How One Mom Built Jobs Where None Existed

Aden was born with Down syndrome,

“and then we had him diagnosed with autism and then a praxia.”

Boys and girls club told us he was too much to handle. And so North Star Pathways was founded to provide caregivers to individuals like my son, Aden, who have support needs. Sidney Chamorro is a disability advocate entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of North Star Pathways.

Through her work and her founding of Aden's Joy Concessions and More, she creates inclusive opportunities that empower individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities to build confidence, independence, and meaningful connections within their communities.

So Aden was a non-speaker. He is very agarious. He loves people. And he was sitting on the couch. And I'm like, this is enough.

You need to do something. Why don't you just make your own snacks. Sell things that Aden loves.

And then use those proceeds to help other individuals get jobs

to product with purpose. What does success feel like to Sidney? I think when-- [INAUDIBLE] It spans the goal.

Like a super high school, internet Elvis. [INAUDIBLE] Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. It's not over, I'll tell how we're-- The living your legacy podcast for those who live

to leave a legacy. [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] Oh, that is sensational. [INAUDIBLE]

It's not on the planet. You can live your dream. Welcome back everybody to another episode of the inside success podcast.

I'm your host, today, Jason Tyler.

And I'm joined by Sidney Chamaho. I rolled my hours on it. I had to make sure Sidney, you just finished filming your episode of Women in Power.

“How are we feeling now on the other side of filming?”

And what can people learn about you in your episode? Well, I'm actually among the other side now, because I was so nervous to do this. This is outside of my element. But there's really a painless process.

And I'm really glad that I did it. You got to film with Lauren, who's in the studio in here behind the cameras. But she's one of our best interviewers. She does such a great job.

And like getting people out of their comfort zone and out of the jitters. I'm sure we film everything in segments. I'm sure by segment two, you're like, I can kind of relax into it.

It was cold though, so we were shivering. Which is not usually the case here in Miami. It's not usually this cold. It's like some 40 today, which is outlandish, which where are you coming from?

I'm from Oregon, actually, Eugene Oregon. So it's not that cold. But I was cold this to you. It was freezing. Yeah, I brought the cold with me.

He'll really weekend. You could have left it. I'd have left it in Oregon. I know.

“So talk to me a little bit about your business.”

What was like the starting point? What's the why behind it? So the why is my son, Aidan? I have two children. My daughter Lauren, Lauren.

And Aidan was born with Down syndrome. And then we had him diagnosed with autism and then a praxia. And he's in my why. He was not able to be in a typical after school program.

Boys and girls club told us he was too much to handle. He because he had behaviors. And he's still at that time had potty accidents. And I was a very fortunate woman that in my community, I was allowed to go to our capital, Salem, Oregon.

And do a lot of advocacy and learn about advocacy, get a really good history about people with disabilities in our communities. It wasn't that long ago, maybe 30 years ago that people with intellectual disabilities like Aidan

would have been put in an institution. And if anybody meets Aidan, I mean, he is now going to be, he is a business man. He is very agarious. He loves people.

And for me to know that that would only been my option for him is to put him in an institution. It's just wrong. And so he's my why we get funding through Medicaid. And I learned how that process worked.

And I started my own agency. So that way Aidan could go out and community with a helper. He doesn't have to be with his mom all the time. He has a support worker. And so North Star Pathways was founded to provide caregivers

to individuals like my son Aidan who have support needs. It's a real life thing. He needs, like, you have glasses. He needs supports for making sure he doesn't choke on his food. And I can't, I promise you, I cannot see if I don't have music.

You see, they're needed. But some people think that that is a lot of excess waste. You know, when you hear politics and Medicaid. But we're using it for good. I use it to hire people so that people with intellectual

Like, going to the trampoline park, we built it.

“So we were doing things every day when he was in middle school.”

So Mondays was a activity, like the trampoline park. Then we would go swimming. We would go to the library. We would volunteer. We had a place called Next Step in our community.

