Boonville’s Boonslick Industries celebrated a milestone birthday this month: 50 years of giving people with disabilities a paycheck, a purpose, and a place to belong.
The nonprofit marked the occasion with a reception in Boonville on August 21, drawing current and former staff, board members, and supporters to look back on a half-century of work that started small and grew into one of Cooper County’s steadiest employers of people with disabilities.
Boonslick Industries opened its doors on December 13, 1976, inside the old Archway Cookie Factory in downtown Boonville, created to provide jobs for 17 men and women with disabilities who otherwise had few employment options in the area. Today the organization employs more than 50 people with disabilities out of its facility at 1620 W. Ashley Road, a home it’s occupied since 1983.
The work itself has grown well beyond that first factory floor. Boonslick Industries now runs a full recycling operation — balers, a metal densifier, sort lines — that collects material from roughly 250 area businesses and more than 25 school districts spread across seven counties. Crews from the organization have also kept the Interstate 70 rest areas near Boonville clean year-round for more than two decades, a contract that’s run 365 days a year for over 20 years straight. The nonprofit also operates the Savvy Seconds resale store and runs community recycling drop-off points in six area towns.
Boonslick Industries operates under the umbrella of Unlimited Opportunities, Inc., formed in 1991, and keeps regular hours Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Fifty years in, the organization’s mission hasn’t changed much from that first day in the cookie factory: steady work, and the dignity that comes with it, for neighbors who might not find it elsewhere.
Boonslick Industries can be reached at (660) 882-5576 or dakota.melkersman@uoi.org.
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