Human Resources Unlimited Has Been Supplying It for 40 Years

Cover October 25, 2010

For four decades, Human Resources Unlimited has been debunking myths about people with disabilities and helping such individuals become part of the local workforce. As the agency marks its milestone, it reflects on a solid track record of success, but, more importantly, looks ahead, toward developing strategies for doing what it does even better.
Like many people across Western Mass., John Gullotti is looking for work — and not having much luck finding it.
But unlike most of those perusing the want ads and sending résumés to companies across the region, Gullotti is confronting much more than a lingering recession and wariness among many employees to make additions to the workforce as he carries out his search.
For starters, he’s hindered by a résumé that shouts that he is overqualified for some of the entry-level, minimum-wage positions he’s seeking; he has a bachelor’s degree and experience, some of it in management, with many national retailers. And then, there’s the 12-year gap on that résumé, which includes a five-year span during which he was simply too afraid to leave the house.
That fear was a byproduct of the deep depression and paranoia that Gullotti was diagnosed with years ago, and has been battling ever since.
And maybe because of his progress in that fight, especially in recent years, Gullotti has something in abundance that many job seekers have all but run out of: hope.
His large supply of that commodity comes mostly through his association with Human Resources Unlimited (HRU) — a private, nonprofit agency — and, more specifically, a program, or facility, called Lighthouse. There, Gullotti and dozens of other developmentally disadvantaged individuals are trying to enter or re-enter the workforce and thus connect with the community around them.
Providing hope and making connections to the community are not the official missions of HRU, but they might as well be, said Don Kozera, its long-time president, noting that, as the agency turns 40, it is not merely celebrating four decades of carrying out those assignments, but also looking ahead, toward creating ways of continuously doing what it does better.
And perhaps what the agency does best, said Kozera, is help debunk many of the myths or misperceptions about people with disabilities, while also helping members like Gullotti realize that they can do things that others say that they can’t, and that they themselves might believe they can’t do.
“It was believed that people with developmental disabilities couldn’t work with equipment or couldn’t work in outside businesses, or could only handle repetitive work, so that became our battle cry,” said Kozera, noting that, over, the years, HRU has accomplished that mission through programs and businesses it has created or acquired, which ranged from a printing shop to a restaurant to a packaging outfit. But it’s also done it by placing members in jobs with area companies.
Created in 1970 to be the vocational training center for Belchertown State School residents and provide employment opportunities for residents of the facility, HRU, known then as the Carval Workshop, has expanded and evolved over the years. It now offers a broad range of services, from assistance for individuals transitioning from public assistance to the workplace to a ‘day habilitation’ program called Pyramid for people with developmental disabilities; from a commercial division known as Custom Packaging to four so-called ‘clubhouses’ (more on that term later) — Lighthouse, Star Light, Forum House, and Trade Winds.
With most all of these programs, there is one common thread that has defined HRU since the beginning — putting people, or members, to work.
Since he first came to Lighthouse, rather reluctantly and with great doubt about whether it would help him in any way, Gullotti has worked in what’s known as a transitional employment (TE) position as a receptionist with the state Department of Mental Health. Later, he worked in a supportive employment position handling calls to First Response from business owners impacted by the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Over the past few months, he has continued his search for independent work, and while he’s had just one actual interview, he remains upbeat and believes that, overall, he’s in a much better place than he was when he first walked in the door at 1401 State St.
“I’m able to deal with different situations that I never could before,” he explained. “Hope … that’s been the strongest piece. I have seen results that, even if they’re small, allow me to push on.”
For this issue, BusinessWest takes an indepth look at HRU as it celebrates its milestone, and, while doing so, weaves in in Gullotti’s thoughts and experiences to show what this agency does and how it does it, and maybe quantify and qualify the sheer power of hope.

