TURNER — After more than 34 years employing people with disabilities, the nonprofit Nezinscot Guild in Turner has closed.

Executive Director Dan O’Shea said the small business lost too much money over the past three years, including $180,000 in funding from the state, and it could not afford to continue. 

“It was the perfect storm,” he said. “We lost the state funding, the recession started — or we were in the throes of the recession — and the shift in Idexx’s business, which was very significant. The fact that we were still standing after that was pretty remarkable.”

The guild’s 35 workers were told of the closure at the end of April. About half have mental illness or disabilities, including developmental disabilities, autism and traumatic brain injuries.

“Me, personally, I loved it. And I hate that it had to close,” said Rene Tassinari, 25, of Lewiston. He has autism and an impulse control disorder and worked for the guild for four years. “I think it’s really a shame.”

The Nezinscot Guild started in 1979, in the wake of the lawsuit and consent decree over the state-run Pineland Center in New Gloucester. The state was accused of not providing care and services to Pineland residents who had mental and developmental disabilities. In the years that followed, Maine was required to provide more opportunities for people with disabilities in the community.

At Nezinscot, workers were paid hourly or by the manufactured piece. Workers with disabilities got support and direction on the job. 

In the beginning, Nezinscot got all of its funding from the state. As the years went on, it got more money from its manufacturing jobs and less and less from the state.

Three years ago, the state changed the way it funded certain programs. The Nezinscot Guild would have had to conform to MaineCare regulations, and it couldn’t.

“We ran a small business model as opposed to a very regulated counseling kind of circumstance,” O’Shea said.

Nezinscot was able to make up some of that money. It was already contracted to make wooden crates and gift boxes for various customers, test packaging for Idexx Laboratories in Westbrook and drying racks for Robbins Lumber in Searsmont. It also got a contract to do hand packaging for J.S. McCarthy Printers in Augusta. 

But Idexx began automating its packaging production. Nezinscot got some smaller jobs from the company, but they didn’t equal the loss of that big one.

Nezinscot tried fundraising, downsizing and cutting back. But it wasn’t enough to stay in business. The nonprofit ran out of money three weeks ago.

“I think people took us for granted, that we were just somehow going to always manage,” O’Shea said. “We’re getting a lot of gee-I-wish-I-had-known kind of stuff. But we just didn’t go around saying, ‘The sky is falling. The sky is falling;’ We were working too hard trying to keep things going.”

Some of Nezinscot’s employees had worked there for more than 20 years. Others used it as more of a stepping stone, a place to learn job skills and work etiquette before moving to a more traditional workplace.

Alan-Michael Flagg, 23, of Jay, started working at Nezinscot about four years ago. Hoping to become a carpenter, he’d first gotten involved with the Job Corps, a federal program that helps young people gain life and job skills. But, he said, workers there kept losing his paperwork, frustrating him and his family. His parents heard about the Nezinscot Guild from friends.

Flagg, who has dyslexia, spent the past four years at Nezinscot building dryer racks and boxes, silk screening, running a drill press and doing other work. He gained not only skills, he said, but also friends.

“It was overall really nice and a great place to work,” he said.

He now plans to work from home, building birdhouses and tables to sell on his own.

Tassinari isn’t sure what he’s going to do. He wants to find another job, but he needs more support than many employers are willing to give. He might try a state vocational rehab program, but he’d tried that before and didn’t have good luck.

Nezinscot, Tassinari said, gave him the perfect mix of support and independence, work skills and social skills. His mother said it gave him self-worth. 

“He was a contributing member of society,” Karen Morris-Arsenault said.

She said she was “mentally and emotionally sick over it” when she learned Nezinscot was shutting down. Her son hadn’t made a lot of money and what he had earned was offset by a reduction in his Social Security, but he was working nearly 30 hours a week, bringing home a paycheck and developing a work ethic.

She criticized the state for not funding Nezinscot.

“They’re supposed to have these individuals as mainstreamed as possible, integrated into the community. Yet look at what they go and do,” she said. “This has done terrible things for his self-esteem, for his self-worth, because work was a big thing for him.”

Nezinscot officially shut down at the end of April. O’Shea plans to sell off machinery and remaining inventory in the next couple of weeks.

To stay open at reduced levels, O’Shea said, Nezinscot would have needed another $50,000 to $80,000 a year. To stay open at the level it was before downsizing, it would need about $100,000 a year. 

O’Shea said he was saddened to close.

“We enjoyed what we were doing,” he said. “Everybody was motivated by what we were doing for people.”

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