Page 37 - ABILITY Magazine - Best Practices Employment

J. Randolph Lewis Senior Vice President
Brett Woods, job coach, with Nicole Mercer, one of the team members
Angela Campbell, career-outreach coordinator, and Charles Shealey, a team member
CC: Isn’t it, on the one hand, a little frustrating to think that in all these years no one’s made this happen before, that it took this long? Right now you’re still unique. This should be multiplied around the country, around the world?
RL: That’s what we hope.
CC: Any other thoughts that you would want to add?
RL: Whatever we’ve learned, we’ll be glad to pass on. We stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us, and we’re ready to have people stand on ours. While we haven’t figured everything out, it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. I mean, that’s the bottom line.
CC: Have you looked into creating a take-it-on-the- road, if you will, presentation of this, that you’d can share at different employment conferences?
RL: If there were businesses where people wanted us to speak, we’d go there and speak. We will go talk to groups. We have a website that we’re going to expand to show more of the lessons learned as we built and did the initial hiring at Anderson. It’s called Walgreens’ Out- reach. We’re expanding it into Connecticut. After seeing the Anderson model, we have committed to hiring 1,000 people with disabilities by the year 2010. We wanted a clear and elevating goal, so that is it. Whatever we can do, we’ll do to help people. It’s something we enjoy.
CC: How many stores do you have now?
RL: Six thousand and some.
CC: And the distribution centers are expanding to sup- port the expansion of the stores?
RL: That’s correct. We’ll be opening the distribution center in Connecticut in 2009, then we’ll build another one. This is the way we’re gonna build our distribution centers from now on.
CC: Are you building ‘green’ as well?
RL: Sure. We try to use solar where we can. All the land- scaping is natural, low-maintenance landscaping. We still consume a lot of power because of the automation.
CC: Do you ever think about asking your vendors to green up?
RL: We care about it. But I’m more focused on how diverse they are, than how green they are.
CC: So you’re asking them about their diversity?
RL: Sure! There’s 100 things we ask them to do, but probably number one right now with our suppliers is diversity.
www.walgreensoutreach.com