Like the iconic glare of Uncle Sam telling Americans, ‘I Want You,’ Pueblo executive Stephanie Garcia makes the same plea. But she’s recruiting for something entirely different.
Garcia, Executive Director of Pueblo’s arc Thrift stores, is more interested in nurturing and later, hiring intellectually and developmentally disabled men and women to staff the city’s two arc Thrift stores.
“It’s the mission of the organization,” said Garcia in a recent telephone interview. It is also a personal duty and responsibility, she said, “to promote the rights and dignity” of an often undervalued and too often discarded group of human beings.
Since 1968, arc Thrift stores in Colorado have hired intellectually and developmentally disabled adults, people often thoughtlessly or foolishly labeled ‘handicapped.’ arc Thrift stores, Garcia boasts, “are the largest employer with people with disabilities in Colorado.”
Arc Thrift stores, here and elsewhere, accept perfectly useful clothing, furniture, household goods and, essentially, things people no longer need or want and resell them. They do the same with people, men and women, whose value is also often overlooked or even dismissed. Like the shelves of their stores where no longer wanted items are placed, arc Thrift finds a place for them.
Garcia said, arc Thrift stores are among the most committed, employment-first advocates for intellectually and developmentally disabled men and women. In addition to advocating on behalf of this group, the Pueblo executive says the organization serves as legal guardians when there is no family to fill that role.
In Pueblo’s two stores, Garcia counts “74 individuals who have no family.” The work, she said, gives them not simply an opportunity to be part of an everyday world, but also gives them purpose. It also provides arc Thrift customers an opportunity to see value in their contributions.
While serving in Pueblo’s arc Thrift leadership, Garcia has another reason for embracing the organization’s mission. Her adult son, Lorenzo, is autistic. But, like many of arc’s employees, he also has meaningful work.
Her tone reflects her pride in describing him as “amazing.” He bags groceries and shags buggies at a Pueblo Safeway. He’ll soon celebrate 20 years at the store.
While Garcia celebrates the work of so many arc Thrift employees, it was something many years earlier and far more personal that truly inspired her advocacy for others.
It was Garcia’s own intuition with her own son, now in his forties, that first introduced her to this reality. Her pediatrician—even her own physician assistant husband—did not see or recognize her son Lorenzo’s autism.
“I got the typical, kind of dismissive” routine, said Garcia. The doctor, she recalled, told her, “He’s never going to have language, never going to work and I got angry.” Perhaps, even more than angry. “How dare you,” she told him. “Where is your crystal ball?” She remembers that moment when “I committed to making him as successful as he could possibly be.”
While there may be a perception that arc Thrift store workers are more window dressing than anything else. Garcia suggests taking a closer and more realistic look. At arc, she said, the mission is“employment first,” also respect.
These stores are not what one might call boutique sized. And it is no small task to keeping one running. Many of the facilities were once grocery or big box stores that had shut down and moved on to other locations.
The men and women who perform the work to keep the stores running, earn their money. In Colorado this group of workers is paid what the state mandates. No one is getting “sub-minimum wage,” Garcia said. State statutes set minimum wage at $14.81 per hour.
Garcia said arc Thrift and its workers find one another through referrals with local government’s adult protection. “We work with vocational rehabilitation.” Once a person is identified, there is “job training, finding out a persons’ likes and dislikes and job coaching.”
For many people, Garcia said, encountering someone who is intellectually or physically disabled is unfamiliar or sometimes even uncomfortable. “It’s somewhat like the culture that you’re not familiar with. But disability touches everybody at some point in their lives…I understand that.”
