— From Horizon Air Magazine, December 2003

Meaningful Employment: Employees with disabilities find pride and a paycheck at Skookum

By Bill Asenjo and Sharalyn Harris Illustration by Julie Delton

Willie is a 51-year-old woman diagnosed as bipolar. It's an illness that causes such wide mood swings that Willie is considered disabled. For 16 years, she couldn't find work. She lived on Social Security Disability Insurance payments, growing increasingly miserable as life seemed to have nothing to offer her.

Then, three years ago, a friend told her about Skookum Inc., a Northwest not-for-profit company that provides employment for people with physical or mental challenges. Willie was hired and now makes $11 an hour, well above minimum wage, as a janitress. She is also a job coach — teaching others, one-on-one, how to be successful, too. "I feel like I'm part of a big, loving family," she says.

Skookum, based in Port Townsend, northwest of Seattle, pays wages as high as $38 an hour, routinely wins contracts in competitions with for-profit businesses, and counts the U.S. Navy, Army and Coast Guard as its biggest customers.

The 15-year-old company — whose name derives from a Northwest Indian word meaning "strong, well-made, well-built" — makes jump ropes, and also provides janitorial, recycling, landscaping, auto-maintenance, and chemical-latrine services. In addition, an environmental-engineering division designs and services wastewater systems, and another division does asbestos abatement, and removal of hazards such as mold and lead.

Skookum employs 560 people — 75 percent of them "disabled" — with nine divisions in multiple sites across Washington state. Anyone with a barrier to employment is welcome to apply for work at Skookum, whose employees range from people with mental and motor disabilities to people in addiction-recovery programs.

Many nonprofits rely on subsidies, donations, community grants and charity drives. Less than 2 percent of Skookum's income is derived from these sources. The rest of its money is generated from its products and services.

Skookum founder Jim Westall, left, talks with Greg Smith, whose work placing beads on jump ropes helped the company get started.

"Skookum is proof that not only can employment barriers be broken for the disabled, it can be done in a way that everyone wins, big time," says company president Ken Lynn. "We do more than just provide entry-level work for the disabled," notes Skookum founder Jim Westall, a former high school special-education teacher. "We provide careers and a career ladder." At Skookum, the average salary is around $33,000 a year. The lowest-paid full-time employees make nearly $21,000 a year, and 2 to 3 percent of nonmanagement employees make as much as $70,000 a year.

The need for employment for people with disabilities is substantial. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults, ages 21 to 64, who have severe disabilities are unemployed. That's nearly 12 million people, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report. Almost 1.9 million of the 10.4 million people with non-severe disabilities are unemployed.

"Skookum gives people a job, with a living wage," Westall says. He adds, however, that he measures Skookum's success by more thm money. Two of the company's main goals are to "support marginalized members of society" and provide "a safe and supportive workplace."

"We talk about the social returns on investment the way Boeing talks about capital returns," Westall says.

Maurice Correia knows the value of those returns. The 36-year-old has been at Skookum since 1997. In 1994, a drunk driver ran over him as he was walking home — just two blocks from the restaurant he owned. The accident took one leg off just under the knee and broke the other leg. During three years of convalescence — as he worked his way from wheelchair to walker to crutches to cane — Correia, who provides financial support for his three children, lost his savings and his home, and had to close his restaurant because he didn't have the ability or the money to run it after he was injured, especially since the bank demanded payment in full on the restaurant loan. When he applied for other work two years into his rehab, after he had advanced to the walker stage, he learned how difficult it is for a person with disabilities to get a job. "I was given many different reasons that I wasnt hired," he says. "Even though I was qualified, they'd say they were afraid I couldn't deal with the stairs, or the clutches on the vehicles, things like that. It was pretty disheartening."

One year and 70 résumé submissions after he began looking for work, Correia saw a notice at an employment service that gave him hope. "You don't see too many want ads for jobs that say they welcome the disabled," he says. "It got my attention."

Today Correia is director of Operational Support and Quality Management. He oversees a team of nine people who ensure that every division of the company is up-to-date on international regulations and standards for each job, and that every division fully meets contract requirements.

When Jim Westall started Skookum in 1988, in a 500-square-foot industrial garage he leased from the Port of Port Townsend, he had no idea the company would grow to be so important to so many people with so many different work challenges. In the beginning, he just wanted to help his students. As a gpecial-education teacher, he saw the frustration his students felt when they tried to find work after graduating from high school. In school, they had been taught hand-eye-coordination skills such as stringing colored beads. "They would string the beads, then unstring them to start all over again," Westall says. "Then one day I was in the gym, watching the kids work out with jump ropes, and I thought, 'Why not put the beads on a string and sell the string?'"

