GET Celebrates Its One-Year Anniversary this Friday

A typical weekday morning for Kevin Eikov is to first walk his wife to the Wynnewood Train Station and then walk several blocks to the GET Included Cafe at 246 Haverford Road in Narberth. There, he will give his order for an Americano to an employee at the cash register. Most likely, the employee would have a disability.

GET’s mission is to hire people with disabilities. Some of them have physical and/or mental challenges, ranging from being on the Autism Spectrum, having Down Syndrome, from being legally blind to dealing with social anxiety and seizures.

“I was very impressed that GET hired those individuals,” said Eikov. “I truly believed in that philosophy.”

Eikov’s wife is a pediatric nurse who works with patients who have developmental disorders. He was also a pediatric nurse until he became disabled as a result of serving in Desert Storm in 1991.

In addition to being a loyal customer, Eikov volunteers at GET. He built GET’s partition, fixed their sinks; he does whatever needs to be done there. Some of the staff have referred to him as the “face of the place.”

“GET spoke to my heart and I just wanted to be a part of it,” said Eikov.

This Valentines’ Day, will be GET’s one-year anniversary.

GET Owner/Founder Brooke Goodspeed launched wanted to create a space where people with all different types of disabilities could feel part of the community instead of feeling out of place and awkward. She understood too well this need because her nine-year-old non-verbal son Oliver has Down Syndrome. She said that at playgrounds people used to stare at him, which made him uncomfortable.

“A year ago, we started with about six employees,” said Goodspeed. “Now we have about 20. We also have a 100 percent retention rate.”

GET employee Jonathan Schwarz of Narberth, who has been with GET since its 2015 inception when it was only a community center said that this is the best job he ever had.

At GET he is not subjected to taunts and name-calling as he had been at his previous job. Schwarz has seizures and Hydrocephalus, a condition in which an accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) occurs within the brain, but that has not stopped him from performing his duties at GET.

According to GET Manager Victoria Goins, Schwarz began as a volunteer in 2015 where he was so active and reliable that she and Goodspeed hired him to work at the cafe.

“I like it here,” said Schwarz.

Goodspeed remembered how excited she and the GET staff were at the cafe’s grand opening. Her husband Jon Goodspeed added:

“Opening day was exciting and daunting; it was definitely a new challenge. For my wife, her background being in health and nurse care, for me, my background being in business and manufacturing, the coffee shop was entirely new to us. It was a tough challenge.” He elaborated that a key reason he likes GET is that it always makes him happy.

“All I need to do is come in here, see these employees, see what we have created,” he said. “Every day I come in here to get my cup of coffee. It’s the first thing I do, even if I’m late for work. It gives me the right perspective, a jolt of energy. We get lost with deadlines, emails, all these things. To be able to come here, see a place where people come together where it’s all about a mission and not about any individual, everyone working together and helping - I feel like this is what every place should look like. I hope that we play a small part in creating that future.”

For more information about GET, log onto Getincluded.org