Helping Community Members Find Independence and Employment
If you’re in the business community in Flagstaff, you may think of Quality Connections as “QC Office,” a local toner and office supply seller that employs people with disabilities, but office supplies are just one branch of this non-profit organization’s many interconnected programs that help the members of our community become more independent.
Helping a Friend Achieve a Dream
When Armando Bernasconi, co-founder and CEO of Quality Connections, was a college student at NAU, he worked as an aide to his college roommate, Ben Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe had cerebral palsy, and although he was an intelligent and driven individual, he required total assistance with all his physical needs such as using the bathroom, bathing, eating, and taking medication. During the day while Sutcliffe attended classes, day time aides would help with his needs, then in the evening Bernasconi would take over. As Bernasconi describes it, “We would have dinner, hang out, go to the bar—you know—whatever college students did.” After college, Bernasconi and Sutcliffe continued to live as housemates together with Bernasconi’s wife, Melissa Bernasconi, who served as Quality Connections’s CEO for the first 10 years.
There were two things Sutcliffe wanted from his life: a girlfriend and a job. “We put him in situations where he was able to find a girlfriend,” Bernasconi explains, “but the job was really the accomplishment that I am most proud of, because that is the origins of QC Office.” Armando and Melissa were serving clients with disabilities out of their garage when they learned of a program in the eastern U.S. wherein individuals with disabilities were given an opportunity to work collecting, refurbishing, and reselling used toner cartridges. They decided to try applying the model here in Flagstaff, and Sutcliffe became their webmaster.
According to Doug Arnett, QC’s Chief Communications Officer, Sutcliffe was able to work as the webmaster by using an augmentative communication device attached to his wheelchair and controlled by his chin. He was only able to choose between yes and no, so the process was very slow and tedious, but he was able to use it to upload images and other information to the website, and most importantly, to “achieve his dream of working.” Arnett says that when the Bernasconis realized they could help someone like Sutcliffe, who had such profound limitations, they realized that they could help anybody, and so Quality Connections grew and expanded to reach more people.
Diverse Community Services
Today, Quality Connections has six departments to help individuals with different needs gain more independence: group home services, in-home services, a Montessori-based adult day program, employment services, Evergreen Academy Preschool, and QC Office. Members may rely on Quality Connections to help them develop independent living skills for residential settings through the group home and in-home programs, to learn vocational skills and address barriers to employment in the day program and employment services program, or to provide opportunities for group-supported or individual employment through the organization’s social enterprises (QC Office and Evergreen Academy Preschool) or through other community partner businesses.
Each person’s needs are unique, so it’s rare that an individual member will progress through every department, but Quality Connections has developed its programs in such a way that each one addresses the next potential barrier a member might come up against on their journey toward increased independence. For example, a person in the day program might develop their vocational skills, then participate in group-supported employment, then find individual job placement in a business in the community. For Arnett, it’s this innovative approach that drew him to the organization: “There’s other people doing group homes out there. There’s other people doing day programs. There’s other people doing employment programs. But QC has created this sort of continuum that really ties them all together in a way that’s just more effective.”
Serving Adults with Disabilities and Other Barriers to Employment
Last year, Quality Connections served 333 people across all six of their departments, with clients falling into two major groups. The first includes people with intellectual or developmental disabilities such as autism, cerebral palsy, or epilepsy, who are typically served through the residential programs, day program, and group-supported employment. The second group is broader than the first, including anyone with a barrier to employment such as homelessness, a history of substance abuse, a learning disability, or even just a lack of employment history. These members’ needs are addressed through individual employment counseling as well as providing direct aid or connecting members with other community services that can help them tackle the barriers that have kept them from finding stable employment.
Removing Barriers to Organizational Success
Just as Quality Connections works to help its members remove barriers and find greater independence, so, too, its leadership must find creative ways to tackle the many barriers in the organization’s path. On the wall of the organization’s conference room is a visual depiction of its strategic plan (a few years old now) with a canyon depicting its greatest challenges, a bridge representing strategies to tackle them, and some of the organization’s aspirations on the other side.
Already, one can see some of the aspirations becoming reality, as the preschool that was a mere dream when this plan was drawn became Evergreen Academy Preschool, which opened in 2022 and served 90 children, while simultaneously providing an employment opportunity for Quality Connections members. Some of the other dreams Quality Connections leaders hope to someday realize include owning their own space that can meet all the needs of their varied programs, having a farm program that members can participate in, and getting their member-run digital radio station, “Route 66 The Ghost” on the FM dial.
As with any non-profit, one of the greater challenges Quality Connections must continuously work to address is its expenses. While the organization does receive state funding, the state’s rate increases do not keep up with Flagstaff’s minimum wage. Fortunately, the donations received from its generous supporters, grants, and revenues generated by QC Office and Evergreen Academy Preschool have been sufficient to make those endeavors self-supporting and subsidize employee wages to ensure that Quality Connections is able to pay its employees above minimum wage. (Though both Arnett and Bernasconi note that the value of these social enterprises lies more in the training opportunities for members and the community connections they foster than in the revenues they generate.)
Quality Connections is also working to make the organization more “employee-centric,” by offering better benefits, revamping company materials (like the employee handbook) to be more “human,” and just treating its employees like people. Bernasconi explains, “If our employees want to be here—if they’re happy here—then we’ll keep them longer, which means our turnover won’t be as expensive, which means that we’re going to have longer term employees providing a better service.” Beyond having a very low turnover rate, Quality Connections’s employee focus has helped them attract the kind of staff who are enthusiastic about identifying the community’s needs and building and growing programs to fill in the voids.
Community Support in Flagstaff
Although Flagstaff can be a very challenging place to run this sort of organization from an expense standpoint, the trade off for that is a truly exceptional amount of community support. “Flagstaff businesses are probably the most incredible group of people to be partnered with,” Bernasconi says, “and we have dozens of partnerships all throughout the city.” Local businesses partner with Quality Connections to provide job placement opportunities for its members, but even non-partner businesses—including Coconino County, the City of Flagstaff, FUSD, and Northern Arizona University—purchase office supplies and provide support to the organization.
Arnett compares that to the response in the Phoenix community:
“We’ve been trying to dip our toes into the Phoenix market with QC Office for years, and it’s just a different beast down there. The community as a whole just doesn’t respond the same way that they do here in Flagstaff to the mission of helping people with disabilities, to the environmental message of recycling your toner cartridges… They just don’t care as much.”
The environmental message Arnett is referring to earned the organization the Chamber of Commerce’s “Green Business Award” in 2023. That’s because QC Office’s toner cartridge recycling program does more than help people with disabilities in the community. It also substantially reduces community landfill contributions by pulling toner cartridges and electronic waste out of the waste stream and recycling them back into useful products. Along the way, it creates half a dozen jobs for people in the community.
For Arnett, this recycling program functions as a great metaphor for the whole organization. “In many ways people with disabilities at one time were thought of… as something that could just be discarded,” he explains, “but, in fact, with training, with the right opportunity, everybody has something of value to offer to our community.”
Successes Keep QC Going
Both Bernasconi and Arnett are bolstered to keep working through challenges by the successes they have seen. Arnett notes that, “When you focus and look creatively, there are ways to get around these barriers, as challenging as they may seem at times…You get up and you do your best every day.” Meanwhile, Bernasconi focuses on the positive outcomes: “We’ve been at it for 25 years, and it’s been working.” With thousands of members served, tons of landfill waste diverted, and unquantifiable ripples made by helping people turn their lives around and then give back, the impact Quality Connections has had on the Flagstaff community over those 25 years simply cannot be overstated.