Westall took a second mortgage on his house to obtain $30,000 to start a jumprope company. To get orders, he sent fliers to stores and schoolteachers across the country. He hired a job coach to supervise three employees with severe disabilities who made beaded jump ropes during the day while Westall taught school. Westall went to the garage after school — sometimes staying until the wee hours of the morning — to process orders and do paperwork to keep his endeavor afloat.

He says his company survived thanks largely to what he calls "a windfall event." In 1989, Carl Nomura, a retired Honeywell executive vice president, heard Westall speak about Skookum at a Port Townsend breakfast meeting for retired executives and professionals. He volunteered to mentor Westall.

Nomura led the company's first strategic-planning session and laid the groundwork for the company to expand. The first branching out began in 1991, when Skookum — which had grown to about 20 employees, working staggered shifts in the garage — acquired another nonprofit, which was struggling financially. The nonprofit, which was also devoted to employing people with disabilities, owned a recycling company in the Port Townsend area.

In addition, Westall and his then-wife scraped together $10,000 for a booth at the 1991 American International Toy Fair in New York. Skookum's colorful ropes were a hit with retailers.

"That marked a real turning point," Westall says. A few months after the toy fair, the Today show featured Skookum and Westall. "Our phone rang off the hook for a week," he says.

In 1993, after 22 years of teaching special education, Westall left the school district to work full time at Skookum. Two years later, the company, now with 40 employees, was able to leave the garage. With a vision of extensive future expansion, it obtained a community-development grant, and land donated by the Port of Port Townsend and Jefferson County, to open its present 10,000-square-foot headquarters.

Westall — a late-middle-aged, silver haired man with calm, bright eyes, who follows Unitarian teachings — is philosophical about the years of nearly round-the-clock labor to grow the company. Those years took their toll and contributed to the demise of his marriage, which ended in 1995, he says, "but pursuing dffferent goals is what we do in life. We play life as hard as we can, gently. What we do in life comes from the values that we have. I would hate to go to my deathbed regretting the things I haven't done."

Westall was not the only one who took risks to make Skookum a success. At a 1997 NISH — formerly National Industries for the Severely Handicapped — meeting on how to get government contracts, he met Audrey Fitzgerald, the contracts officer at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, south of Port Townsend. Fitzgerald was impressed. She gave Skookum its first large janitorial contract. "The contract required that we have 150 janitors," Westall says. "At the time, we had one." Westall had to find and train 149 employees in just four months. He advertised in newspapers and, as much as he could, hired workers from the outgoing contractor. Every detail had to be planned ahead of time, including knowing what each person was supposed to do, right down to the minute. Skookum rented offices near the shipyard so that its managers could familiarize themselves with the layout before employees began working at the yard. "It was a huge risk on both sides," Westall says, but in October 1997, Skookum Janitorial Services was on the job — and meeting the requirement that 75 percent of the labor force be handicapped.

Cliff Wright and Julie Davis provide janitorial services at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where Skookum employees clean more than 300 buildings a day.

The new janitorial crew had to clean 319 buildings a day: two million square feet total, in secured and non-secured areas, in spaces with daily traffic of 6,000 people. From day one, the Skookum crew did a stellar job, Fitzgerald says. "They were great."

"We never questioned, 'Could we do it?'" Westall says. "It is just who we are, to do it, to make it work. This was one of those points where the survival of the company was at stake. We had to succeed." He pauses, remembering, then adds, "It worked beyond our wildest imagination."

At the shipyard, and in all of its work, Skookum is committed to doing the best it can — not only in quality, but also in ethical practices, he says. "Many companies try to hide their mistakes, but we adopted the philosophy that we would be absolutely honest, that when we made a mistake, we would report it. We wanted everything to be completely up-front."

Skookum's commitment to ethics and excellence has resulted in many awards, including the 2003 Washington State Governor's Award for Large Nonprofit Employer of the Year and the NISH 2001 Performance Excellence in Government Contracts Award.

A lot of people wonder how the company can accomplish so much when most of its employees have disabilities, says Buhl Holcomb, director of the Fleet Management Division at the Fort Lewis Army base south of Seattle, where Skookum employees service more than 3,000 vehicles a year, providing annual maintenance, and oil and parts changes.

Scott Mikelson, who has been employed full time by Skookum since 1995 and works in grounds maintenance, has received many positive comments from customers.

"Before I came here, I didn't see how it could possibly work using disabled people," he says. "But since I was hired a year ago, my attitude has done a 180-degree turnaround. It amazes me every day that so much is possible. Sometimes it literally brings tears to my eyes to see it." Company president Ken Lynn, who was a management consultant before joining Skookum three years ago, notes that the company works hard to make sure employees understand safety procedures and what is expected of them. They must pass competency tests, and those who can't read or write have job coaches to help them understand the regulations. Job coaches retrain employees frequently — every day if needed. Employees also help each other. "A perfect example is that we have a person on our crew who doesn't read or write," Holcomb says. "On their lunch break, on their own time, other employees gather around him, teaching him how to read."

