In terms of brute wealth, the United States of 2020 is the richest country our species has ever established. Over 20 trillion dollars flows through the economy annually, and 7 of the 10 wealthiest individuals on the planet call America home. Much of this prosperity can be attributed to America’s love affair with capitalism: the economic system founded on the idea that private individuals (or private organizations) are legally free to own ‘capital’ (wealth, property and other productive assets), which can be used to generate legally-protected private profit which can then be traded across a free market at the owner’s discretion. Historically, capitalism has arguably moved more people out of poverty than any other economic system we have created.*
Yet within this unprecedentedly-prosperous population of 329 million, almost 40 million Americans live with incomes below the federal poverty line: the point we have deemed acceptable for our country of such prosperity. The system, seemingly, has failed.
While the reasons for this are complex, the research is clear that unemployment and underemployment is a leading cause of poverty in the modern world. Though this can be an ongoing challenge for many, for those in our community who have a disability, this challenge can become overwhelming.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, our brothers and sisters with a disability are:
more than two and a half times more likely to be outside of employment and the workforce than people with no disability;
twice as likely as people without a disability to be employed part-time (which often negatively impacts access to benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans);
less likely to be employed in managerial, professional, business or financial occupations (which are typically higher-paying), and
even when armed with a bachelor’s degree, are still almost 50% less likely to be in employment than a similarly-educated person with no disability.
This presents us with a challenge: how do we ensure that everyone in our communities, including (and especially) those with disabilities, has the opportunity to release their skills in the job market? Is there still a space for capitalism? Have we reached the limits of this system’s ability to release people from poverty? Is charity - the giving of money and resources to those needing help - now the only system we can employ in order to assist those experiencing poverty?
I spoke with Lauren Burgess, founder of Dirt Coffee in Colorado, to find out.
Dirt Coffee, located in downtown Littleton in the southern reaches of Denver, may just be changing the way we think about poverty, disabilities and the workforce. Founded by Lauren in 2013, Dirt has steadily grown from a small, mobile coffee truck to a sustainable, bricks-and-mortar establishment serving none other than Huckleberrry Coffee - a renowned roaster on Denver’s solid, socially-conscious, third-wave coffee scene.
Around 30% of Dirt’s permanent staff are considered to be neurodivergent - a term made popular in the late 1990s by Australian sociologist Judy Singer and American journalist Harvey Blume to refer to variation in the human brain which impacts sociability, learning, attention, mood and other mental functions. It’s an umbrella term for conditions such as autism and Asperger Syndrome.
Lauren has served on the boards of Colorado’s Coalition of Autism Professional, the Autism Society of Colorado, and the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce and Alliance. In 2016, she was elected to serve as City Commissioner on Denver's Commission for People with Disabilities.
I spoke with Lauren about the Dirt model - and why she’s using the forces of capitalism, and not charity, to reduce poverty levels in this section of our community.
PB: Lauren, how did service to this population become something close to your heart?
LB: In my undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to intern at the Douglas Developmental Disability Center (part of Rutgers University). I didn’t know it, but at the time they were helping to pioneer ABA** for autism in mainstream schools. Without knowing what I was signing up for, I was assigned to an 8th grade boy who was going to the Developmental Disability Center. His name was Patrick and, because of his aggression, he unable to attend mainstream school. I was punched, hit, kicked, stabbed with a pencil - you name it, it happened to me.
Towards the end of the year, however, we started to notice something in Patrick that his previous teachers had not seen before: he was beginning to make eye contact and the two of us were listening to each other using nonverbal language. And he was smiling! We were all very inquisitive as to his change in behavior, and that kind of sparked my interest. I wanted to know more about people like Patrick, and I found that my passion was in developing skills that would connect these individuals to their community, and our community to these individuals.
I eventually decided that if nobody else was going to create opportunities for individuals with neurodiversities to become gainly employed, then I would find a way to do that - and along the way I would educate our community that these individuals are employable.
Our name, Dirt, came from Garden (an entrepreneurial program for people with autism, founded by Lauren in 2010), and we talk about how we’re planting seeds, building foundations and cultivating growth.
When you founded Dirt, what was it that you wanted to achieve?
Our mission at Dirt is twofold. Firstly, we offer competitive, integrative supportive employment opportunities for this population. But our big, overarching mission is that we are educating our community and building relationships with business owners to cultivate more employment opportunities for the population we are serving.
Everybody thinks differently and operates differently, and people with autism just happen to have a diagnosis on the way they think. Unfortunately, the world is not built for people who think and operate differently. At Dirt, we serve and focus on the people who you don’t see in the movies or on tv (the ‘savants’, like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man). It’s the people who are in the middle and who would be considered moderately impacted. They have the skills to get by - maybe - with minimal supports in school, but then are unable to independently, immediately and successfully, bridge that gap between education and employment. But there’s a skillset there that our world has yet to capitalize on.
About 30% of our permanent staff at Dirt is neurodivergent, and on top of that we have a paid internship program with seasonal cohorts of five to fifteen people. These are all students or young people with disabilities who come in, get partnered with a job coach, and get paid to work here. To qualify for the program, you have to meet a metric of qualifications, but one of them is little-to-no successful job history. They’re learning the basics here, so we work on the skills that are generalizable to any workforce.
The data tells us that 90% of people with autism are unemployed, and over the next ten years we’re expecting to see up to half a million teenagers with autism leave their school-based services and enter adulthood and, hopefully, the productive workforce. What is the connection between having a disability, and being unemployed or under-employed?