Unlimited Potential
Kozera was teaching a little, coaching soccer, and working toward his MBA at American International College when he applied for the job of fiscal director of the Carval Workshop in 1980.
“I saw 120 people sitting around with no work in front of them,” he recalled, “and I thought to myself, ‘I can’t mess this up any more than it already is.’”
So he took the job, while going to school at night — but with the expectation that it would be little more than a line on a resume. Instead, it’s become his life’s work — and very much a work still in progress.
And when one visits ETS Career Services and Custom Packaging, two programs that are essentially the current incarnations of Carval Workshop, there are dozens of people with plenty of work in front of them.
Those initiatives and their growth patterns are emblematic of how HRU has expanded well beyond its humble roots and evolved over 40 years, and especially Kozera’s tenure, which started in 1980.
Today, HRU has several components, including:
• Workforce Alternatives, which helps transition individuals from public assistance to the workplace through job-readiness skills, placement assistance, and ongoing support;
• Pyramid, a ‘day habilitation’ program that provides a caring environment in which individuals with developmental disabilities can enhance their physical, mental, and social competencies;
• ETS (Employment Training Support) Career Services, which provides individuals who are disadvantaged or have developmental or other disabilities with opportunities to increase their vocational skills and find meaningful work. Participants handle work ranging from light assembly to sorting gift cards bound for the Final Markdown;
• Custom Packaging, HRU’s commercial division that provides customers, including Olympic Manufacturing and other area employers, with services including hand assembly, heat sealing, shrinkwrapping, folding, collating, and mailing; and
• The four clubhouses, which help transition members, who join on a volunteer basis, to meaningful employment and, hopefully, independent employment.
Kozera said he doesn’t particularly like the word ‘clubhouse’ — he believes it conjures up images of children in tree forts — but he certainly likes the results these facilities have generated over the past half-century, and especially since they became part of the landscape in Western Mass.
The clubhouse model provides members with a supportive environment where they can get assistance with transitioning into the workplace or back into school as well as increasing their participation in the community.
Members work with staff to operate the clubhouse, said Kozera, adding that activities are designed to help members develop and hone critical vocational skills needed to succeed in the workplace. The facilities then help members transfer the skills and capabilities learned at the clubhouse to real jobs in the community. Over the years and decades, a number of area companies have stepped forward to provide such jobs.
That list of more than 120 business partners includes large regional or national retail chains, such Big Y, Friendly’s, CVS, A.J. Wright, Burger King, and others, but also such wide-ranging local businesses as WGBY and Berkshire Service Experts.
Each member of a clubhouse receives a comprehensive vocational assessment that identifies training and job-placement priorities, as well as preferences. Members are also provided with career counseling, interview-skills training, résumé writing, and job-search assistance, as needed.
Once a member is placed in a transitional or competitive employment job, clubhouse staff members continue to provide ongoing support for work-related and personal issues, said Kozera, adding that the goal with most members is to move them into independent employment after a specified period.
It was into this world that Gullotti walked about 18 months ago.

