Richard Carlson

(6/6/97) -- At two company-wide meetings last winter, Richard Carlson, director of operations at Chartpak in Leeds, talked about a new group of people that would soon be starting work

"We talked about what these people would be doing and the types of personalities involved -- that some would be physically and mentally handicapped.The bottom line is that I said I didn't want any teasing or pointing," he recalls.Everyone has feelings, he said, and Carlson didn't want any of the newcomers to get needlessly hurt.
...
Carlson was optimistic from the start that things would work out.
...
Nothing panned out then, but Carlson remembered that discussion months later when he was faced with a problem to solve.Delta Technical Coding, a California-based company that sells the line of transfers being made at Chartpak, no longer wanted to handle the job of packaging them; Chartpak wasn't set up to handle it either.He would need a crew of people who could work indefinitely, for a year or more.

Carlson called Riverside in part because he had some previous experience working with mentally retarded employees at a plastics company he ran in Leominster.Most of those workers, he found, were diligent, highly productive and able to work an eight-hour day at the kind of repetitive task many people spurn.His one hesitation was that in Leominster he'd had a few people with "severe emotional problems and that was hard for me to handle.I said (to Riverside), 'Look, I want people who are able to take care of themselves.' "

Carlson liked the idea that Riverside would bring in its own people to oversee the project and handle any personnel problems; that would keep Chartpak's managerial costs down.And finally, he says, this was "a way for us to do something for people who don't have the same opportunities as the rest of us.
...
So pleased is Carlson that he's talking with Riverside about adding more people for additional projects."I'd expand what we have if we can," he says.