ABVI Makes Government Issued Sticky Notes
By: Cierra Putman
Updated: October 24, 2012
Passing through Rochester, you may have noticed the building with braille on South Clinton Avenue. Most pass by not realizing there's a manufacturing plant inside.
It's the home of the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
Patricia Austin is one of 85 manufacturing workers employed by ABVI. Some of them sew clothes and work with "green" detergents, but Austin helps make materials for the government.
"I'm a packer," Austin said. "I pack pads and then send them down to the shrink wrap machine."
For 22 years, the group has worked with 3M and the government so ABVI clients can make federally issued sticky pads, notebooks and other paper products.
"Used by the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States all the way down to our military," Sondra McFarlane ABVI's VP of Marketing said.
3M provides the paper, but all the work that goes into making the products useable takes place in Rochester.
The machines are specially outfitted for blind and visually impaired workers. Made so they can safely cut, assemble and package the products without sight.
It's an experience Austin didn't see in her future 32 years ago. Back then, she was leaving the Marines after a work accident caused her to lose some of her vision.
"(It was) scary, so scary, but now it's just a way of life," Austin said.
Now she's still serving, but in a different way.
"It makes me proud to have been in the military, and I'm proud to be working here too," she said.
Providing a product used across the country and around the world.