They would allow us to dismantle the computers. How cool is that? We go to the movies a lot. And then it was just being part of the community. And then as Aidan grew, so did our business model.

We're now he's an adult. And we do a day support program where they can come and hang out.

As a parent, I always wanted to safe place for Aidan.

That I knew that he was safe. And so that's kind of what we've built at our day support program. But we sprinkle in a lot of vocational work. Sometimes it's volunteering. Sometimes we're trying to do different things.

Aidan's business came out of that wanting more for Aidan that he has a job, he has a business that we're building.

“In North Star, I created similar to the after school program.”

But we still go to the movies. It's a popular thing to go bowling, so they go bowling. And my staff, that's-- they get to do all these fun things with the clients. I'm really into entrepreneurship for my clients because if there's-- if something brings them joy and they put their heart into it,

I have a young woman who gets no money, not even SSI. She has nothing. So I encourage her. She loves to knit. I can't even knit.

She was making scrunchies, and then she was selling them to everybody,

so that way she had money. And it was just SSI. It is. And then I got a 3D printer for the crew. I'm not tech savvy, but I had one of my staff.

I said, those things scare me. I'm not eating a lot of things. It's my brother's super super into that stuff. So he builds PCs, and he's got his 3D printer. And I see that stuff in his room.

And I'm just like, that's too much technology in one space for me. I'm good with just my cameras. I'll be right. So the cool thing is, they all lack, they don't lack. I lacked the know-how to set it up and just the programming of it.

But they figured it out.

And then the young woman that did the scrunchies,

she gets to earn computer time, because she hordes computer time, and so we have to give doses. But I said, you know what? What if you were to look at fidgets? Because if it, people love fidgets.

And we can make them on a 3D printer. So she went, and maybe a list of 20 fidgets. And she starred the lens that had bets ratings. And then we uploaded it, so staff helped her upload it. And we've been making fidgets ever since then.

And so one of our goals is to have enough inventory that we can go and start selling them. So buy newer divergent people for newer divergent people. These fidgets are cool. I have some more, but like shapes of hearts. And but it's just she did this.

And she, if she would have been just sitting at home. Exactly. If I didn't have this opportunity. So we do a lot of, I'd like to prepare them. We do a lot of social skills.

Please, and thank you's how we treat personal space. Because if they do have a job in community, I want them to be successful. I don't want them to lose their job, because they were rude to somebody.

Or because they don't know the rules about personal space and getting into somebody's face or saying not nice things that are untrue. Because we know that people can lose jobs for something simple because they have a bias because this person has a disability.

So we work a lot a lot on social skills, personal interactions. And we frame it and like, well, you know, to be a really good employee and co-worker, you really can't be doing this. Let's kind of change the narrative. Let's style it back on, you know, the back hats and things of that nature.

Yes. Yeah. There's an interesting thing. When I do these podcasts with our guests, there's an interesting narrative sort of through line

that I noticed through a lot of different business owners, people who are successful within their own right. And it usually traces back to being able to identify a need within the community and then meeting, figuring out a way to meet that need.

And it builds over time, right? You identify new needs, you figure out how to meet those needs. That's unanimous among business owners, right? So you were able to identify like, hey, Aden doesn't have the level of support that I would want for him to have.

And I don't see it out there for us within this community. I'm just going to go and create it.

“And that's like the key, that's the cornerstone”

for business. I want to talk a little bit about A. Aden's business.

I'd love to talk about that. And B, if you notice right here, we have some snacks in the studio. I want to talk about that as well.

But first, let's talk about Aden's business.

What's Aden got going on? And what's he able to kind of learn from you in your dealings in business? Well, so Aden was a non-speaker, but he's a lover. And so he shakes everybody's hands.

He's very intuitive. So he knows if someone's good or bad. But we were living in a place that there wasn't a lot of community outings for him. We were there for mostly just to live across from the river.