Westfall's visionary company attracts people who have "a sense of service," says Lynn. Goals are well-defined, and employees assess their job performance every week. Employee wages start at $10 an hour, and line employees and managers are eligible for bonuses based on success related to areas such as meeting production quotas, deadlines and budget constraints. Manager bonuses are also tied to customer and employee satisfaction.

"This means managers can't make their goals at the expense of the employees," Lynn says. "The manager who gets the most compensation is the one who gets the highest evaluations from the employees. What all this adds up to is that we all feel responsible for each other's success."

Skookum polls customers and employees every six months to determine satisfaction, Lynn says. If there is an employee or customer complaint, Westall speaks directly with the person who has a concern. "If the top of the corporation is in touch with the bottom and with the customer," Westall says, "then the company can't go far astray."

Mark Hering, manager of the Jump Rope Division, gestures out his window to a view of Townsend Bay in Port Townsend. Sitting on a peninsula, the 8,500-person town looks north to the San Juan Islands. To the east is the majestic Cascade Range. To the southwest are the Olympic Mountains. To the south is Marrowstone Island.

"This view and my job keep me youthful," Hering says. Formerly an artist and candle maker, he joined Skookum three years ago. "I had been working for an artist, doing piecework, when I ran into a friend who was director of the Jump Rope Division at the time," he says. "She knew I was looking for more traditional work, and she stopped me on the street. She said, 'You need to work with us!'"

Hering felt nervous about joining Skookum because he'd never worked with people who had disabilities, but he decided to hang out at company headquarters and observe things for a few days. To his surprise, he fell in love with Skookum, its people and its products. He became his friend's assistant until she married a couple of years ago and moved to another company, and he was promoted to her position.

"I never thought I would get excited about jump ropes," he says. "But the quality is extremely high, and Skookum allows me to bend over backward for my customers. If something goes wrong, I can send them free ropes or free shipping or whatever it takes to make them satisfied."

Jump Rope Division employees place plastic, colored, tubelike beads along the length of a light rope. The result is a jump rope that handles more smoothly than plain rope and that turns easily in the handle so that the rope doesn't twist, Hering says. The company also makes "speed ropes" without beads, and assembles do-it-yourself jump-rope kits.

The Jump Rope Division is the first rung of the company's career ladder, Hering says. "We place people here initially to find out what their skills are and then try to match them out in the community."

The division employs about 15 people. They include Skip Crutcher and Greg Smith, two of the three workers who got the company started by making jump ropes in the leased garage. Another star employee is 41-year-old Tony, who has learning and other disabilities that leave him unable to read or write beyond an elementary-school level — but who is fondly known as the "idea man."

"I was the one who thought up the idea that we should make red-white-and-blue jump ropes [after 9/11]," he says. Most of the ropes Skookum sells are rainbow-colored, and the company rarely gets orders for special colors. But based on Tony's idea, Skookum made around 300 red-white-and-blue jump ropes. All but a couple of boxes have long since been sold.

Skookum's jump-rope-quality supervisor is a 35-year-old named Troy, who experienced brain and motor disabilities following a car accident when he was in high school. He takes tremendous pride in his work. "I used to make them [the jump ropes) too tight," he says. "But that was long ago. Now I make them right."

Like Willie, the bipolar employee, Troy considers Skookum a second home. "I'm doing good [because] I got a job," he says.

"This is the only place I ever worked where, when I tell the employees that we're getting two days off for Thanksgiving, they groan and want to know why they have to take Friday off, too," Hering says. "They want to work. For them, money is just a fringe benefit."

For some employees, however, earning a wage makes all the difference. John Kartes, a 34-year-old quadruple amputee and father of two, feels like he's well off now — after a long struggle. He lost part of all four limbs in a car accident when he was 21. Five years after the accident, he'd worked his way through rehab — learning to use artificial arms and legs — and he'd got his old job back at Boeing, where he drove a forklift. But his job was one of those lost in Boeing's thousands of Puget Sound-area layoffs last year. In February of this year, he was hired at Skookum, where he does the same work — forklifting — in the Fort Lewis Central Issue Facility. But he likes it better at Skookum. "When I worked with people who didn't have handicaps, they didn't know what to say to me, so they avoided me," he says. "Here, no one even notices, and I'm treated just like everyone else. I am just glad that there's a company like this that gives people like me a chance to prove our abilities."

John Kartes, who lost his arms below the elbows and his legs below the knees in a car accident when he was 21, uses prosthetic limbs to operate a forklift.

Writer Bill Asenjo is a certified rehabilitation counselor.

Sharalyn Harris is a freelance writer.

© 2003 by Bill Asenjo

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