A little over one year ago, our clients had the opportunity to tour Eagle Graphics, one of our apparel and promotional product partners. During this tour, clients were provided the opportunity to create their own t-shirts by screen printing! This hands-on tour experience inspired and intrigued our clients to learn more about similar work environments, talking about the experience all year long.
Unfortunately, our clients were unable to get any job experiences in this area, as the job skills specific to this are rather difficult. Not only are the skills difficult to learn, but they require special equipment, such as a heat press, to teach. With this in mind, the team at VPI set out on a mission to find a way to allow our clients to gain the job skills and experience they need to be successful in the niche industry they feel so much excitement towards!
After some brainstorming, we had our idea: Create an inclusion-based clothing brand and training program that not only allowed our clients the job experience they desired, but one that invests right back into impacting the individuals we serve through our community programs. All profits made through our new training program, Inclusion Clothing Co., go right back into fueling our community programs to make an even bigger impact! This experience was bound to be a win-win-win: job experience for our Pre-Employment clients, fuel for our community programs, and trendy Inclusion based clothing for our community! Our clients would gain experience be trained on a heat press, packaging and shipping garments, and overseeing all parts of the order fulfilment process! This allows our clients to expand their involvement, participating in the whole fulfillment process, rather than just creating the garments. This extensive knowledge provides them with a better opportunity to land a job doing something similar at a job within our community! There was one catch to this plan, and that was having the funds to implement this incredible opportunity.
We are very grateful to say that we received not one, but TWO grants from the Community Foundation to help fund this initiative! We were awarded $500 by the The Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region Community Vision Fund to support the startup expenses for Inclusion Clothing Co. We also received a generous $1,000 donation from the Community Foundation’s SAC Developmental Disabilities Fund to help support start up expenses. These grants helped VPI to implement our dream: to enable clients the work experience they needed to help land them the perfect job they wanted, whilst returning the impact full circle by donating profits back to our community programs, and ultimately creating a more inclusive future.