SAXTONS RIVER — It takes a village to raise a child, so the saying goes. So what happens when youth with disabilities get too old to continue attending school and enter the community, leaving behind the supportive and social opportunities provided by the educational system?
A group of Saxtons River residents are addressing that gap with a restaurant, The Dish on Main, opened in December. It serves breakfast and lunch.
Saxtons River Partners, a nonprofit with a board comprised of seven local residents - Jim and Jane Macri, Sean and Joan Campbell, Carol and Dave Bucdahl, and Averill Larsen - coalesced around the mission to provide people with disabilities a vocational and social opportunity.
Several members of the board work with or are otherwise involved with people with disabilities, or have known someone who “could have used a place like this” once they got out of school.
Altogether, board members bring diverse interests and skills to the table. “Everyone is good at something we needed,” Campbell explained.
The Macris are retired but own the building and “we run a farm too,” Jane Macri said.
Joan Campbell works as a special education teacher in Springfield, and “that's my thing,” she said.
Averill Larsen has worked in the restaurant business for years, running the Saxtons River Inn with her husband, Bob Thomson, and the Saxtons River Village Market.
Together with the Bucdahls, “we've all been friends for decades,” said Campbell, who handles the publicity for the enterprise.
“A business model with a mission like this is unheard of,” she said. “We've hired people who are totally on board with the idea [of working with people with disabilities].”
The staff concurred.
“We've done surprising well,” Executive Chef George Kendall, said of the restaurant's four months of business. “We've gotten through a lot of what needs to be done, but there's still stuff on the list.”
The restaurant is light and colorful, lined with wood booths and the walls display original art from students and local artists.
“We try to rotate regularly,” Kendall said.
At a wooden counter, regulars often sit to converse with lifelong local waitress Barbara Pacific. Country-style windows front on the village's main street, Route 121. Even during slow hours, the booths fill with patrons who can sit in the sun whiling away a pleasant hour over coffee and a plate of local eggs and toast from bread baked on the premises, Kendall said.
While Kendall describes The Dish on Main as a country diner, “We want to provide high end food service,” he said.
Kendall grew up and attended high school at Bellows Falls Union High School with Campbell's daughter.
“When this job came open, I asked her to put in a good word for me,” he said.
“He's a real find,” Campbell said.
Larsen has her own hands full working at both enterprises in Saxtons River, but manages to “talk with George regularly. He's the manager. I just guide him along.”
“He's a real find,” Campbell said.
Kendall has worked in high-end, fine dining facilities on the East Coast since he graduated from New England Culinary Institute, so “I bring that knowledge and experience” to the restaurant.
“I'm at home here,” he said.
That experience and knowledge is most reflected, he said, in the way the food is cooked and garnished, and through the fresh local ingredients and on-premise baking he provides. “We want to give people a high-end dining experience without having to leave the village.”
There is no greasy food smell, and the cleanliness of everything from the restaurant to the kitchen to the restrooms is a matter of pride to the staff.
“We've got the cleanest ladies' room in New England,” Pacific said with a laugh. “Seriously.”
Pacific said that having lived and worked locally all her life, she brings clientele with her to the restaurant.
“I know everyone who comes in,” she said, and mentioned that she once worked at another restaurant that occupied the premises.
“They all love me,” she said, grinning. “They remember me and come to see me.”
Joan Campbell noted that the restaurant “is getting there” in terms of being able to accomplish its mission. The group has introduced the enterprise to agencies like Health Care and Rehabilitation Services of Southeastern Vermont (HCRS), Vocational Rehabilitation, and Lincoln Street Inc. of Springfield, a developmental services specialized services agency.
“We've talked to all the agencies to tell them what we are doing,” Campbell said.
But “first, the restaurant needs to be able to support its current staff before we can hire anyone else, and we intend to run a profitable organization,” Campbell explained, “so we can then provide this unique opportunity to people with disabilities in the area.”
“We're working out the kinks as we go,” Averill Larsen said, the only member of the board whose spouse did not come on board due to “enough other things” he was involved in around the community.
From concept to restaurant
Campbell said it took the group a year of weekly meetings to hammer out a plan that all thought could work.
It meant connecting with agencies that are all ready set up in Vermont to facilitate placing young adults with disabilities in the workplace.
“We want to provide the opportunity for someone to come in and learn a skill,” Campbell said. “We need to work with the agencies because most of the people we want to help would need someone, a mentor or some sort of support person, to come with them.”
The restaurant can provide the opportunity and training, she said, “but that support person needs to be provided by the agency. They also need to be doing something that suits them [which the agency helps determine].”
