Natasha Morris at Blue Bears in Princeton doing vegetable prep work. PHOTO | Michael Rinelli
One morning at Blue Bears Special Meals, CEO Céline Guillemot asked a young employee to clean the tables after the customers left. Minutes later, she spotted him seated beside a table of talking customers, waiting for them to finish and leave so he could do as he was asked.
She recalls that moment humorously.
“He was taking a break,” Guillemot said. “We should have come with him and show him which tables he had to clean.”
Moments like these capture the heart of Blue Bears, a French cafe on North Harrison Street in the Princeton Shopping Center. Founded in 2019 by a Rocky Hill family who adopted four children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), Blue Bears Special Meals is a nonprofit cafe designed to provide meaningful employment opportunities for people with disabilities after they finish school.
“They saw the need for employment opportunities for learning disabled individuals,” Guillemot said, “and then they decided, because of their background, that it was going to be a cafe.”
Today, 12 employees of varying abilities work for Blue Bears Special Meals, all earning New Jersey’s minimum wage.
Training employees with disabilities, many of whom arrive without prior job skills, requires patience, Guillemot said.
“It’s about 50% of the time just teaching,” she said. It often comes with spilled coffee, broken plates and broken glasses.
But Guillemot said the investment pays off in small triumphs: a shy worker mastering table numbers after two years of practice; another proudly making her first sandwich alone; or a budding pastry chef preparing chocolate fondant and coconut macarons independently.
“Sometimes I have goosebumps,” Guillemot said. “It’s a question of time and patience and of having people helping them to learn.”
Demand from families seeking employment for their children far exceeds available positions.
Guillemot said, “I have demands almost every day.”
Stories like this stand out because they remain the exception. Employment opportunities for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities remain limited nationwide.
According to the Disability Employment Statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, the unemployment rate for individuals without disabilities is about 3% to 4%. For individuals with physical or learning disabilities, the rate is almost double at 7.5% to 8.5%.
Changing that story requires more than willing employers; it also requires preparation. That preparation often starts in the classroom. At Mercer County Community College (MCCC), there are systems designed to help those who need this type of extra support.
Lisa Ward, a learning disability specialist for MCCC’s Center for Accessibility Resources (CAR), spends her days guiding students diagnosed with IDD through college life. In what could be described as a typical day at CAR, she recalls a conversation she had with one freshman student.
“[The student] complained that they didn’t understand why they had to write essays because they only had to write a paragraph in high school,” Ward said. “The student was very easily upset, and it was a very, very challenging first year.”
CAR provides academic accommodations to roughly 7% of the college’s enrollment, or about 600 MCCC students each semester. Many arrive with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 plan from high school and a pressing question: What happens now?
“The student drives the bus,” Ward said. “The student is the first point of contact.”
Students apply for accommodations, submit documentation of a diagnosed disability, and meet for a comprehensive intake that can last an hour or more. Together, CAR staff discuss what worked in high school and what might translate to college: extended test time, distraction-reduced testing, permission to record lectures, assistive technology, or a sign language interpreter.
“Every student is different,” Ward said. “We meet them where they are.”
For many students, the next step after college preparation is finding meaningful employment. Outside of the classroom, one of Mercer County’s largest employers of people with disabilities is also doing just that. Local nonprofit organization The Arc Mercer works to bridge that gap between local employers and individuals with IDD.
The Arc Mercer works with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, and Down syndrome typically ages 18 to 21. Executive Director Steven Cook says this is a critical stage in life for individuals with IDD.
“Once you age out of school at 21, if you haven’t had significant work experience, it doesn’t take long in a window of a time where your habit is not to go to work,” he said.
To prevent that habit from forming, The Arc Mercer provides vocational training in six areas — retail, food service, document scanning, landscaping, car detailing and janitorial services. Recently, the organization also added agriculture to the list after the purchase of a farm in Hopewell.
“Our goal is really to get them prepared to go into the community,” Cook said. “We stay focused on those six career tracks because they’re the ones we have found most people are interested in and we’re good at placing them in.”
The training coaches at The Arc Mercer will take course material and turn it into a training curriculum that meets the needs of individuals with IDD.
“Their method of learning is different, but their attention to detail can be incredible,” Cook said.
The Arc Mercer has started several internal businesses where they employ individuals from their vocational training programs. Sometimes they are employed by The Arc Mercer itself, but are placed with a coach at a partnering business such as the food service organization at Rider University.
The ultimate goal of The Arc Mercer’s program is to have the consumer leave the Arc Mercer nest and become a direct hire of the non-Arc business. Ward said the biggest barrier is often misconception.
“If employers knew it’s really not as scary as they think,” Ward said, noting that many workplace accommodations cost little or nothing, “it would be a better outcome for all.”
