THE INTERVIEW:

Ed Guthrie: The voice of Opportunity Village

As executive director of huge Las Vegas charity Opportunity Village, Ed Guthrie has a voice—and is he ever using it.

With the Magical Forest, for the 40 days we were open this year, it rained for 15 of them. We had to struggle to just break even.”

Beyond VEGAS INC

With the Nevada economy the way it is, and most everything in the state budget on the chopping block, you’d think Ed Guthrie would be wringing his hands worrying about the future of Opportunity Village.

Not so.

With his usual can-do approach, Guthrie is confident in future of the big Las Vegas charity.

If state funding is inadequate, he and his staff will deal with it. If clients need to spend less on Opportunity Village contracts, they’ll find more clients to make up the difference. Ditto, if donors are giving less.

"Opportunity Village is all about finding a way,’’ Guthrie, executive director of Opportunity Village, said in an interview with VEGAS INC.

Guthrie recently updated us on Opportunity Village, which serves people with intellectual disabilities in Southern Nevada by:

• Hiring them for jobs in which Opportunity Village provides services around Las Vegas on a contract basis; and at its three employment training centers.

• Placing them in jobs with other employers.

• Running a thrift store.

Highlights of our conversation:

Many people know Opportunity Village because of the Magical Forest fundraising event at the Oakey campus. Can you give us an overview of the larger organization and how it’s doing during the recession?

Opportunity Village has a lot of facets to it -- different things are reacting to the market differently.

Our annual operating budget is about $24 million and we’re very proud of the fact we’ve raised most of that money ourselves.

Grants from the government are a very small part of our budget.

We have a fair amount of fee-for-service income, so if the vocational rehabilitation (agency) refers someone to us for assessment and training, we charge a fee for that.

An awful lot of our budget is earned income. The balance of our budget is fundraising. We work real hard to raise that money.

The Magical Forest is essentially 40 different fundraisers on 40 nights in a row. We have to be out there to organize all the volunteers and provide a great show for all the kids coming out there and their families -- we’re part of Christmas and we don’t want to disappoint the kids.

The thrift business is going well. We had a fire at the thrift store on the 11th of July and it burned to the ground

Judge Lloyd George is a retired federal judge -- he was a young attorney when we bought that store and he helped co-sign the note so we could get it in the first place. That’s how long Opportunity Village has been in that thrift store. That was very traumatic for us.

Because of the support of the community -- we received lots of donations -- we were able to find a new site over on Meadows Lane. It opened Oct. 11. The site is doing very well. We continue to get a fair amount of donations coming through the door -- we can always use more. We’re able to meet a community need by providing used merchandise and at the same time provide jobs for people with disabilities. That part of our business is doing well.

Most people know Opportunity Village because of the Magical Forest or the thrift store. What they don’t know is we clean about 1.5 million square feet of government and commercial office space.

If you drink wine at the local casinos, we clean Southern Wine & Spirits. If you pull a permit at the Clark County Government Center, we clean that. If you’re a veteran and you go to any of the VA clinics in town, they’re all cleaned by Opportunity Village. If you rent a car at McCarran, that’s cleaned by Opportunity Village.

So we provide an awful lot of jobs to an awful lot of people.

Because of the economy, we’ve had to work with all of our customers on how we can manage our contracts so they have the money to pay for the service -- and that we also have as many jobs as we can for the people we serve.

So we’ve had to reduce a number of the contracts. We’ve gone to the Springs Preserve and we worked out a deal where we had to reduce some of the services we provide to them. At the Clark County Government Center we showed them ways they could reduce their contract by 25-30 percent. That’s just by changing the frequencies of when a lot of things were cleaned.

We’ve specialized for a number of years in cleaning services, food service and a number of things so we’re pretty good at it. So now we’re not just a bunch of amateurs running around trying to figure out how to clean the building. We’re pretty professional at what we do.

Have you cut rates you charge for contract services?

What we’ve done is work with them on how to do things differently for the short term. And the short term could be a few years. If you do this for a long time you’ll probably have deferred maintenance that will catch up with you over time. For two or three years you can change the frequency at which you clean the bathroom or strip and wax the hallway, so you reduce the impact on the current budget with the understanding you’re going to have to come back and put those back in or the building’s life will be lowered.

We’ve made some tradeoffs with our government customers. We’ve taken some hits. It’s probably been about 20 percent of our revenue that we’ve lost in custodial and food service contracts, but we’ve gone out and aggressively looked for other contracts.

We’re doing work differently to save the client money. The big thing is frequencies. You can have the bathroom cleaned five times per day, or you can have it cleaned three times per day. It’s not quite as clean as it used to be, but it seems to be meeting the customers’ needs.

We’ve gong to Fox 5, we clean their studios now. So the people who lost their jobs at the Clark County Government Center now have jobs at Fox 5.

