Priceless Partnership: Open Arms Care

The Why behind IT

Why do we do what we do? It’s a question every business should ask. Here at Claris, we exist to help organizations succeed by making IT work. By removing the burden of IT, we exist to free up our customers so they can fulfill their mission even better. In the day-to-day of any job, though, it can be easy to forget the broader reason for why your company exists. Recently, however, we received a fantastic reminder of why we do what we do here at Claris which came in the form of a gift from one of our partners.

Open Arms Care (OAC), a Nashville non-profit that helps people with physical and mental disabilities, recently signed on with us. They have several of offices with hundreds of employees across Tennessee, and their mission is to support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in reaching their maximum potential and enabling them to lead dignified and meaningful lives. IT is a critical factor in enabling Open Arms Care to fulfill that mission.

One of the services they provide to their clients is called the Flying Brushes Program, in which their clients can take advantage of a technology known as Artistic Realization Technologies (ART). Using this technology, “People who may have spent years with little control over what occurred around them are suddenly directing paint by tossing, flinging, pouring or brushing on canvases. Personalities explode on the surface of the work and finished pieces reveal a true artistic style they can call their own.”

Open Arms Care commissioned client-artist Steven Kirby to create a painting to express their gratitude to Claris for serving their IT needs. With the ART technology, Steven used a headband equipped with a laser pointer and tracker and the help of a trained assistant to make his creative vision come to life. Some of the staff along with the artist came to our recent All Hands meeting to unveil the painting. We were in awe. The OAC staff related Steven’s vision in that the dots represents company’s different locations, devices and people, and the orange lines represent how Claris helps them communicate and stay unified between them.

The painting was a profoundly meaningful gift, and receiving it was one of the most powerful things we have experienced at Claris. Equally powerful was getting to see our mission played out in real life. Using technology to enable OAC’s mission of helping people live dignified and meaningful lives is what it’s all about.

It’s our goal to help our partners succeed by making IT work. And this visit and gift from Open Arms Care was a wonderful reminder of why we do what we do.

If you would like to learn more about Open Arms Care just visit http://openarmscare.org.

To purchase something from OAC’s Flying Brushes program, you can follow their store on Etsy by clicking here.

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