Seeing the Light
He told BusinessWest that it was his therapist who first suggested that he become a member of Lighthouse, thinking that its group setting would help him gain the needed confidence and inspiration needed to move his life forward and gain meaningful employment.
Gullotti agreed to give it a try, but did not share his therapist’s optimism, to say the least.
“I remember that my first impression of the place was that I couldn’t wait to see my therapist again and tell him that I thought he needed more help than I did,” said Gullotti with a laugh, adding quickly that with each visit he was getting more comfortable, while also learning and gaining inspiration from those around him.
Jeff Trant, program director at Lighthouse and Gullotti’s mentor since the day he walked in the door, said he is representative of the people who come to that facility — but also atypical in at least one respect: he wants to work, to be independent.
“He wants to get off of disability benefits,” Trant explained. “Many people are so polarized, they’re afraid that if they go back to work they’ll lose those benefits. John doesn’t want them; he wants to be independent and self-sufficient, and that’s an anomaly these days, because we have such a disability-entitlement culture.”
But it took Gullotti several weeks to get comfortable at Lighthouse, said Trant, adding that, at the beginning, he was overwhelmed by the situation he found himself in, and, in most all ways, simply not ready to join the workforce.
“It took a while for him to get really get comfortable, but once he got past that threshold and over that barrier of going into this place called Lighthouse, he found it extremely liberating,” said Trant. “You could almost see him relax once he got in and saw what this place was.”
A seminal moment in Gullotti’s progression came roughly a month after he arrived, when he was given a transitional employment assignment with the Department of Mental Health as a administrative assistant and receptionist. This was another transition that had some rough moments, but eventually, as he did with Lighthouse, Gullotti found a comfort zone and made it progressively larger.
“I remember having some impromptu counseling sessions with John in the early days when he would come back in tears,” said Trant. “He was so emotionally overwhelmed, and his confidence and his self-perception were so low that he didn’t think he was worthy and able to work.
“But very slowly, as he found his office colleagues were supportive and receptive, he went from doing the simple nuts and bolts of the job — answering the phone, sorting mail, and greeting people as they came in the door — to doing some very high-end projects that some of their more seasoned staffers would handle; he became a go-to person in that organization.”
The confidence he gained at DMH, coupled with ongoing support from family and both staff and members at Lighthouse, gave Gullotti what Trant called the “gusto” to move on to not only the next step employment-wise — a temporary position arranged through Johnson & Hill Staffing handling with Innovations First Notice — but also other platforms through which he could connect with the community.
“Here’s someone who, a few years earlier, wouldn’t leave his room,” said Trant. “Now, John is out speaking in front of Rotary clubs with me. He shares his story of hope and recovery, and he’s spoken in front of groups of more than 100 people. To me, that is so telling about how far he’s come and how much insight he has.”

Forward Thinking
There have been many success stories scripted by Lighthouse and the other clubhouses within HRU, as the walls within Lighthouse attest. There are pictures of members and former members in work settings and wall charts indicating current assignments and who has them.
Moving forward, Kozera said those at HRU want to make this 40th anniversary a time of celebration, obviously, but also a time for introspection, looking at programs, and developing a strategic initiative that will ultimately yield more pictures for the walls and more stories of individual triumph over adversity.
The company has always been focused on continuous improvement and the ‘good to great’ philosophy, said Kozera, but he wants the current milestone to spark an even deeper commitment to reach higher and, ultimately, put more members in jobs and have them thrive in those positions.
“We have a whole new level to get to,” he explained. “We have every accreditation in the world — national, international, state, and we get the highest ratings in all of those. But we don’t feel that we’re even close to the level we need to be at.”
To get to where it wants to go to go, HRU will continue to observe not only similar programs in other parts of the state and the country, but also businesses across myriad sectors and educational institutions, and “steal shamelessly,” as Kozera put it, when it comes to best practices and concepts it can apply.
In other words, the agency intends to be innovative, in the strictest definition of the word.
“Over the years, innovation has rarely been someone creating something brand-new,” he explained. “What they do is, they take a process, product, or system in one industry, and they tweak it and apply it to another system, and all of a sudden, it’s new.
“If you look at the iPhone and the iPad, these are things that are conglomerations of things that already existed; they’re just packaged in a different way,” he continued, adding that he wants HRU to continue innovating in that same fashion, again with the simple, overarching goal of putting people in the workplace.
And to achieve continuous improvement in that realm, Kozera and his staff will be focusing on the two agency’s two core functions — job preparation and job placement.
With regard to the latter, Kozera recently brought in some sales executives and sales-training professionals to work with and motivate those at HRU who are essentially selling job placements to area companies, thus creating opportunities for members like Gullotti.
“Most sales professionals are motivated by money, but the people who end in our industry are motivated by mission,” he explained. “Someone has to tie what your job is to the mission. So what we were able to do is bring in the sales principles, the sales discipline, and the sales structure, but then have individuals who have passion for what they do — because that’s why they’re in this industry and equate that there’s nothing more critical than them making a phone call and ultimately making a sale.
“It doesn’t matter how much you job train,” he continued, “if you don’t have a job waiting for you at the end of your job training.”
Meanwhile, on the job-preparation side of the ledger, HRU is working to make individuals better able to get and keep the jobs sold by the sales team. And at the heart of these efforts will be an initiative to be launched in January called “Changing Habits and Transforming Lives.”
It will take a number of proven principles not typically applied to job training and put them together for that purpose, said Kozera, noting that, collectively, individuals with disabilities mirror society in general, which means that many are obese and do not have the stamina to be employed, while others may lack the work ethic to obtain or keep a position. So HRU will be focused on those areas and others to help members become more workplace-ready.
As just one example, he cited exercise and its ability to help people focus.
“Exercise is really Miracle-Gro for learning,” he explained. “If you have an exercise routine, for up to four hours after that routine, you have the ability to take in information better, faster, quicker.
“There are schools around the country that are implementing this,” he continued. “I traveled to Naperville, Ill., and visited a school where they’re not cutting gym, like everyone else; they’re looking to expand it. Now, whatever your hardest subject is, you have gym right before that. And the results are amazing.”
The challenge for HRU will be to take some of these proven methods and repackage them to benefit members and meet the agency’s primary mission to get people employed, he told BusinessWest.
“The bottom line is get people to fit in,” he concluded, stating HRU’s reason for being in still another way. “That’s the number-one issue to getting people employed and keeping them employed — they get along with others, and they fit in.”

