Carol Clancy is hard at work as a machinist.
“We’re having mechanical problems,” she says with a chuckle.
Once troubleshooting is complete, Carol makes parts for ballpoint pens.
“It’s just a little old pen clip,” she demonstrates.
Carol is like most other factory workers you may have met – except for one thing.
“I’ve been blind since birth – blindish, I call it.”
Carol is legally blind – she can see shapes and colors. But many of her coworkers are totally blind. They all find purpose at Industries for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
“We still have quite a bit of use left in us!” Carole says.
Chris Lechner lost his sight about six years ago. He says he enjoys the work at IBVI, but he likes his coworkers more.
“Getting out, meeting people who are also like minded, visually impaired,” he says. “We kind of understand each other a little more deeply.”
Those coworkers taught Chris how to work again – but they’ve also helped him with a lot of other things, like mobility training.
“I think the first week I walked into a few walls,” Chris says. “Now it’s not so many walls and learning how to navigate with a white cane.”
“I feel like our culture here is – I don’t know if you’d call it family oriented, but it’s more of people having each other’s backs,” says CJ Lange, IBVI’s president and CEO.
Lange says his employees really embrace the mission of the company, which is supporting the blind and visually impaired.
“We even turn away good business opportunities because if it doesn’t employ people that are blind, it’s not us, and we’ll move on and look for something that will provide that opportunity.”
The staff here at IBVI know they’re just as capable as any other employee. They just need a chance to prove it.
“I’m hopeful down the road, because we’ve had such great success in getting the right tools and technology and actually showing some other employers that it’s not expensive, and it’s not difficult,” Lange says.
“We get to the same end result as everyone else, but it just takes us a different path to get there,” Chris adds.
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