And he was sitting on the couch. And I might, this is enough.

“You need to do something because it work is important.”

So we started his business with a self-pushing cart just with ships and snacks from Costco. And I advertised it a little bit because we were in a community. That had a little small Facebook community. Everyone knew Aden because we love to eat out.

And so he shake everybody's hand. And he go to the little community in store, shake everybody's hand. So he's very gregarious. So we posted about him selling. And I knew it was a hit because people were getting a bag of ships

for $2 and giving him $20. So he was making a lot of tips. And just the nature of Aden being Aden, people enjoy being around him because he's funny and laughs and gives good hand shakes.

When we moved back into town, I used some resources that I had as people that I know. And they had space where I could park our cart for Aden. And then we upgraded it and got an actual physical food cart. But it got cold.

“And so it was hard to run it in the winter.”

And Aden was getting bored because then we weren't getting as many customers because we were getting a lot of customers. And the ringing of the bell. And it was just a really fun experience. So that is kind of what led me to.

How do I build something that brings joy? But it's not my current business model, which is like a one to one with one to many. And kind of spent about a year drawing different things out. And then one day I just was meditating, praying.

And it's like, well, why don't you just make your own snack, sell snacks, sell things that Aden loves. So I worked with my business coach. And we came up with-- I'm going to show the battle back here.

And it's so cute. Has Aden's little face on it. And it's a product with purpose. And it's just snacks in a smile. And just when you read about him--

and these are his things that he likes. They're trail mix. He loves M&Ms.

He will never share those.

And then we added in-- I need a will.

“We added in a plantain chip and then a chocolate cover pretzel.”

Because he likes to mix his snack. So it just was like, why not make our own and sell it. And then use those proceeds to help other individuals get jobs. Because I have plenty of clients in my day program who are so capable of working.

I get my funding through Medicaid. I can't pay them because I'm getting my support dollars from Medicaid. So these rules are just-- There's a lot of red tape.

Yes. So to speak, yeah. And I'm creative enough that I can get around it sometimes. But there are very hard, finite rules with Medicaid about those funding different projects.

I imagine that because the ethos of your business has its foundations in advocacy, right? I imagine that in a perfect world, we would have as little red tape around advocacy and philanthropic ventures.

I don't think we should be red taping those kinds of things, versus, you know, there's so many other ways that funds are mismanaged and things are wrong. Things are done wrong with it. And we could have a conversation about that forever.

But I want to jump too much into it. But just talking to me a little bit about your ethos around advocacy and standing up for people who might not be able to stand up for themselves. My role in advocacy has changed over the years.

I used to think, go speak to my legislators and my senators and get to their town halls and get my name known.

That doesn't always work.

But getting on work committees where you get to help make decisions, I sat on a board for their Oregon College Savings Program that's the Abel account.

because it's a Savings Program that, if you receive

“SSI, you're not allowed to have more than $2,000 at any one time.”

That's enough, I mean, that's not a lot for people. So the Abel account allows people with disabilities to put money into that account and it doesn't affect SSI. So for me, I could use that role and speak to families that this Abel account is a really good tool.

It's free, basically. It's not like a special needs account where you have to have a lawyer. So I use things that as a platform for me to speak to

when funding would get cut, it was always like stressful

to go up and like share stories, like horrific stories because this is why we need the support. I would rather go and say how wonderful it is and how it has really helped. But they always want to hear the minuses.

- The negatives, the negatives. The other, I guess my advocacy is now focused on everybody can work, everybody can work. And it doesn't have to be 40 hours. It could just be an hour a week,

“but you're legitimately working and getting a paycheck.”

And so that's kind of always been my passion. Even when I started North Star, almost 11 years ago, the fundamental of like the social dynamic and learning social skills volunteering is that I wanted our atons of the world to be ready for a job.

