Honest work | An enterprising nonprofit puts the disadvantaged to work while competing in a global market
In a town in central Maine, during a time of massive budget cuts, a relatively unknown agency serving the intellectually disabled is engaged in an improbable quest to serve its social mission while successfully operating five businesses.
Skills Inc. is a $17 million enterprise based in St. Albans that provides a full spectrum of services, including group homes, day and crisis programs, and meaningful employment to 300-plus adults living in Kennebec and Somerset counties.
The agency is unusual in that it keeps its core mission firmly front and center (full and rich lives, including jobs, for adults with disabilities) while serving as a portal to larger worlds, industries and social concerns.
Included in Skills Inc.’s mix of enterprises is a lumber mill that competes on the world market and a nascent e-waste business that aspires to join the global search for a solution to the health and environmental problems caused by the disposal of computers. The social enterprise division also includes a dog kennel, thrift store and industrial recycling center.
Tom Davis, who has led Skills Inc. for the past 11 years, has contributed his unique stamp on an organization that was already primed for audaciousness. In 1980, when state institutions housing the mentally disabled were closed, a fervent, community-based movement developed, and organizations like Skills Inc. were born. These organizations sought to offer people with intellectual challenges lives they had been denied in institutional settings.
At the heart of this movement was the commitment to provide employment through unique for-profit social enterprises. So, 20 years ago, a group of Maine residents took on the task of building a lumber mill to help ensure that adults with intellectual difficulties had work available to them. Since then, Sebasticook Lumber has paid in excess of $4 million in wages to people with disabilities.
However, when Davis entered the scene, the mill had become outdated and needed to be closed — or rebuilt from the ground up. Davis and his board decided to build a world-class mill. Imagine trucks from a broad base of suppliers delivering hard wood of all types; workers in hard hats using technologically advanced equipment to reduce logs to different grades of hard wood lumber; planks stacked neatly around the yard, ready to be shipped to all of New England and eastern Canada for flooring, boatbuilding and other purposes.
The mill employs 25 people, 13 of whom have intellectual disabilities. It also produces 6 million board feet of lumber a year — three times the lumber the old mill produced. It is the only lumber mill in the country to employ people with disabilities. Like all of Skills Inc.’s social enterprises, the mill has a full-time manager who is an expert in his field. “You can’t run saw mills like group homes,” explains Davis. “To be successful, you have to compete with the marketplace, and have a market-ready product that is as good as or better than others out there.”
Market driven
All five of Skills Inc.’s businesses employ people with disabilities and each one generates income. In fact, Skills Inc. is the second-largest employer in the St. Albans area. “We are able to operate differently from other social service organizations. If you generate profit, you have freedom and choices,” says Davis.
Davis combines business acumen and experience working with adults with intellectual disabilities. “Who’s the entrepreneur?” he asks rhetorically. “He is someone who generates enough money to pay for their own mistakes.”
Davis’ father, a vice president at Kraft Corporation, gave him a predisposition to business principles and a respect for the power of markets. As a college student, Davis worked at a liquor store in a rough part of Los Angeles for a man named Alex, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. “Over and over again, Alex told me: You need to figure out something unique, a product or service that no one had ever thought of before,” says Davis. “I am still trying to figure that out.”
After college, Davis ran a human services agency serving adults with intellectual disabilities. Then, for the next 17 years, he honed his entrepreneurial skills by owning a variety of businesses. In time, he was drawn full circle to run a program finding employment for people with disabilities, and from there, to Skills Inc.
Skills Inc.’s enterprise E-Waste Alternatives is its newest and most ambitious, with the potential to enter the global marketplace. Employing eight people, it addresses both the environmental issue of computers in the waste stream and the economic barrier that keeps technological tools from low-income people. Its impressive array of contracts with businesses, hospitals and colleges includes Bates College, DeLorme and MaineGeneral Health.
Skills Inc. is a mixture of social commitment, entrepreneurial risk and reward, and passionate interest in local and global concerns. Talking with Davis, I realized that more, not less, is possible.
Elizabeth Banwell is director of program development and strategic initiatives for the Maine Association of Nonprofits in Portland. She can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz. Read more of Elizabeth’s columns at www.mainebiz.biz.
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