’s Baptist Health, of course, but also Lehman Brothers, Terremark Worldwide, United Way, Seaboard Marine, Publix and some law firms. One second-year University of Miami law school student with a physical disability who interned at Holland & Knight through the MDEAN program landed a coveted summer associate internship at the law firm during his third school year. The law firm chose not to seek payroll reimbursement so the EmployAbility Network could use those funds for another internship.

Though getting hired is every intern’s dream, the experience of working in a real-world situation can be just as valuable, says Iliana Castillo-Frick, a Miami Dade College vice provost who serves as MDEAN’s current president.

“They gain the opportunity to see what it’s really like on the job,” adds Castillo-Frick, “and they also get more confidence from the experience.”

That certainly holds true for Mcloud. “I learn patience, responsibility and getting along with other employees,” she says.

Though she likes the work — fixing salads, prepping food, arranging trays — she particularly enjoys the camaraderie with the other workers.

“Everybody encourages me and they tell me, ‘Good job.’ If I make a mistake, they show me how to do it right.”