It sounds like you haven’t lowered your rates.

The rates stay the same. Custodial contracts are bid on a cost per square foot. You change the cost per square foot if you don’t do things as frequently.

What we know with every business -- whether it’s a government purchasing office or a private individual or a publicly traded company -- all of them are interested in price, quality and on-time delivery.

What we try to do is provide price, quality and on-time delivery and we hire people with disabilities to do those jobs.

We’ve had a 20 percent reduction in revenue (since 2008). That’s about $3 million in all of our lines of business. But we’ve replaced almost all of that $3 million.

And how is employment training going?

We have three employment training centers. We’ve worked hard to find contract work to do assembly and packaging, shredding of confidential documents, things of that nature. Any of the contracts we’ve received have been smaller, so we’ve had to look for more contracts. We package a lot of the amenities in hotel rooms. When there weren’t as many people in the hotel rooms, they didn’t use as many amenities, so we had to look for additional packaging jobs we could do so we could keep people working because you can’t provide vocational training if there’s no work.

We were out aggressively looking for contracts. Now the hotel rooms are starting to fill again -- we consider ourselves one of the early economic indicators for the city of Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. If you ask us how many amenities we package for the hotel rooms, you’ll know one of two things: either the rooms are fuller more often or there are more people taking home the amenities. We know we’re packaging more amenities for the hotels (including Aria, the Mirage, Caesars Palace and the Venetian).

How long do the clients receive vocational training?

It depends on the individual. Some of the individuals will choose to work for Opportunity Village so they’ll be here for a long time. We serve all the meals to all the airmen at Nellis Air Force Base and will have for 10 years in May. We hire a lot of people with disabilities to serve all those meals. Some may decide they want to go to work for us. Some of them decide they’d like to go work elsewhere -- we’ve placed people at the Capital Grille and the Venetian and other places in their kitchen and food service area. We have a commercial kitchen at our Oakey campus and we do a lot of training for placement. We have a kitchen at the Ralph and Betty Engelstad campus and at that campus the individuals are just doing production.

We’re trying to become the cookie kings of Southern Nevada!

There are four different types of cookies: Chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal raisin and sugar cookies. We provide them to a number of casinos, to the employee dining rooms and in some cases to buffets, and to convenience stores and Famous Dave’s barbeque among others.

It’s another example of finding work for people, we decided to bake cookies. And I volunteered to do random quality checks on the cookies. Once every day or so I take a cookie and make sure it meets our quality standards.

One thing I try to go back to business people with all the time is we’re two things at the same time: We’re a training ground for people with disabilities, but we might be a solution for business people.

When you have a problem, we might be the solution to that problem. Almost every contract we’ve gotten at Opportunity Village has been because a business person has come through here and said 'Can you do this for me?’

There’s a window manufacturer in Henderson who toured our program and saw what we were doing in assembly and manufacturing and asked if we could hot-glue a piece of cardboard to a piece of Styrofoam so we could make spacers for packaging his windows so he could ship them. Now we have jobs for 12 people. All they do is hot-glue pieces of cardboard to Styrofoam. We had the ability to solve their problems and they can give people a paycheck and self respect.

How is fundraising going?

It’s tough. The government or others provide a subsidy so we can provide the extra support or supervision some of the folks with disabilities need to be successful. When the government doesn’t have the money, we go out and recruit private foundations and others to provide scholarships for those individuals who are waiting for government support.

(Kirk Kerkorian’s) The Lincy Foundation (for instance) has helped us provide scholarships to the tune of $200,000 per year for -- this is my 17th year -- and they’ve done it every year for the last 17 years.

With the Magical Forest, for the 40 days we were open it rained 15. Being an outside event, it’s kind of tough when it rains. We had to struggle to come up with ideas to just break even to where we were the prior year and the prior year wasn’t that good either. It is a struggle to do the fundraising, but the community has been incredibly supportive of Opportunity Village. We’ve been here since 1954. Over that period of time we’ve had the support of some very prominent individuals, the Thomas and Mack families, the Engelstad family, Kitty Rodman. We’ve had support from the rank and file individuals who bring their sons and daughters to the Magical Forest. And all the hundreds and hundreds of volunteers who run the Magical Forest -- without them it wouldn’t be doable. It’s like putting on a show 40 nights in a row.

The show is there for everybody but it’s really there for the 10-year-old in all of us.

From 2009 to 2010 how much did the donations decline?

It declined no more than about 10 percent. That was from going out and hustling. Donations left -- we worked hard to get more donations in the door. The Magical Forest is a good example. Some of the major donors who would donate $100,000 as a sponsor said `we can’t do that this year, we can only donate $20,000.’ So we went out and looked for four other donors who could donate $20,000.

If we couldn’t have found replacement donors, it would have dropped 30-35 percent. But because of the hard work of our volunteers and our staff, we were able to find replacement donors.

