business in the cafe. It also funds a popular paycheck-incentive program. Staff members are drug-tested each week, and for every clean test, they earn $100. If they attend all their classes, they earn $25 on top of that. And if they’re doing satisfactory work, they earn another $25. So there’s opportunity for $150 on top of a standard weekly paycheck, a fact assistant manager Chelan Thissell-Armstrong (whose great-grandfather once ran a market in the same building) has had to impress on one struggling employee. “I told him, ‘Man, have you considered that we will virtually pay you to be sober? And I know you like money,’” Thissell-Armstrong says. By design, Fresh Start gives employees a few more second chances than other employers might. Thissell-Armstrong is a big believer in second chances. The youngest of three children, she was home-schooled in Burns until around third grade, when she says she became too much for her mother. “I just became like a feral child.” At 12 years old, someone introduced her to hard drugs. Sheltered and from a small town, she assumed this was normal. “I was about the same age as my daughter is now, which seems crazy to me — to look at my daughter and think that anybody would do drugs with her,” she says. Thissell-Armstrong struggled with addiction for 25 years until she noticed friends in her social circle were asked to stay out of their adult children’s lives and not attend major Assistant manager Chelan Thissell-Armstrong has been sober for two years and was recently certified as an addiction-recovery mentor. Symmetry Care’s main offices A crew works on the remodeling of Symmetry Care’s sober fourplex. 30
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