Accent believes our community is at its best when we work together. Any company can make a profit; we believe in making a difference. We recently teamed up with the Crestwood Police Department to donate 30 life-saving kits as a resource for officers to use. Each kit contains a tourniquet, blood-clotting aids, and other crucial medical tools to help on-duty officers during emergency situations. It’s our privilege to help the Crestwood Police Department have the resources they need to make a difference in someone’s life when it matters the most.

Making the transition from school to the workplace can be difficult for anyone. Our Accent team is helping students from the Special School District of St. Louis County with their transition. We are currently partnering with the SSD to host our Vocational Skills Program (VSP) and Community-Based Vocational Instruction (CBVI) program through Accent. SSD students are able to fulfill a variety of roles at Accent, such as compiling orders for customers via the Accent warehouse, sorting promotional items, assembling and packing boxes, arranging shipping details, and developing graphic design projects.

The Vocational Skills Program and Community-Based Vocational Instruction program give students the opportunity to develop ‘soft skills,’ arguably the most important benefit. The ability to make eye contact, have stamina for an entire work day, solve problems, and give a friendly greeting are often barriers to employment for SSD graduates. Each day SSD students in both programs spend 90 to 120 minutes developing their soft skills. Tasks such as filling out a job application, managing money, and navigating public transportation are just part of completing their Individualized Education Program (IEP).

What we love seeing is how quickly our Accent staff adopted the SSD students as part of our team. As our CEO Erica Hughes shared, “The people that work here are on board with our new partnership with SSD—it’s an attitude we’ve taken on with all the workers.” We hope to be a source of encouragement and growth for each SSD student that chooses to work with our Accent team. Here’s a wonderful article written by the Special School District about our partnership.

We are excited for these opportunities to partner with SSD and the Crestwood Police Department. Our commitment to our community is to take action on purpose. Whether it’s creating life-saving medical kits or giving meaningful life experience to students, we believe we can make a difference today.

If you’d like to learn more about our work at Accent, check out our list of services and start a conversation with our Accent team today.