Our Core Values
Products Made with a Passion for Quality Handmade Goods;
An Appreciation of Simple Beauty;
A Love of Minnesota’s North Shore;
And the Crazy Idea that People with Disabilities Should Enjoy Meaningful Work.
A Vocation For All
Karl was born into a family that cares a lot about him, and cares a lot about the idea of vocation.
Vocation is this notion that we all have gifts and those gifts matter; we are all part of a community and that community matters; and where these elements overlap is where we claim and share what we’ve got with those who could use a dose of it.
Ideally, a person enjoys meaningful work, and then in one way or another the community thanks them for the work, because the community thinks that the work is meaningful too.
Sometimes, though (in fact way too often) what should be a vocation is merely a job: a task that gives us an income but no fulfillment. Work becomes a means to an end rather than a means to meaning.
All too frequently, people with disabilities, and especially significant disabilities, run a risk of landing in jobs rather than vocations.
Karl’s Wheelhouse was born because Karl has a disability.
In 2004, an accident occurred. Karl’s papa died, and Karl suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Karl has some challenges to be sure: his speech is thick, his response time is slow, his gross and fine motor skills are not as finessed as they could be, and developmentally, Karl is far younger than his years.
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a vocation.
Karl’s vocation is to spread joy and hope.
A few years back, we were told that joy and hope aren’t in the wheelhouse of the systems set up to help people like Karl.
Turns out that people with disabilities don’t only have challenges.
They offer challenges to systems designed for people not like them.
Why Karl's Wheelhouse?
So, to rise to the challenge, we created Karl’s Wheelhouse.
Here, on an average day, Karl might help to initiate the laser printer (and keep careful watch on it to make sure nothing catches fire!), or hold and hand over the candle molds, buff etched candle tins, select the perfect pinecones, make wreaths, package the orders, and happily deliver what he’s made to local addresses.
And also choose the soundtrack of the day, of course.
Through the benefits in living in a state like Minnesota, we have received expert support in assistive technology for the workplace. Thanks to new tech, like switches, levers, buttons, and other augmentations, Karl can help out in ways that would otherwise be far more difficult.
We laugh, we are patient, we see that the journey is the destination, we make mistakes, and both literally and figuratively, we roll with it.
About Us
David Willis
In 2021, after a long career in Federal Government service, David retired.
In 2023, despite and to spite a traumatic brain injury, Karl completed school.
The timing could have been any better for each of them to do something new, and something new together.
David’s last pre-retirement gig was serving as a U.S. diplomat; now his primary diplomatic task is how to suggest to Anna a better way to load the dishwasher.
That laudable career notwithstanding, David has always been an artist at heart (not to mention a wordsmith, which is how he won Anna’s heart!).
Working in the Shop allows David to imagine a new creation, sketch it out, and then call the thing into being. Anna teases him that they’d have a lot more firewood for their winter store if David didn’t regularly lift up a log in their shed and say to it, “Well, would you rather keep us warm, or become something new?”
David loves creating, but more than even that, he loves Karl, which in its own right has also managed to create something entirely new: the Wheelhouse.
Karl Madsen
Karl has spent his last decades being seen as a boy with a TBI, but he is so much more than that.
Perhaps most of all, Karl is tangible joy and regular mischief. We affectionately call him “Norm,” because just like the character in Cheers, whenever he rolls into a public space, at least one person happily hollers out his name: “Karl!” (It’s especially adorable during Communion at church.)
Karl has challenges, to be sure, ones that are quite overt.
The offerings he uniquely brings to the table aren’t often valued by the common economic metrics of the world.
But if you’ve encountered Karl at all, you know that it would be an unspeakable shame to have the world miss out on Karl’s manifest and manifold gifts.
And so we created Karl’s Wheelhouse.
Here, Karl—and, we hope, eventually people with a range of disabilities—can have a hand at creating something of beauty, of function, of whimsy, of good work.
The physical product is, frankly, less important to us than is this: through the Wheelhouse, Karl participates in something worthy of his time, the production of which affirms in yet another way that he is of profound worth.
Of course, he doesn’t need the Wheelhouse to know that.
The Wheelhouse
Here at the Wheelhouse, we value the notion of vocation, this idea that we all have gifts, that the world is in need of our unique gifts, and that therein one’s vocation be found.
We are so grateful for and dependent on the wonderful network of people who have found their vocation at Trillium Works.
Trillium Works! sends people dedicated to supporting people with disabilities in their places of employment, so each week, from about 9:00-1:00, we welcome Destiny, or Haeli, or Mariaha, or any number of other amazing people to help Karl do his thing.
When you buy something from Karl’s Wheelhouse, then, you’ll buy something which Karl has helped to produce, and which therefore have given him a sense of pride, and you’ll be affirming the vocation of people who wake up every morning just to help someone be the fullest that they can be.
“I made this!” he’ll say, as he puts an etching, a candle, a magnet in a box.
And we’ll say, “Yes you did, sweet man. You made this, and you also made the world a better place.”
So through the Workshop and the Wheelhouse, you’ll find David’s creativity, Karl’s capacity to make not just things but to make joy, and you’ll find their love for one another alive and infused into everything they do.