Entrepreneur Combines Business with Social Mission

Ten years into his teaching career in Port Townsend (pop. 8,727), a small town in northwest Washington, Jim Westall decided it was time his students with disabilities had more interesting and meaningful things to do than threading brightly colored beads onto a string. A time-honored method of developing hand/eye coordination in special education classes, “it was always put the beads on the string, strip the string, put the beads back on the string,” Westall says. “It wore everyone out, so I thought why not put the beads on the string and sell the string?”

Working within the school district at first, and then later in a donated garage, Westall’s students began making brightly colored, beaded jump ropes in 1981. And so was born the Skookum Jump Rope Co., a highly successful part of what has become Skookum Inc., an award-winning nonprofit corporation whose 200 employees with disabilities offer janitorial services, lead and asbestos abatement, gutter cleaning and repair, street striping, grounds maintenance, and recycling services to corporations and the federal government.

Westall founded Skookum partly out of frustration, he says. After so many years of teaching special education students, he knew that no matter how well he taught and nurtured them, there were few places for them to find meaningful, dignified work when they left school at ages 18-21. “They’d go into the system and be absolutely lost,” he says. Now many Skookum employees receive middle-class wages; some earn as much as $70,000 per year. This is virtually unheard of in the United States, where an estimated 70 percent of people with disabilities are unemployed and receiving public assistance.

Westall chose the name, Skookum—a Northwest Indian word meaning strong, well-made, well-built—to honor the native peoples of the Olympic Peninsula and to herald the quality of the organization’s work. As a boy growing up in Port Townsend, he often heard his father describe particularly well-built boats he’d spot in the harbor as “skookum boats.” Now, Skookum Inc. is widely known for its quality work, reliability, and customer service.

Even though 81percent of Skookum’s employees have disabilities, the workers are up to even the most difficult tasks. “We literally do our jobs as well as any company in the world,” Westall says. Last year the organization was awarded an international certification for quality that is required for working with the auto industry and large corporations such as The Boeing Co.

Unlike most corporation heads, Westall believes that the return on Skookum’s investment should be measured in terms of social benefits to the community as well as economic returns. Using what has come to be called “a double bottom-line,” he and Skookum’s board of directors consider meeting the needs of the community as important as the company’s continued financial success. “We talk about our social return on investment the same way Boeing talks about its economic returns,” Westall says.

One of a growing number of social entrepreneurs, Westall says his most difficult challenge is to combine business with a social mission. “To be a social entrepreneur is to have to make hard decisions about what we can and can’t do. Given all the needs—and they are enormous—how do we give what we can and still have enough revenue to keep going?”

Westall modestly downplays the central role his leadership plays in the success of Skookum. He may be a lightning rod for the organization, he says, but it’s a philosophy shared by the whole company that is responsible for its being a totally self-sustaining organization, one that has received multiple awards for service as well as national media attention.

“It’s our saying that we’re going to make a difference in our community and our region, and we’re going to do it with integrity and as much honesty towards each other as possible. That’s how it’s done. Business doesn’t have to be based on greed.”

Laurel Holliday writes books and articles in Seattle.

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