Here Work People – Of All Kinds

Studio End Joy, a business for designing gifts and flowers, boasts a social record that few can claim: in its eight years of existence, it has rehabilitated 112 people with different disabilities. However, as the owner, Nadav Atiya, emphasizes, the studio is not a charity and does not receive government budgets, grants, or private donations. "The idea is not to treat these people as needy but as regular employees who have unique contributions to make."

Atiya, one of the founders of 'Zer For You,' started Studio End Joy almost by chance. "When I retired from Zer For You, I intended to set up a logistics center for similar businesses. I was invited to a sheltered workshop to see if I could transfer some of the work there. I saw a large group of disabled yet cheerful people. After that, they took me to a factory for people with mental health issues. They were quite frightened to see me, and their alarm took me decades back."

Mental health issues are not foreign to Atiya. When he was a year and a half old, his father was injured in the Yom Kippur War and suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Awareness of the mental effects of combat was low at the time, and families had to cope alone with fathers who returned mentally scarred from battle. "The people I met reminded me of a visit I made at the age of four to a psychiatric hospital where my father was hospitalized, and how he handed me with trembling hands a wooden car he had made for me in a woodworking workshop they held for them."

These sights and the memory they evoked led Atiya to decide to change direction. "I decided to shelve my business plan and prepare another plan to establish a social business. "Not from a place of pity, but from a place of empowerment," he emphasizes. "I grew up with a father struggling with a complicated mental illness that affected the whole house, but my mother never let us pity ourselves and led us to success. I decided I wanted to create a business where people are measured by their strengths and not by their weaknesses. Even if a person is lacking seventy percent of their abilities, they still have thirty percent where they are good and can contribute."

Who sends workers to you?

"The Ministry of Health, the Welfare Ministry, and the Defense Ministry. They know our criteria for employment and send people accordingly. Our uniqueness is that we are completely independent and not supported by any entity, and the workers are employed as regular employees with all social benefits. People come with a wide range of challenges: intellectual disabilities, mental health issues, diseases that require dialysis but leave the patient available for work on other days. These people rehabilitate with us, and we save the state a million shekels a year in rehabilitation centers and recovery costs."

Ask Atiya about success stories, and they flow readily. "We had a blind woman who rehabilitated with us and learned to arrange flowers without seeing anything! Just relying on other senses. We had an employee suffering from combat stress who couldn't work in a closed place, so we included him in the delivery team. He was our best courier. The work rehabilitated him so much that he mustered the strength to study a profession, and today he works as a travel agent in a regular business. We employ someone who came with schizophrenia so severe that we had significant doubts about her: today she instructs here and founded a schizophrenia patient's association. The work, the community, and the structure we provide – it rehabilitates greatly. There are people who got married or rented an apartment thanks to the work here."

Atiya also takes pride in the quality of relationships among workers. "The social atmosphere is amazing. Relationships are on the deepest level of consideration, understanding, and help. Every new employee receives support from veterans. They share successes and are very approving. Just this week, an employee got married, and everyone came and celebrated with her."

Running a social business, however, is not entirely rosy and smooth. "There are complex ethical dilemmas. What do you do when someone simply cannot integrate? We do everything to help, but ultimately we understand that there has to be a limit: we cannot desire someone's rehabilitation more than they want it themselves. When that happens, and we have to fire someone, the family may well come to shout at us."

Why did you choose not to receive financial support from any government office or organization?

"I don’t like dealing with receiving funds and fundraising. Like it or not, if you operate in such a way, fundraising becomes your primary job. I prefer to focus on product development and building a customer base that is interested in social products. I don’t accept donations or serve anyone other than Him up there. What I do – is because I believe it needs to be done."

Atiya says it took him six years to stabilize the business and make it profitable. "We had to educate the market. There's a stigma that if a person with disabilities produces something – it’s inferior and should cost less, and that’s just not true. What my people know how to do, they do better than anyone else. We are a textbook case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, the public hasn’t fully internalized this yet. We undoubtedly earn less because we are a social business." Atiya also adds that the gifts and packages they produce not only come from a social business but always convey an educational message.

What is your vision moving forward?

"My dream is that in five years, there will be ten such centers across the country, where people with disabilities can be employed and earn a dignified living."