Productivity a team effort at COF

COF Training Services offers residents in Coffey, Osage and Franklin counties with developmental disabilities the opportunity to experience these and other everyday tasks that many may take for granted.

The organization was started in 1968 by a group who believed there should be more opportunities for people with developmental disabilities after they completed high school, Dan Andrews, COF executive director, said.  

People with disabilities who work with COF are called consumers. COF, which has gone from five consumers to 250, provides such services as employment and residency to developmentally disabled people, which gives them the opportunity to be integrated as a part of the community, Andrews said.

The consumers who work at COF work incessantly to increase their skills, Vikki De La Torre, associate director, said. Their work includes working in a warehouse where they make air masks for airlines through COF’s contract with Mac Fasteners, a local supplier of airline fasteners. The assembly process involves many steps.

“Each person has a specific task that is part of the whole,” De La Torre said.

Other services COF provides include an alternative day program for people with higher medical needs, community employment and training for those jobs, and medical assistance, De La Torre said.

“COF, for many of our people, is their lead medical provider,” De La Torre said.

COF recieves 80 percent of its funding from the federal government. A smaller portion, about 17 percent, comes from the state, and the remaining 3 percent comes from the county.

Last year, COF’s billing process changed, as did the amount of funding coming in. Andrews hopes that state legislature will increase the amount of funding coming in to eliminate the state’s waiting list, and also to provide competitive wages for the organization’s staff, who do a lot of janitorial work.

“It’s pretty hard sometimes to be able to pay good wages for the type of work we require our staff to do,” Andrews said.

While the organization is able to help hundreds of people, there are still about 65 on a statewide waiting list to receive services from places like COF, Andrews said.

While funding was a challenge last year, COF increased its consumer population by eight and completed a horticulture trail that enables consumers to maintain it as a form of therapy, Andrews said.

COF continues to provide the best service available to the individuals it serves, Andrews said. He said the company’s growth is dependent on the growth of the individuals that COF serves.

“We’re a little bit different,” Andrews said in terms of the comparison to other industries. “We deal with individuals instead of products, so to us, success is seeing growth of skills in the individuals.”