Avenues Work Center

Poppin’ with Productivity

What do the Chicago and New York Marathons, the Superbowl, hotel hospitality kits, and popcorn tins have in common?

Products for these events and businesses have all been assembled or packaged at Avenues Contract Packaging in Wheeling, otherwise known as the Avenues work center.

More than 160 Avenues workers come to the center five days a week.  Here, it “gives clients a sense of purpose – an opportunity for paying jobs for those individuals not yet ready for community employment,” according to Ron Reeves, Marketing Manager. “We help maximize their independence.”

It’s also a social networking opportunity. People swap lunches, tell stories, and learn the same kinds of skills as everyone else,” says Cathy Kerr, VP of Programs. “But the biggest benefit is the sense of dignity and pride the workers have with earning a paycheck. A paycheck gives them self-esteem.    They take pride in their paycheck, and take lots of pride in their work.”

And there’s plenty of work. While other companies are faced with lower sales and production levels, the work center can boast a 16% sales increase so far this year, thanks to increased marketing, our http://www.avenuespackaging.com website, and new customers like Gourmet Gift Concepts.  

Gourmet Gift Concepts brought the Work Center its highest volume and one of the most challenging jobs ever this fall. The 48,000 square foot work center was literally bursting with product, and the numbers are staggering: 370,000 empty holiday popcorn tins and over 1,000,000 bags of popcorn.  To visualize the enormity of this time-sensitive project, imagine as many as 100 popcorn tins on a skid or pallet. Sixty skids fit in a 53’ semi-trailer, so Ron calculates it will take 62 trucks to haul the   filled popcorn tins.  Lined up back to back, the row of trucks would be over 10 times the length of a football   field.

“This project gives us the opportunity to exhibit our blended work force concept. Avenues’ workers  fill the tins with three different  flavored popcorn bags, and contract workers seal the tins and  finish packaging.” Cathy adds that “the participants have loved working on this project, and it has allowed us to analyze how big a job we can and can’t do in the future.”  

As we go to press, Ron and the entire work center staff are working enormously hard, ensuring the popcorn tins get filled and shipped on schedule. Operations Manager Mark Schulewitz engineered a production assembly line that kicks out one completed tin per second!

“It’s a constant balancing act to run not only a competitive business, but to run a social service program. We have to meet our customers’ needs, as well as our “participants’needs,” says Ron.

Keeping that balance in perspective has helped make the work center so successful.  Cathy credits the “team at Avenues who share the same vision and goals. We all feel the same way; and have the overriding belief that people with disabilities want to work…can work…and should work.”

This holiday season, if you’re munching on popcorn from a tin, keep in mind there’s a good chance it was put together by our workers.

You’ll enjoy it all the more!

view the video of the Avenues popcorn packaging process