What’s happening with state funding?

The state of Nevada, when it comes to fees and rates, there’s been no increase for the type of service we provide since the 2005 session of the Legislature. We don’t expect any increase in the 2011 session. It will be 2013 at the earliest before there is any increase.

So if we we’re making $25 a day for providing a service to somebody, we’ll be making that through 2013 for the same service. That’s kind of tough on a long-term basis because you lose some of your purchasing power, but everyone’s got to deal with that now.

We’re going back to the Legislature and saying `we’re not expecting a rate increase. We don’t think you can afford one anyway, so why even ask for it?’

What we are saying is there are more than 350 people on the waiting list for state support for services like those provided by Opportunity Village. They’re at Desert Regional Center in Southern Nevada.

(Of the 350) a number of people are coming to Opportunity Village because we’ve recruited donors like the Lincy Foundation and the Ralph and Betty Engelstad Foundation to be able to scholarship those individuals for services. We have about 75 of those individuals who are being served by Opportunity Village -- but that’s 75 out of 350.

There are also more than 250 students between 19 and 21 who are no longer going to be eligible for services. These are special education students with severe intellectual disabilities who will no longer be eligible for services from the schools sometime in the next two years.

They’ll age out of the system. The school says `that’s all we can provide’ and they’re on their own.

Are you worried the Legislature will actually cut funding?

I haven’t heard anything about a cut in the rates. What we have heard is there is no growth in the number of people who are going to be served. But at the same time the number of people needing services is growing dramatically. That’s concerning to us.

When you talk to donors, do they say `we’ve done what we can for years, but maybe the state government needs to step up with more funding.’ Is the level of state funding discouraging to them?

Yes and no. The donors are usually business people. They understand the economic cycles and they understand the state is taking the same hit that a lot of businesses are. They understand that nothing’s going to happen at the state level until the economic engine of business is going to put more jobs on the street. With jobs you have more people paying sales taxes and buying property and there’s more property taxes and so on. They’re waiting for that lag to catch up. We’re hoping new donors come to the plate and say `we’re here and we understand our civic responsibility.’

What a lot of the donors like about Opportunity Village is we’re pretty frugal and pretty business like.

The building we’re in (the Engelstad campus at Buffalo Drive and the Las Vegas Beltway), we don’t have to pay rent for. Since we did the capital campaign for the building -- 15-20 percent was government money -- we’re able to plow all the (ongoing) government money into services.

All the furniture in this office was donated to Opportunity Village.

The other thing they appreciate about Opportunity Village is we’re putting people to work.

When people are working, as we’re finding out in this recession: a job’s not just a paycheck. It’s your form of self respect. You get to look at yourself in the mirror every morning and go to work. Opportunity Village provides an opportunity for a lot of people -- who others would feel are unemployable -- to look at themselves in the mirror every morning and say `I’ve got to go to work because I have a job to do.’

Are market forces working against you, with businesses able to hire a lot of qualified people at low wages?

Yes. When the economy was booming we were able to do what’s called `job carving.’ You’d have a position and we’d carve out pieces of that position so that a person with fairly substantial disabilities could do the job. They might not be able to do anything but make copies. But you had enough copies that needed to be made that we could carve out that part of the job from three or four different people and have that person making copies.

Or we’re placing someone for custodial service and all they can do is empty the trash can. But you have so many trash cans that need to be emptied that you could have someone doing that full time.

When the economy shrinks, you need people who can multi task -- not people who need a job carved out specifically for their limited capabilities. A lot of those jobs we carved out for individuals with substantial disabilities went away. It wasn’t that people were being mean, it was because of economic necessity.

They had to find ways to keep the doors open and they couldn’t have as many specialists, they needed people who could multi task and our guys are specialists by definition. That happened an awful lot during the recession and it’s still happening somewhat.

It’s part of the reason we do contract work. We place 150-200 people per year in jobs out in the community. But we employ 900-1,000 a year. It was partially so we could be a safety net. It was also so we could control our own fate. If we learned how to do custodial or food service really well, we could provide a lot of jobs in that area.

If the only thing you can do, when we’re baking cookies, is take 12 of them and put them on the baking pan -- we’ll find a job for you. But in private industry they probably couldn’t do that because they need to use that money to pay down their debt.

Developer and sports gambler Bill Walters has been a big supporter of Opportunity Village. How has the 60 Minutes piece on him, also reporting on Opportunity Village, affected fundraising?

It's still going great. Bill’s been an incredible supporter of Opportunity Village for 15 years. Kitty Rodman brought him to Opportunity Village in the first place. His son Scott had an intellectual disability due to brain cancer as a youth. We were happy to have Scott work with us at Opportunity Village, he worked with some of the most severely disable people and did a fantastic job. Bill fell in love with the place and helped us raise the money, so now we have the Walters Family campus in Henderson named after Bill.