Getting the Message
As part of its 40th-anniversary celebration, HRU will stage a breakfast at the Sheraton in downtown Springfield on Oct. 26. The keynote speaker will be Troy Brown, former New England Patriots wide receiver and integral part of three Super Bowl-winning teams.
His talk is expected to center around his ability to defy the odds and rise to stardom in the NFL when few thought he would.
That message should resonate with an audience of HRU administrators, staff members, business partners, and business and civic leaders, who have helped enable the agency to permit others to beat long odds against them.
People like John Gullotti, who both understand and help create the power of hope.

George O’Brien can be reached
at [email protected]

Manufacturers’ Collaborative Puts Pieces Together

Cover July 19, 2010

Tom Langevin says the idea is to take what he calls “big-company philosophies” and bring them to exponentially smaller businesses.
This is the main motivation behind the Pioneer Valley Precision Manufacturing Collaborative, or what Langevin described as an ambitious pilot program that involves four small area manufacturing outfits: Boulevard Machine & Gear and Thorn Industries, both in Springfield; Mechanical Drive Components Inc. (MDC) in Chicopee; and Creative Machining & Molding Corp. (CMMC) in Westfield.
Each of these companies is successful and profitable, and enjoys a solid reputation in their respective specialties, said Langevin, who takes the title ‘technology innovation application engineer,’ and works for the Regional Employment Board of Hampden County (more on all that later). However, they, like most other small manufacturers in the under-20-employees category, live “day to day,” as he put it, a corporate lifestyle Langevin noted while surveying area companies in his first assignment with the REB as point person for efforts to expand and strengthen the region’s precision-manufacturing sector.
“All of the companies I surveyed really hadn’t planned beyond the current year,” he said. “There were no three-, four-, or five-year plans, meaning marketing plans or engineering-research plans, or anything else,” he explained. “Everyone was in the same predicament; they didn’t really have a business system in place to take them through the next several years.
“It became clear that we needed to come up with a way to help these companies develop a business system that would help them strategically plan for the future,” he continued, adding that the methodology chosen was the collaborative.
It should, in effect, enable the four companies, working in unison, to achieve progress in the key areas of revenue growth and cost reduction that they likely could not accomplish on their own, he explained, adding that, in addition to thinking and acting like bigger companies, those enterprises in the collaborative should be able to generate opportunities generally reserved for much larger corporations.
Chris Araujo, owner of CMMC, a unique outfit that handles both precision manufacturing and injection molding, agrees, and he says he’s not speculating when he talks about the collaborative’s chances for success; he speaks with the voice of experience.
“This is something I’ve done very successfully in my career,” he said of the concept of collaboration. “By bringing together several smaller companies as we have, we can go after work that none of us could go after individually. As a group, as a collaborative, as a much larger entity, we will now be able to be competitive and have the horsepower that a lot of the big companies want.
“Everyone’s reducing supplier bases, and they’re looking for unique opportunities with their suppliers to have them do more,” he continued, adding that the collaborative can accomplish this end. “This gives us a unique opportunity to go after some of the larger aerospace companies, medical companies, and possibly even automotive companies, utilizing not only the assets of four companies but the intelligence of four individual owners to problem-solve and uniquely put together schedules and other details to accomplish very difficult tasks.”
Susan Kasa, owner of Boulevard Machine & Gear, concurred, and said she believes the collaboration represents another manifestation of an emerging trend within the manufacturing sector, one where smaller shops are viewing other players in the sector more as possible partners than competitors to fear and resist.
“I think local business owners have gotten over the hurdle, and no longer look at each other as competitors; we’re starting to look at what we can do to help one another grow and not necessarily be afraid of what we can take from one another in business,” she said while borrowing an industry term — prototype — to describe what the collaborative is or could easily become.
For this issue, BusinessWest takes an indepth look at the Pioneer Valley Precision Manufacturing Collaborative, how it is expected to benefit the participants, and how this model might be emulated by other companies in the region.