I think at the crux of all of it is that people are scared of what they don’t know. As a society, we have educated, cared for and supported people with disabilities in very secluded environments. Even an integrated classroom is still a new concept - and one that isn’t being done very well. So most business owners and corporations don’t even know that people with disabilities exist in the numbers that they do in our part of the world. Nor do they know that they want to be employed, are employable, and have a skillset to offer.
The way that we are currently recruiting our workforce also does not work for most of the individuals we serve. An online application which requires you to display your skillset on paper, and be very eloquent in explaining, describing and selling yourself, can be a daunting first obstacle for some people. Also, as we increasingly automatize manual labor jobs - farming them out to the robots - we’re shrinking the employment options that are available. It used to be the default that we could teach any interested person how to do a manual labor job, but those jobs are disappearing. We need to rethink our strategy, and this needs begin before people leave the school system.
Would you share some of your success stories?
The one that I most like to share is about Robby, who was a client at Garden, and had a difficult time. He got a couple of jobs along the way - the first job he got was at a Fedex packaging center, so that was manual labor. He then moved on to a donations recipient/processor at Goodwill. Finally, a spot opened up here and we offered him a position. He was able to determine systems that I didn’t even know we needed. His ability to find the right way to do something, replicate it, show others and hold others accountable to replicate it the right way is remarkable. He’s one of the most beneficial team members we have, and he’s now Back of House Manager.
Personally, Robby is now living independently. He can get to and from work independently. He has a savings account. He has hobbies and big picture dream goals - and he’s still working here as our longest standing employee.
So what other people may have seen as a weakness, was actually a strength when placed in the right environment?
Yes, he’s such a great team member and I know when Robby’s here things will be done right, and other people will do things right as well.
What have you learnt, and what have you changed along the way?
An issue we’ve encountered is having someone behind the counter that a customer perceives to be rude, but they probably just maintained a flat affect and answered the questions without providing the fluff around the edges. The population that we’re serving is very easy to misinterpret.
Now, our goal isn’t to say, ‘Give this person more leeway because they have a disability.’ Our goal is to say, ‘This is how they are, but you’ll get the same end result, of the same high quality, which you’ll enjoy. It may just look a little different from what you’re used to, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.’
We teach customer service and we’re very passionate about customer service, but as a society we need to become ok with interacting with someone who doesn’t interact the way that we want them to. Most of our customers don’t know about our mission, although we hide it around in little places (like our wifi password). We can solve this problem through more exposure and outreach, but that takes a lot more resources to do than what we were initially expecting.
What do you still hope to learn?
I crunched some numbers earlier this year for a presentation I was doing, and in those numbers I figured out that if 10% of small businesses employed just one person with a disability in Colorado, there would be no unemployment for people with disabilities. Now this seems so achievable and doable - and we could get this done in a day - but it’s not happening. And it's taking a whole lot of time and resources from someone like us - either through consultative services, or through service providers - to get the employers and employees off to a good start that will ultimately be mutually beneficial. That’s the part that we’re still trying to figure out.
I believe most people want to see poverty eradicated. For someone who is compassionate, and wants to combine their compassion with intelligence in order to help well, what should they do?
If you have a business, employ somebody with a disability, and commit to figuring out how to make that a mutually beneficial arrangement. There are charity models out there, even coffee shops, who have a charity mission - like employing people with Down Syndrome. You walk in there and everyone has Down Syndrome. But we’re doing something completely different - our model is a mutually-beneficial business, not a charity.
And if you’re in the community, find out which businesses are effectively and compassionately employing people with disabilities, or differences, and do business with them.
Finally, did you ever figure out what you were doing that helped Patrick?
I gave him space to be himself, while I just stepped back and tried to communicate in different ways until I found what worked with him. I think looking back, it had to do with respect and understanding - a mutual and beneficial relationship on both sides - which is what we all want and deserve.
****
Dirt Coffee is a 501(c)3 Nonprofit Organization, but it is anything but a charity. Dirt’s model is to combat poverty through a more ethical capitalism: the building of a business that is both socially and financially profitable. It is not necessarily a radical strategy, but it is still a remarkably underutilized one.
This model breaks the traditional giver-recipient paradigm, and replaces it with one where both parties are givers and both parties are recipients: there is mutual exchange and reciprocity. When our perception of people with disabilities, who are typically vulnerable to poverty, shifts from ‘people in need of lifelong welfare and aid’, to ‘people who may have remarkable skills that can be an asset to business’, we open up a new world of creative and innovative possibilities to combat poverty. This is a high-impact anti-poverty model, with each dollar invested generating a return for all parties.
To enable Dirt Coffee to continue investing in people with neurodiversities, please consider making a direct financial contribution.
To learn more about innovative approaches to fighting poverty, why not “ask the Dr” directly?
* For a detailed look at the pros and cons of this American love affair, take the time to read through part two of Goldberg’s ominously-titled, but thoroughly fascinating, “Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy”.
**Applied Behavior Analysis: a type of therapy that focuses on improving specific behaviors, such as social skills, communication, reading, and academics as well as adaptive learning skills, such as fine motor dexterity, hygiene, grooming, domestic capabilities, punctuality, and job competence.
Dr Phillip Barnard is committed to helping more people engage practically, intelligently and compassionately with the issue of poverty in our world.