AN organisation providing crucial employment opportunities for people living with a disability is calling for businesses to consider using their services.
This comes as Orana Mount Gambier teams with an innovative business to shore up employment for its workers.
Orana employees are now sorting and packing for Jolly Soles, a growing business distributing colourful socks around Australia for fundraising activities.
Orana business development manager Carolyn Rayner said the organisation was thrilled with the new arrangement and urged other businesses to also consider using their services.
“There are a lot of things the employees can do here,” Ms Rayner said.
She said Orana employees assembled and packaged a wide range of products, undertook garden and grounds maintenance, timber processing as well as mail outs/invoices for businesses.
“Jolly Soles owner Tanya Pettingill came to Orana to see whether we could assist with the packing of product, a task well suited to our employees,” Ms Rayner said.
She said providing employment to people living with disability enriched their lives and provided their own earnings.
“There is a great deal of self worth linked with this,” Ms Rayner said.
Mount Gambier manager Joan Coutts – who has worked for the organisation for 20 years – said the Mount Gambier operation needed greater consistency of work for its 18 employees.
“We also have a crew that goes out every day and does maintenance jobs, such as at Telstra phone exchanges,” Ms Coutts said.
While there was enough work for two to three days per week for employees, she said the organisation wanted to expand.
“We are trying to get one extra day at the moment for our employees,” Ms Coutts explained.
She said the employees at the Brownes Road facility were sorting boxes of socks for distribution, which sometimes calculated to thousands of pairs per day.
Ms Coutts revealed she loved working for the employees at the site and see them grow and develop.
“A lot of them come in from school. There are limited opportunities for people living with a disability in Mount Gambier,” she added.
Meanwhile, Ms Pettingill said she was thrilled with the service provided by Orana.
“I saw a Facebook post from a local dad in Mount Gambier who was looking for work for his autistic son,” Ms Pettingill said.
This sparked the idea to contact Orana to see if they would package and distribute the sock orders.
“At the time we were sorting the socks on our eight-ball table at home. This got the ball rolling in regards to looking at this type of service,” Ms Pettingill said.
“All of my customers are volunteers who are all trying to make the world a better place, which is a good fit with Orana.”
She said third party packaging was available in capital cities but harder to find in regional areas.