Gauging Possibilities
Joe Giffune, owner of MDC, said that, among other things, the company makes parts for the after-market automotive sector, or what he called “speed products,” including horsepower boosters, vacuum pumps, and other parts for NASCAR and National Hot Rod Assoc. vehicles and other customers.
“It’s a fun niche,” he said, adding that, while the company doesn’t deal directly with NASCAR drivers and owners, it serves those who do. “You’ll get calls from people saying, ‘so-and-so’s team needs this part by next weekend … you’ve got to get this done.’ It’s a good talking point; it’s fun to do.”
While the 11-year-old company has done well historically, it has been limited by its small size, relatively tight niches, and that ‘day-to-day’ operating philosophy that Langevin referenced, said Giffune, adding that the opportunity to increase its reach and operate more strategically is what prompted him to jump at the chance to become part of the collaborative.
“He [Langevin] seemed to think our companies had a lot of similar things to bring to the table — skill sets, approaches to the way we do business, approaches to the way we do machining,” Giffune explained, “but also some unique things specific to our businesses. But his perspective is that we were also operating without a strategic plan as individual businesses, and that was a real shortfall — and no one realy disagreed with him on that.
“As a small business you’re caught up in the day-to-day processes of making your debt payments, making your payroll, those sorts of things, and that tends to lead to more short-term thinking,” he continued, “which comes down to getting through a specific time period, be it a day, week, month, or a year, rather than think strategically.”
Giffune’s story is similar in many ways to those of the other participants in the collaborative, said Langevin, a former engineer with Danaher Tool who was hired in May 2009 by the Regional Employment Board as part of the so-called PMRAP (Precision Manufacturing Regional Alliance Project), a multi-faceted initiative involving the REB, UMass Amherst, the Western Mass. Chapter of the National Tooling and Machining Assoc. (WMNTMA), and other parties.
He told BusinessWest that his basic job description is to identify and execute strategies for helping area manufacturers become more competitive and tap new markets. One of his current endeavors involves work with educators at UMass to develop a cryogenic milling process for project machining.
One of his first assignments, however, was to survey WMNTMA members and determine what kind of support they needed. It was during these interviews that he identified a lack of — and need for — longer-term planning, as well as a stronger commitment to continuous improvement.
This is what Langevin calls a big-company philosophy, or ‘lean’ philosophy, and he acknowledged that it is something difficult for smaller companies to embrace and implement because of the resources required to do so.
“You have to develop data, gather data, coordinate data, analyze data, and things of that nature, and that’s hard to do if you’re a mom-and-pop shop with 10 employees,” he explained. “But if you take three or four or five shops and put them together, you can amortize those administrative costs to implementing such a business system.”
The desire to spread the cost and combine resources was the spark for creating the collaborative, said Langevin, adding that several area companies were asked to participate, with Thorn, Boulevard, MDC, and CMMC eventually agreeing to join forces.
They were chosen because they are among the more progressive companies in the area, said Langevin, adding that they are well-managed, have good engineers, are “above water,” as he put it, and, above all, have something to offer each other.
Working together, said Langevin, the companies in the collaborative will be better able to do what he says they need to do to compete in the global marketplace — become what amounts to contract manufacturers focused on the big picture.
“I’ve sat with many companies, and their focus seems to be on how to increase the speed of their machines — that’s where they think their money is,” he explained. “But that’s not really where their money is. We can’t really compete with the rest of the world machine for machine; we can’t compete labor-wise. We have to compete more on services; we have to provide more services to our prime contractors.”

