Connie Mulvin clicks on her headset and stares at her computer screen.
“Thank you for calling PBS. My name is Connie. How may I help you?” the 47-year-old Des Moines woman says in her friendly, lilting voice.
This could be a scene from any of a number of call centers throughout Iowa, the United States or the off-shore locations where American companies sometimes send their call center work.
Except this is no bustling call center.
This is a 5-by-10-foot storage room in the back of Mulvin’s single-wide trailer at Val Vista Estates, a Des Moines mobile-home park.
Nearby sits Mulvin’s oxygen tank. In the corner of the closet, Mulvin’s 6-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, scribbles in a coloring book. Two bare light bulbs shine over a rack of clothes hangers.
Mulvin’s job is part of a new program through Mainstream Living, an Iowa nonprofit social service agency that helps people with disabilities become independent. Through the increasingly popular trend of homesourcing, the Mainstream Living program lets people work at home in jobs that fit well to their specific disability.
Homesourcing, also called homeshoring, combines outsourcing and telecommuting to let people do contract work from their homes rather than sending American call-center jobs overseas and is increasing at a rate of about 20 percent per year, according to IDC, a global market research company.
An unexpected benefit is helping people like Mulvin find steady jobs.
The workers train for six weeks. They work out of Mainstream Living’s south-side Des Moines office for the first month, then transition to home.
They contract their work for Arise Virtual Solutions, a company at the forefront of the homeshoring trend with its home-based sales and customer service concepts. Contractors must have their own computers and Internet access.
Arise sets up contractors with companies such as GSI Commerce, an e-commerce firm that manages e-commerce for Web sites of companies such as PBS, Linens-N-Things and Sports Authority.
Photo by Justin Hayworth.
Disabled Become Able To Work
March 25, 2008 by Rich | 1 Comment
In Disabled, Telecommuting, Work at Home
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Dana Keith on May 8th, 2008 at 2:45 am
Great idea, it help people like Mulvin, though she was disabled but still she makes it cause in the world of call centers it doesn’t require more moving actions, so it is more advantage for Mulvin, all she got to do was to sit and keep talking..