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Meaningful work
By SHARON L. BOND © St. Petersburg Times, published May 9, 2001 ST. PETERSBURG -- These are the jobs done at the Louise Graham Regeneration Center in a huge warehouse on Third Avenue S: Tearing paper by hand, adding decorative bows to bottles of lime juice, assembling ball point pens, packaging items such as a gasoline additive to hang on store shelves, feeding documents into a shredder, sorting plastic lens cups by size for recycling, sorting and shipping paper to paper mills for recycling, and baling cardboard. These are the workers who do the jobs: 55 to 60 men and women of varying ages who are mentally retarded and considered unemployable. Many of them live in group homes. Some can manage only tearing paper by hand. Others can assemble pens but can't count the correct number for each shipping box. So they place each completed pen on a template that contains the correct number. All work by choice. Supporting them is a staff of 28, including truck drivers, machine operators, accountants, teachers, social workers and Frank Leeds III, executive director and chief operating officer. "Just about all of our clients understand that two quarters will get a Coke" (from the machine at the center), said Leeds. "A few here understand four quarters will get you two Cokes. After that it is high math. There is no understanding." The Louise Graham Regeneration Center, a not-for-profit agency, began in 1949. Louise Graham, a volunteer at All Children's Hospital, met a mentally retarded man and decided to train him to stock shelves. He practiced in her garage and she was able to get him a job at a local grocery. She kept helping the mentally retarded and got others in St. Petersburg to join her. Leeds was hired by the center's board of directors 10 years ago. His mission was to close the center in six weeks because it had lost its contract with the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, which provided funding for the clients. When he arrived, he had to keep the business going for the final six weeks of the contract but also begin to dismantle it. In the process he found that the state had been reimbursing the center about half what it was paying similar organizations. He successfully persuaded the state to renew the contract. It did, but at a lesser rate. So Leeds looked for moneymaking opportunities. He decided to try a plastic recycling project to shift the emphasis from crafts to work. "Then I learned a lesson," Leeds said. After the clients had removed all of the plastic from the discarded electric boxes, Leeds passed out quarters according to how much plastic each client had taken out. "They had never done anything where they had gotten paid," Leeds said. "I came to close the place and found out what work meant to them." It was important enough that clients' behavior problems began disappearing. Leeds decided to commit himself to finding more work for them. Now the mission of the Louise Graham center is to provide work for the clients and to create enough business to sustain the organization. Its main business is recycling office paper from 375 customers in the St. Petersburg area. The center recycles 3-million pounds of paper per year. "That translates to 45,000 trees," Leeds said. "I think it's kind of neat that these people who never worked a day in their life are saving 45,000 trees." About half of the center's operating funds still come from the state. When Leeds arrived, the state's portion was nearly 100 percent. He hopes to eventually reduce that to 10 percent. "We go from paycheck to paycheck. We're still broke but no longer poor. We have assets that we didn't have before, the building, the trucks and also the know-how." The center also has gross revenues of just under $1-million. Clients and non-handicapped workers are paid the same rate for their work, about $6 per hour. A formula based on market rate for specific jobs is used. Clients take home less, though, because most cannot work a full-time job. "No one would hire our clients if they can only do the work of half a person," Leeds said. The turnaround began when he got a federal grant through the city to buy the warehouse where the center is now, at 2301 Third Ave. S. Florida Power hired the Graham center to recycle its used office paper, which it had to pay to be hauled away and buried in a landfill. During the two-year contract, the Graham center picked up two other clients. The arrangement with Florida Power ended, and the center had to return some of the power company's equipment it was using, such as a baling machine. Leeds said he put together a business plan and went to Barnett Bank (now part of Bank of America) and got a loan to buy equipment. The center started over again in its recycling and worked its way up to 100 customers, including some as far away as Citrus County. Mills were turning some of the paper the Graham center sold them into toilet tissue and hand towels. Leeds started buying the toilet paper and towels from the mills and reselling it to the businesses from which the used paper came originally. He also sells the tissue to the city of St. Petersburg, and hand towels to Pinellas County for use in park restrooms. When the price of paper fell several years ago, the Graham center was forced to retrench and now deals with customers in St. Petersburg. When the center needed additional workers for a big job, Leeds hired workers without mental handicaps. Some were unemployed and some on welfare. Their arrival provided unexpected benefits. "People in the community who work faster cause the production of the mentally retarded to go up," Leeds said. The advantage for the able-minded workers is that they get to know people who are handicapped, people they may have never seen before. The center's clients benefit, too, from an expanded group of acquaintances. "Handicapped people are so isolated," Leeds said. "When you can't read, your life can be pretty small." Yet inability of the clients to read is one reason that area companies send their sensitive material to the center, Leeds said. His goal is to hire one non-handicapped person for each handicapped client the center has.
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