Come January, Bea Scott will be the newest small-business owner in Douglas County.

Her business will pick up towels from local hair salons, sanitize them and fold them before returning the towels to the salons.

While the business itself is interesting, Scott is not your typical small business owner. For Scott, who has significant intellectual disabilities and cerebral palsy, creating her own business was her best chance at having a job that paid her better than minimum wage and helped her do something she enjoyed, her mother says.

“When she has her evaluations at vocational rehab, her first choice has always been to do laundry,” Saunny Scott said. “But no one would hire her.”

So, with the help of grants, Cottonwood and a KU professor, Bea Scott will start her own laundry business.

Unemployed

Wendy Parent, a research associate professor at KU’s Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, has been helping the disabled with supportive employment for years. Parent said that in the disabled community, only 38 percent of people have any sort of job. Of the 62 percent of people who are unemployed, two-thirds of them want to work.

And the jobs they do have? They often involve doing menial tasks that don’t contribute much to the community and certainly don’t provide the sort of fulfillment a good job can, Parent said.

She is out to change that.

Parent visits local employers and tries to identify jobs that people in the disabled community could do.

“I can find anyone a job, but I don’t have the ability to be there as long as it takes to teach them a job,” Parent said. “People just don’t think of what’s possible.”

So Parent works with Lawrence-based Cottonwood Inc., which provides job coaches and vocational training to help members of the disabled community get into jobs they like.

Geraldine Brown, a disabled native of Lawrence, has been a recipient of Cottonwood’s services for a number of years. For the past three years, she’s worked in KU’s Facilities Operations Department as a janitor in the KU residence halls.

“They like me. They’re my friends,” Brown said. “All the students that I worked with at Ellsworth and (Hashinger halls) like me because I’m the best.”

Brown has a job coach who works with her on a regular basis to make sure she is understanding how to do the job and is able to complete the tasks she is assigned.

“These are people who never used to work before,” Parent said, “and now they’re taxpaying citizens.”

Small business

For some individuals though, even with a job coach, there aren’t jobs out there that they can do.

For Scott, that meant working at Cottonwood doing manual labor. She didn’t like the work and wanted to make more money.

For the longest time, that was the end of the options for her.

“In years past, we could have maybe gone the route of putting her in a Laundromat or a hotel laundry room,” Parent said. No longer.

Now, the idea of creating businesses has caught fire, and Scott will be one of the first disabled people in Lawrence to try to launch a business.

“My first reaction was she would not be capable,” her mother said. “But a conference talked a lot about different ways we could do this.”

Phil Bentzinger, who is working with Scott to get the business started, said this has been the most complicated project he has tackled since coming to Cottonwood.

“For us, it’s been writing business plans and making the connections,” he said. “It’s been difficult, a challenge, but there are some interesting success stories out there.”

Both Bentzinger and Parent say it wouldn’t be possible without the support Scott gets from her mother.

Challenges

Saunny Scott can list the challenges she has faced without much difficulty.

Location: Do we run the business from our home or from a rented space?

Facilities: If we run it from our home, where can we install the commercial equipment we’d need to sanitize these towels?

Capital: How can we afford to keep this business running as it gets started?

Clients: Who’s going to use this business if we create it?

But as imposing as that list is, all signs point to the business opening in January, even though significant hurdles remain.

“We’re in the process of getting funding to build a shed on the side of the house,” Saunny Scott said. “If that doesn’t work, I may just put it on credit cards.”

Another grant has paid for the washing machines, a van to pick up and drop off the towels and for operating capital for the first months the business is open.

But more than money, Saunny Scott says, teaching and time pose daunting challenges to teaching her daughter how to run her business.

“She’s frustrated. She wants the business to open tomorrow : or a few months ago,” Saunny Scott said. “I really do think it will work.”

Saunny Scott said she couldn’t have helped her daughter pull the business together without the help she has received from Cottonwood.

“This is taking a lot of time and psychological help,” she said. “I’ve been surprised it’s been so difficult.”

But she knows when the business gets off the ground, it will be worth it.