This coffee shop employs people with Disabilities - Parents of the Year

Bitty and Beau's Coffee Shop is a business that is challenging the misunderstood realities of a employing people with developmental disabilities.

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By the early 1990s, Ben Wright had some early acting successes under his belt. He’d appeared in a TV movie, played Jack in the first Broadway production of Into the Woods, and smoked Cuban cigars with Tom Cruise while filming a small role in Born on the 4th of July. Wright was not, however, particularly pleased with himself or his career. He remembers sitting in a movie trailer and, rather than meditating on his successes or plotting a way forward, feeling generally apathetic about show business.

“I was reading a book and thinking, ‘This is so boring,’” he recalls. “I didn’t find any enjoyment in it.”

Wright and his wife, Amy, who was also a working actor, decided to try something new and moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. They started a family and Ben began working as a financial advisor. They had two daughters, Emma Grace and Lillie. Then, in 2004, the couple gave birth to a son, Benjamin Jr., or Beau, with Down Syndrome; five years later, their daughter Jane, nicknamed Bitty, was born with the condition, too. The Wrights had raised two developmentally normal teenage daughters without having to wonder whether or not they would have the opportunity to be independent, but they quickly came to understand that Beau and Bitty faced different odds. Only 17.5 percent of American adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities have jobs. It’s an unusually low number in the developed world and it galvanized Ben and Amy; they wanted to create new opportunities.

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