LOGAN — The Cache Employment and Training Center (CETC) celebrates 60 years of services this year for people with disabilities. But they have had one of their more challenging years with the pandemic shutting things down for awhile. On KVNU’s For the People program on Friday, CETC executive director Kae Lynn Beecher said it’s been a very different kind of year.
“If you go back a year, who thought we’d be where we are right now, right? Last March things were going along pretty good, life was good, we had people out in the community all over the place, working on jobs, just really good things happening. Then this COVID word starts creeping in and our day of reckoning came on Friday, March 13th of all days,” she explained.
Beecher said their lunch program feeds 80 sometimes 100 people everyday. But she said after spending 3 hours going to grocery stores and calling stores, she couldn’t put together enough food to provide the lunch program on the next Monday.
“That was kind of the final straw where we said- ‘this is just unreal but we’re going to have to close our doors’. After 59 years in business in business, for the first time, we closed our doors.”
But Beecher said they continued to provide in-home support the best that they could as their center-based supports were shut down for two months. She said a lot of their clients who had jobs at restaurants, hotels or at the university, suddenly all of them were unemployed.
Beecher said it was a huge cooperative effort for everybody to make sure that people’s needs were being taken care of and still try to keep people safe. She said their numbers were at about half from where they were a year ago but people were starting to feel the strain of isolation, feeling that is more of a detriment than actually being out in public.
She says they are taking all of the precautions including wearing face masks, taking people temperatures and social distancing. They have had to put restrictions on certain things and they cannot go all the places that they would like to go because it puts people at risk.
Beecher said right now they are trying desperately to get COVID-19 vaccinations because that will help individuals to come back to the services they offer.
She is hoping they will qualify into the 2nd phase of people who qualify for vaccines. To find out more about the organization and how you can donate, visit CETCsupports.org.