Three Foundry Row employers, including a legacy manufacturer and a biotech firm, have formalized a referral partnership with Wayfinder Recovery Services, giving managers a direct path to get employees into treatment.
Wayfinder Recovery Services has signed formal referral agreements with three Foundry Row employers, including Bellwater Turbine Works and Kestrel Biologics, creating a structured pathway for managers to connect employees struggling with addiction to treatment without going through a hospital emergency room or the courts first. Executive Director Donna Wysocki said the partnership, which takes effect next month, grew out of informal calls her organization had fielded for more than a year.
“We started getting calls from managers asking how to point somebody toward help instead of just quietly firing them,” Wysocki said. “This formalizes that, so it isn’t dependent on whether a particular manager happens to know our phone number.”
From informal calls to a written agreement
Under the agreement, participating employers designate a trained point of contact, typically in human resources, who can refer an employee directly to a same-week intake appointment at Wayfinder rather than a standard waitlist slot. The employee’s participation remains voluntary and confidential, with no information shared back to the employer beyond confirmation that the referral was received, according to terms of the partnership Wysocki described to the Times.
Priya Chandran, human resources director at Bellwater Turbine Works, said the manufacturer has struggled for years with how to handle employees whose performance or attendance suggested a substance-use problem, particularly on its production floor where safety is a constant concern. “We used to have exactly two options: look the other way until something went wrong, or terminate someone the moment we suspected an issue,” Chandran said. “Neither of those felt right, and neither of those actually helped anybody.”
We used to have exactly two options: look the other way until something went wrong, or terminate someone the moment we suspected an issue. Neither of those felt right, and neither of those actually helped anybody.
Priya Chandran, Human Resources Director, Bellwater Turbine Works
A tight labor market changes the calculation
Wysocki said the shift is partly practical: Foundry Row employers, from legacy manufacturers to biotech firms competing for skilled workers, are increasingly reluctant to lose trained staff over an issue that treatment could resolve. “We’re getting calls now from managers asking how to keep an employee instead of replace one,” Wysocki said. “That’s not something I would have predicted five years ago, but a tight labor market changes what companies are willing to invest in.”
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, said she helped broker introductions between Wayfinder and several employers after hearing similar concerns raised at the chamber’s quarterly meetings between Foundry Row biotech firms and workforce-training providers. “Those meetings started as a conversation about hiring pipelines,” Nakamura said. “It didn’t take long before employers started asking a related question: what do we do about the workers we already have who are struggling?”
Nakamura said she expects additional Foundry Row employers to join the partnership within the next year, though she declined to name which companies were in discussions. “Nobody wants to be the first one publicly associated with this,” she said. “But once one or two names got comfortable being public about it, others started asking how to join.”
Not every employer is on board
Not all Foundry Row businesses have embraced the model. A manager at a smaller manufacturing subcontractor, who spoke on condition his company not be named because he was not authorized to discuss personnel policy publicly, said his employer remains wary of any arrangement that could be seen as encouraging employees to disclose substance-use issues. “Our insurance carrier asks questions when this comes up,” he said. “I understand the intent, but from where I sit, formalizing it creates paperwork and liability questions nobody has fully answered for us yet.”
Wysocki acknowledged the liability question has come up in her conversations with prospective employer partners and said Wayfinder has worked with an attorney to draft language clarifying that referrals do not create any disability-disclosure obligation for the employer. “I’d rather spend the time now getting the legal language right than have an employer back out six months in because something wasn’t clear,” she said.
Early cases already underway
Chandran said Bellwater Turbine Works has already referred two employees under an informal version of the arrangement in the weeks before the formal agreement takes effect, both of whom remain employed and are receiving treatment through Wayfinder. She declined to share further detail, citing confidentiality, but said the outcomes so far have reinforced the company’s decision to formalize the partnership.
“I can’t tell you their names or their stories,” Chandran said. “What I can tell you is that neither of those two people would still be on our production floor under our old approach, and I think that says something.”
Wysocki said Wayfinder plans to track retention and treatment-completion rates among employer-referred clients separately from its other intake channels, hoping the data will help persuade additional companies to join. “If I can show an employer that this actually keeps trained workers on the job instead of losing them, that’s a much easier conversation than asking them to do it purely out of goodwill,” she said.