PARK CITY — Katie Holyfield and Taylor Matkins discriminate. They distinguish large time. The list of things that will invalidate we from operative in a coffee emporium they possess called Lucky Ones is as prolonged as your arm. Your final name could be Starbucks, we could make a chai latte with your eyes closed, we could offer to work for free, and we won’t get so most as a initial talk if we don’t accommodate their rigid, harsh employing qualifications.
And yet, no one’s picketing them. No one’s melancholy a lawsuit. No one’s screaming tainted play.
Because who’s going to have a problem with a business that hires usually a disabled?
That’s it. That’s a deal. To work during Lucky Ones we have to have an egghead or developmental disability.
Every chairman on a whole team, some 17 full-time employees during present, is traffic with something outward a mainstream: autism, Down syndrome, intelligent palsy, dire mind damage and so forth.
All others need not apply.
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Lucky Ones group member Jeremy Morgan works a counter.
Lee Benson, Deseret News
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Lucky Ones owners Katie Holyfield shares a giggle with group member Cole Jones.
Lee Benson, Deseret News
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Lucky Ones co-owner Taylor Matkins, center, with group members Julianna Faulkner, left, and Madison Amis.
Lee Benson, Deseret News
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Lucky Ones co-owner Katie Holyfield, left, with group members Cole Jones and Jeremy Morgan.
Lee Benson, Deseret News
If you’re meditative this is rare, you’re right.
Katie and Taylor know usually too good that people with disabilities have a tough time anticipating beneficial employment.
Two years ago they were operative during a National Abilities Center, a activity-based Park City nonprofit that builds certainty and self-respect by emphasizing abilities rather than disabilities.
Katie was a NAC camps village coordinator and Taylor was one of her interns. They helped immature people and their families learn transition skills as they headed toward adulthood.
But during a same time they disturbed about what would occur to them once they got there.
“There usually isn’t most out there after 21,” says Katie. “They learn these overwhelming pursuit skills and afterwards can’t find anywhere to put them to use.”
As they talked, Taylor told Katie about a coffee emporium named Bitty Beau’s in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she went to college, that hired usually a disabled. The women called to see if a owners competence be meddlesome in franchising in Utah, though they declined.
So they motionless to figure out how to open their possess place.
In their gangling hours, Katie and Taylor became regulars during a Small Business Development Center in Salt Lake City, training a details and outs about starting a business.
“Our bad adviser, we consider he sees people a integrate times a year; we were there weekly,” says Katie.
When they finally had a emergence of a business devise and had managed to lift $22,000 on an online crowdfunding site, they went to a Park City City Council to make their representation to open their store subsequent to a city library on Park Avenue.
“Why should we sinecure someone who has no knowledge using a coffee shop?” they were asked indicate blank.
Katie, who was 27 during a time, looked during Taylor, who was 23.
“Because we’re immature and we’re inspired and we have to make it work,” they answered.
They won a bid.
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That was a year and a half ago. Today, Lucky Ones is thriving. It’s turn a unchanging Park City institution, like Davanza’s pizza and Deer Valley turkey chili. The distance of a staff has grown from 12 to 17, trimming in age between 16 and 56.
As for turnover, it’s been all though nonexistent, that in a ski city is zero reduction than a miracle. Even on powder days, everybody shows adult for their shift.
“We have usually a conflicting problem,” says Katie. “People banging down a doorway wanting a job.”
The village has been some-more than welcoming, embracing a singular workforce as enthusiastically as a singular workforce has embraced them back.
Not that there hasn’t been a occasional desirous customer. Like, for instance, during Sundance.
“They could caring reduction who’s operative a counter,” says Katie. “They wish their coffee and they wish it now!”
But a altogether summary from Lucky Ones is clear: Give people support and an event to attain and they will.
The name, by a way, is not a anxiety to a people operative there.
It dates behind to when Katie and Taylor were ski instructors during a NAC. When they were roving a lift with their classes people would come adult to them and constantly contend something along a lines of, “Oh you’re such a saint for what we do.”
“They’d contend it right in front of a particular that we were instructing,” says Katie, “They were well-meaning and we’d appreciate them and pierce on, though what we didn’t tell them is that we’re a ones who get to have this pursuit that is fun and rewarding and get to be with people who have opposite ways to demeanour during a universe — people who go by hurdles that maybe we and we don’t have though have such a good opinion on life that it creates we rethink when we protest or consider you’re carrying a stressful day.
“Taylor and we would laugh. They got it backward. We’re a propitious ones. That’s where a name comes from.”