We recently had the opportunity to visit a wonderful program called La Fageda in the Catalonia region of Spain.
La Fageda produces and sells over 10 million yogurts a year — successfully competing with large multinational corporations like Danone and Nestle. That’s not why we visited them though.
What makes La Fageda so special, and why we flew across the Atlantic Ocean to learn from them, is that their operations are driven by 400 people that society had deemed as incapable of such value creating work. When La Fageda was formed forty years ago, Spanish society had separated out people with disabilities and put them in a place where they could be forgotten about. They were given “work therapy” in the form of mundane tasks that produced little value and did little to create meaning for those participating in it. Cristobal and Carme, the founders of La Fageda, began their therapeutic careers working in these institutions and quickly realized the deleterious effects these conditions and this kind of work had on these people, as it would on anyone.
So they envisioned an alternative — a system that wouldn’t just keep people busy, it would give them the opportunity to be a part of something meaningful. A system that could divide tasks up according to ability and accommodate all those who wanted to contribute. A system that would nurture those who were a part of it by offering them uplifting surroundings, supportive services, and a caring and nurturing community. And over the next forty years, this is what they developed at La Fageda.
Today, every member of the La Fageda community lives a life of meaning, dignity, and purpose and are themselves meaningfully contributing to their community’s existence and flourishing. What Impressed us most about La Fageda was not that they have given meaning and dignity to their team members. It’s that they have recognized that on a fundamental level, meaning and dignity cannot be given. Instead of treating those with disabilities like a problem needing to be solved, they built a system that allows everyone to pursue their own meaning, their own dignity, and their own happiness.
When you talk to La Fageda employees, they don’t express appreciation for what’s been given to them. They express appreciation for finally being given the chance to earn what they want in life. They take immense pride in the quality of the products they produce and in seeing them on shelves in local supermarkets, feeding their friends and neighbors. They know that they are the driving force behind this success — that they are meaningfully contributing to something bigger than themselves.
There were several important lessons we took away from La Fageda. We learned that it is possible to create a large scale, profitable social enterprise with a mixture of mentally-challenged people and professionals. We saw that social enterprise must allow for jobs of varying complexity – indoor/outdoor, social/single, complex/simple, part time/full time so that each position can be adjusted based on the needs of the individual. We saw that an individual’s vocational “journey” must be guided by a team including supervisors and social workers with case oversight. The social team must buy into basic Village beliefs that self-improvement, effortful achievement, selfless service, and an addiction-free life are fundamental to human flourishing.
The exciting results is that those involved in La Fageda have few episodes, lower medication use, and longer lives. Within one to two years of entering La Fageda, levels of happiness and fulfillment increase dramatically. And La Fageda provides a home for life — they manage the changing needs of each individual over the course of years to ensure they exist in a nourishing, growth oriented environment. This is the kind of vision we have for The Other Side Village — we are excited and grateful to incorporate these lessons into our community and our social enterprises.
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