Campbell's experience both personally and in the special education field has taught her that once someone with a disability leaves school, he or she leaves behind much of the support and socialization the schools provided.
“The person stays at home a lot, and because of the needs of most of these people, the families are isolated taking care of them,” Campbell said.
“They don't even know who else in the community might have an interest in going to the movies, or out to a restaurant, or having a party,” she added.
Campbell said the restaurant hosted a Valentine's party in February.
“We got talking with some people who have family with disabilities living at home and no longer in school, and how wouldn't it be great if they could get together with people they could be friends with, and socialize,” she said.
Campbell said she thought that the hosts might have a hard time getting people to stay the whole hour and a half planned for the party.
That concern wasn't founded. was unfounded.
Campbell said they played bingo and ate pizza. “We had about 20 young adults with disabilities, and their caregivers and families, who had never met each other. They were having such a good time, we could hardly get them to leave,” she said with a laugh.
The Valentine's Day party “was all about networking. Families and caregivers are talking about more events in the future.”
In fact, HCRS will host an event “Autism Awareness for Parents,” from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the restaurant on April 28. Families will be able to meet one another and find out about resources in the community.
Campbell envisioned the “back room” could provide a quiet place where someone who can physically roll silverware into napkins but who can't engage easily socially, could “do that job there, out of the mainstream but can still interact if they want to.”
Campbell emphasizes, however, that the restaurant does not furnish care providers or mentors.
“People need to go through the agencies they are associated with already” before applying for work, she said.
She said they have had several people walk in off the street who heard they were hiring people with disabilities.
“It doesn't work that way, unfortunately,” Campbell said.
The people they are hoping to help would more than likely have a caregiver, mentor, or family member to oversee them while they work. For the restaurant to hire such people, arrangements need to go “through an agency that does that, who will then set it up [employment] with us,” Campbell said.
Furthermore, she said, state and federal labor laws prevent the restaurant from asking potential employees if and what their disability is, even to assess what job would best suit them, or to evaluate what prospective workers can or cannot do.
Consequently, an agency assesses the client and matches him or her with a job, in addition to providing support personnel.
“One of the jobs I could imagine someone doing is to be in charge of the serve-your-own-coffee counter,” Campbell said. “They could keep the pump pots full and the area clean.”
Macri, Larsen, and Campbell agreed that Saxtons River is the right community for a business with a mission such as theirs.
“Everyone we've spoken with has expressed support for the idea,” Campbell said. “It's a pretty open community,” Larsen said.
“If somebody needs something,” Macri stated, “the community is there for them.”
Patrons liked the idea too, Campbell noted.
She said a culture of acceptance is something that grows and “ripples across a community.”
Describing Cape Abilities, an organization on Cape Cod that provides employment and other services for people with disabilities living in that region, she sees that agency as a sort of model.
Campbell cited an example where a young man was given a job at a hardware store on the Cape through the program.
When she went in one day, “We were joking around about who got the job of pricing the sandpaper, thinking what an awful job that must be. One of the owners said, 'That's Joe's job. He likes using the pricing gun, so we save it all for him.'”
The owner went on to say that they had to put in a bench at the store “because so many friends in the community came by to talk to him,” Campbell recounted.
“People just loved him and he had found a place in the community that worked for him,” Campbell said.
Campbell said she has told the participating agencies that she will do mock interviews for someone with disabilities who is not quite ready for a real job interview yet.
While they are not quite to the point of hiring anyone with disabilities at the moment, “within in the year” they will be able to move on to that phase of the project, Larsen said.
Campbell said the restaurant is in the process of setting up interviews through one of the agencies with a prospective employee with disabilities, “but we're still a ways from hiring” anyone.
“It depends on many things, including the economy,” she added.
Judging by the response and support from the community and patrons of the restaurant, as well as the families of those with disabilities, “It's going to be a going concern for years to come,” Macri said. “We wouldn't be involved if we didn't see it that way.”
“We're taking baby steps and need to build on our success,” Campbell said. “We need to be able to support another paid employee. Our first responsibilities are to cover our costs and our current staff” of about seven employees.
Then, she said, the group will be able to offer more in the way of service for the disabilities community, and offer jobs, job skills training, and social events geared toward people with disabilities, their families, and their support networks.
“It's evolving,” Campbell said. “We want a restaurant that serves good food, and provides vocational and social opportunities [for people with disabilities].”
The food part of the plan is in place, and providing a workplace for people with different ways of approaching work, while still ahead, according to Campbell, “Is close.”