Bill brought in a number of the casino vice presidents. When he brought them in they smelled the cookies cooking and that’s part of the reason we are cooking as many cookies as we are for a number of the casinos. He brought us to Caesars Palace and other places and we established relationships so we’re going to have a celebrity poker tournament in the spring. There are a lot of different things that have spun off our relationship with Bill long term.

Short term, just from the 60 Minutes, we were able to increase donations (by about $65,000) and we’ve had an uptick in the number of businesses that are interested in talking to Opportunity Village about doing their packaging. There are some that do direct mail, so we’re working with them on doing direct mail. We’re talking to groups about how to do custodial contracts. All those things spun off the 60 Minutes piece.

The funniest thing was there was a group of folks in Bardstown, Ky., outside of Louisville who saw the piece and contacted Bill because some of the donors to this organization wanted to tour Opportunity Village. We just hosted this group of folks and hopefully we can learn a number of things from them and they can learn a number of things from us.

It serves like seven different counties but has only a third of the population of the Las Vegas Valley. The funniest part is the donor who contacted Bill had the last name of Guthrie. Pat Guthrie (of Nelson County Industries) contacted Bill, who said `you should contact Ed Guthrie.’

How has Opportunity Village been expanding its services?

About six years ago, I had a very severe accident. I went in the hospital and had a stroke while I was in the hospital. And I realized from talking to doctors and others, if the accident had been slightly different or the stroke had been slightly different, that I would have been one of the clients of Opportunity Village being served by Opportunity Village, not the executive director of Opportunity Village.

We started having a discussion about what we could do for people who had a traumatic head injury, whether it be through a stroke or an accident. We started reaching out to other members of the community we didn’t traditionally serve.

An individual at our reception desk is an Iraq veteran who is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. We put him through an office assessment and found he did such a good job we hired him.

We serve some of the most disabled people in Southern Nevada.

Another individual found us. We do a black-tie event that’s the kickoff event for the Magical Forest, we call it Camelot. He was with the stagehands union, he was the guy who organized all the stagehands as volunteers to do the lights and all the great stuff the union does for us every year for Camelot. Two years ago he was on a trip to California and on his way back he was within a few miles from home riding his motorcycle and somebody ran a stop sign. He went literally headfirst into the side of the car and he had a traumatic brain injury. He’s a very severely disabled individual. His wife ran through his insurance and everything they had and then the stagehands union approached Opportunity Village and said `can you provide services for him?’ We said `hell yeah.’

We went out and found a donor. It costs us $150 per day to provide services for him. We’re trying to reinvest into being kind of an insurance policy for all of us.

In the last five years we’ve looked at people with traumatic brain injuries, it could be a stroke, we said `what can we do for them?’

You mentioned Opportunity Village has been frugal with expenses.

None of our staff has had a raise across the board in three years, from the executive director on down. We’ve said 'we need to hold the line and reinvest that in expanding services.’ We’ve reinvested in the business that will allow us to sustain ourselves over the long term.

Your annual salary has been publicly reported as $240,00. Has that caused anyone to not want to donate?

Nobody that I know of.

Does it bother you to have your salary reported in the paper? It doesn’t seem to be excessive given the size of the organization.

You get what you pay for. There are some people who take a vow of poverty, they’re usually religious. Most of the rest of us have families and we don’t. I have been told I could make a lot more working for a for-profit business than I do as executive director of Opportunity Village. I don’t’ know because it’s all I have ever done, almost 17 years here at Opportunity Village and before that 15 years at upstate New York. So for the last 32 years, this is the only type of job I’ve ever had. I couldn’t tell you whether I could make more money outside of the nonprofit sector. When the board sets my salary, they go to a compensation consultant and ask the consultant to look at what’s a competitive salary. He tells them what the competitive median is. We have very good business people on the board of directors. They set my salary. I’m grateful for everything they’ve decided I’m worth.

Is it embarrassing to have your salary published in the paper? Yes, kind of, but if I worked for Station Casinos or another public company they’d publish my salary in the paper. It goes with the territory.

You’ve been working with people with disabilities for many years, why are you so passionate about it?

When I looked at them -- there is the saying `There but for the grace of God go I.’ When I looked at each of these individuals I realized that for the most part they had nothing to do with their disability. It violated my sense of fairness. They should have opportunities too. Just because you have a disability you shouldn’t have to sit home and watch TV, because that will drive you insane. And the fact that even with their disability, they are some of the most positive people, some of the happiest people I’ve ever met in my life. They’re grateful for the opportunity to go to work every day and to visit with friends and to earn a paycheck and to do all the things that the rest of us take for granted.

It kind of reinforces that there’s no such thing as a bad day at Opportunity Village. You have a chance every day to make a difference in someone’s life, so why wouldn’t you do it?

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