Giving back: Arizona t-shirt company employs individuals with special needs

PHOENIX (FOX 10) -- For over four years, the CEO of Paper Clouds Apparel, Robert Thornton, has been hiring individuals with special needs to help fold and package the t-shirts the company sells.

Paper Clouds has individuals with special needs create designs and then prints them on t-shirts. 50 percent of the proceeds from those shirts goes back to the cause. But now, the very people Thornton employs, all from The Centers for Habilitation, are packaging up some of their own designs and the money raised will go towards the very programs that employ them.

"Today we are at The Centers for Habilitation because this is the amazing facility that created the artwork for our current campaign, so the proceeds are going to their campaign and these are the amazing members that fold and pack every shirt we sell," said Thornton.

The artists couldn't be happier to see their own works of art heading out the door.

"A partnership like this.. it allows us to have a platform for our supported individuals to be creative and to be a part of something," said TCH's Jeff Bertnick.

And that is what Thornton says this is all about.

"They think that individuals with special needs don't have talents and they want to kind of push them in a corner and we don't want to do that. We want to put them on a pedestal and give them that feeling of self-worth and value that unfortunately the masses don't give them."

Paper Clouds Apparel
Info@PaperCloudsApparel.com
www.papercloudsapparel.com

The Centers for Habilitation
480-838-8111
www.tch-az.com