They're ready that just nobody will hire them

because for various reasons. And some of it is some of my clients, they lack proper hygiene. And so their caregiver helps make sure that they're washing their hands.

Or if they don't do a proper sneeze during cold season, like helping them make sure that they do wash their hands that there's a tissue handy. But it is hard. It's harder to find a community-based job

than it is for me to create one. So for me to be able to create jobs through Aiden's joy, his snack line, we'll have warehouse team, we'll have sales team. I can just give a job.

- And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is identifying a need and saying, "You know what, I can just make it myself." - Yeah. - It's often, oftentimes, just doing it yourself,

it's a lot easier, which, you know, no man is an island, but I stand on that belief that most of the times, if I identify a systemic problem within my general community, I'm better off just identifying it and addressing that problem myself

than trying to go through the whole channel of, "Oh, I have to speak to legislators and get legislation written around this." Like, it makes more sense to be action forward as a community member than it is to try to write laws

and get your way around that way. - Well, that's why with Aiden's joy, it's not, I'm not dependent on government funding for one. I'm going with a purpose, people want to buy snacks. So it's a double win, though, because they're getting something,

and it's very, it's not cheap, it's tasty, and it's a joyful thing. And then they know that their dollar is going somewhere, it's going to really impact a person. But yeah, getting around government funding,

Medicaid funding, waiting for an investor even. Like, I really wanted to find things that would self sustain myself, because waiting for someone to give me money

is not always easy or fun.

- It's almost never, it's almost never fun. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask one final question, what is sort of your marker for success? What does success feel like to city?

“- Gosh, I think there's a lot of things.”

For me, as a business woman, it's making payroll. You know, making sure every two weeks that those checks, you know, I have had a check balance, and it did not feel good. For me, success means that I'm making payroll.

It means spending very little on advertising, because the nature of North Star Pathways, it's a very one-to-one business. It's not a business, that's easy to scale. But I think when you see doors for like Adon's joy,

doors just opened up naturally for me. Like, I'm starting a product. Don't have any experience in that, and then just how it's just flowing, like, because it's supposed to be.

- That's that green light that you get from the universe, like, "Hey, you're doing the right thing. "I'm gonna open these doors for you." - Right. - Go right ahead. And that's, I mean, I love that

in seeing different business owners stories, like even in my own story, just continuously get it like, as soon as I picked a camera up, I was just green light after green light after green light, and I was like, "Okay, this is for sure

"with the universe wants me to be doing it,

For everybody that's still watching at this point, "Hey, I wanna make sure that you guys "check out Sydney's episode of Women in Power."

That's first and foremost,

make sure you guys stick around to check that out, but for the viewers that are still watching at this point, where can they find you online, where can they follow, where can they donate,

“what's your dot coms, your Instagram, all the things?”

- He would ask me this, this is like, like, one thing that I not great at in my social media spaces,

but first and foremost, Aiden'sjoy.com,

it's up and running now, there's one thing that's still not working as the email list, but I think you can now order product. You have to buy three at a time because of shipping and it's expensive.

“We're gonna be in a convenient store in Oregon.”

It's called Space Age Convenient Stores. Aiden has, oh, I'm gonna get it wrong. I think his TikTok is Aiden's joy. I think I changed it to that. - And just a note for the editors,

we'll get all of this info to you guys, so we can just put it in a little title bar down at the bottom as well.

“- Yeah, so I really am pushing Aiden's joy more”

than North Star because more people can have access to the Aiden's joy than what North Star does,

but you can always Google Sydney Chamaro

and different things might pop up like my website for North Star Pathways to learn more about that. But Aiden'sjoy.com is, if you want some great snacks that's the place to go. - And you guys heard it here first.

So with that said, make sure you guys go and check out Aiden'sjoy.com as well as checking out Sydney's episode of Women in Power. Again, I'm your host Jason Tyler, this has been another episode of Inside Success TV,

and I will see you guys in the next one. (upbeat music)