About Opportunity Partners
Opportunity Partners supports people with disabilities and other special needs in their effort to improve their self-sufficiency at work, at home, and in the community. Every day, Opportunity Partners provides personalized employment, housing and education services to more than 1,300 individuals in the Twin Cities with developmental disabilities, brain injury, autism and other special needs.
History
We live in a society that often looks at people’s disabilities and judges them on what they cannot do. The parents of young adults with developmental disabilities who founded our organization in 1953 took the opposite view: they looked at their children’s abilities, focused on what they could do, and gave them the skills and support they needed to achieve their dreams.
At a time when many people with disabilities were institutionalized, these parents opened a facility in Richfield called Opportunity Workshop, where their children could learn and earn. The businesses that outsourced jobs to the workshop discovered that people with disabilities could deliver quality services at competitive prices. The leadership of Opportunity Workshop was quick to recognize the success of their in-house packaging operation. They approached customers about employing people with disabilities beyond the workshop walls. In 1959, we became the first organization in the area to place people with disabilities in jobs at businesses in the community. Then, as people with disabilities began moving from large institutions to the community in the early 1970s, we expanded our programs to include residential services.
Every day, we strive to live up to the legacy of the visionary parents who founded Opportunity Workshop. We continue to be an innovative and entrepreneurial organization, focusing on expanding opportunities for people with disabilities. In 1996, we changed our name to Opportunity Partners to better reflect our philosophy and business model.