Parts of the Whole
Kasa told BusinessWest that, while Boulevard has a long track record of excellence in its specialty — machining parts for primarily the aerospace industry — she recognized that there were many potential benefits to becoming part of the collaborative.
That’s because the companies involved complement each other and bring different things to the table. This should enable the group to compete effectively for more and bigger contracts from customers that always looking to get more from their suppliers.
“By coming together like this, we can, in effect, corner the market and gain business,” she said, noting that the collaborative will likely enable individual companies to gain pieces of contracts that they could not have garnered otherwise. “We all bring very different things to the table: we have the aerospace certification, Thorn has the medical certification, Creative has the injection molding, and Joe [Giffune] has the commercial market.
“When we pool our facility list,” she continued, “it’s actually quite impressive, but we don’t necessarily have duplicate equipment; we all specialize in such different niches that we feel that, by coming together, we can have a true edge on the market.”
Steve Hicks, co-owner with his father of Thorn Industries, which specializes in machining parts for medical devices, agrees. He said the collaborative enables the four shops to merge in a figurative sense, not a literal one, and, in the process, present themselves in the same way that some of the area’s largest and most successful precision manufacturers, such as Hoppe Tool, Berkshire Industries, and others can, and compete for bigger contracts.
“As part of this collaborative, we can look at some of these big jobs that we couldn’t quote before and identify pieces of the pie that we’d like to work on,” he explained. “One of us can handle the milling, another one the turning, and someone else can handle another aspect of making the part; we can all broaden our horizons.”
Araujo, whose company produces everything from stands for scented candles (CMMC has dozens of manufacturers in that industry on its client list) to components for credit-card readers, has seen several collaborative efforts succeed through a lengthy career in precision manufacturing.
“I’ve done it with automotive, with medical, with gun companies, aerospace, and more,” he said, adding that, through one collaborative effort, he was able to win a contract from Hamilton Sundstrand to make the air-handling system for the Boeing 787.
Echoing Kasa and others, he said that companies that award such large contracts are looking for diversity, but also solid management and especially long-term stability, and these are tangibles and intangibles that most smaller companies can’t boast.
“With the size of these contracts and the number of years involved, they’re looking for very strong companies that are going to be around a long time, with proven backgrounds and opportunities to handle not only their growth but the customer’s growth,” he explained. “As an individual company, you would have to be very large and established to meet those needs. As a collaborative, we can do the same thing.”

End Product
All those participating in the collaborative say time will tell if it can yield the many benefits organizers say it can.
But there is considerable confidence within the various companies that, by coming together in this fashion, the machine shops in question can do far more as a group than they can individually.
In short, they believe they have a working prototype — a prototype for growth and progress.

George O’Brien can be reached at
[email protected]