A Vermont staffing agency that helped find jobs for people in addiction recovery went out of business last month despite a recent regional expansion.
Working Fields, founded in 2017, placed more than 3,000 people in temporary and permanent positions at employers across Vermont and neighboring states before announcing its closure in June.
The for-profit, socially conscious company was structured like other staffing agencies but also offered services such as peer coaching and transportation to jobsites for its clients: job seekers who face barriers to employment. The business of second chances was personal for founder Mickey Wiles, a former Ben & Jerry’s executive who spent two years in prison in the mid-2000s for embezzling from the ice cream company. Wiles is in long-term addiction recovery himself.
“It’s devastating, quite honestly, that we weren’t able to keep this going.” Mickey Wiles
Working Fields’ demise could make it harder for others who are in recovery or have criminal convictions to get back on their feet.
“It’s devastating, quite honestly, that we weren’t able to keep this going,” Wiles said.
From the outside, Working Fields appeared to be growing. A pandemic-induced labor shortage created new opportunities for would-be employees who might otherwise have had their résumés passed over; Working Fields boosted its job placements from about 250 in 2021 to 375 in 2023, according to publicly available company reports. The company announced in July 2024 that it had raised $2 million from 26 investors, including the Vermont Community Foundation and the Fund at Hula. That money helped Working Fields open small offices in New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts, including in Greenfield, Mass., where the company bought out a local staffing agency.
Regional growth, Wiles said in a recent interview about the closure, was crucial to Working Fields’ plan to become financially viable. Staffing agencies, including Working Fields, make money by charging a fee to employers. As such, they generally rely on scale to turn a profit, especially if they invest in additional supportive services for job-seeking clients.
Working Fields relied on its $2 million of new investment to bankroll its expansion. The company also closed offices in Rutland and Springfield in 2023 in favor of “metro regions” in other New England states that had “a denser network of employers and community partners,” according to company documents.
But new clients in those other markets didn’t come quickly enough. The recruiting environment became somewhat less favorable, and Working Fields couldn’t find new capital, Wiles said. CEO Chelsea Bardot Lewis stepped down last fall as part of a last-ditch plan to shrink operations back to Working Fields’ home base in Chittenden County. It didn’t work.
“We, I think, overestimated how quickly we would be able to grow in markets outside of Vermont,” said Bardot Lewis, now the executive director of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, “and probably underestimated the strength of the support we had gotten in Vermont.”
Working Fields worked with as many as 75 employers at a time across numerous industries. Job seekers typically began as temps but had a chance to move into permanent positions at the host firms.
One of its long-standing clients, Casella, placed workers at its recycling facility in Williston. Temps started on the sorting line, where they picked through recyclables as the items moved from trucks onto a conveyor belt. “Anybody who shows interest, the sky is the limit,” manager Suad Caus said. Several Working Fields clients later became permanent Casella employees, Caus said.
The staffing agency would drive several employees to the recycling facility in a van when they otherwise didn’t have a ride, according to Caus. Its staff also provided someone to talk to whenever an employee was struggling or needed support.
“They were always there for them,” Caus said of Working Fields.
Company staff were a regular presence at the COTS Daystation in Burlington, offering help to many of the unhoused people who fill city shelters, according to COTS executive director Jonathan Farrell. Roughly three-quarters of COTS’ adult shelter residents are employed in some capacity but lack permanent housing, he noted.
Working Fields’ efforts were not always successful. Even as it increased job placements, fewer temporary employees moved into permanent positions at those firms in 2023, according to a company report. The University of Vermont Health Network partnered with Working Fields but at times struggled to place some clients in health care roles, spokesperson Annie Mackin said.
The Vermont Department of Corrections launched a $150,000 pilot program with Working Fields in 2024 intended to help people find work as they completed their prison terms. The pilot, funded by a federal grant, expired in April, and the department didn’t have money to extend it, spokesperson Haley Sommer said. She said the department is still evaluating the program’s effectiveness.
Before closing its doors, Working Fields arranged for its existing clients to continue to receive support. It enlisted First Step Staffing, an Atlanta-based nonprofit agency, to assume case management for Working Fields clients. From an employer’s perspective, Casella’s Caus said of the transition, “we didn’t really even skip a beat.”
Wiles and Bardot Lewis still believe the Working Fields model could be successful. But it would likely need more taxpayer or philanthropic support to do so, they said.
The state, meanwhile, is investing in similar work. HireAbility, a state-run vocational support program for people with disabilities, started a pilot project aimed at people in recovery a few years ago, with employment teams in Burlington and Newport.
Unlike Working Fields, HireAbility isn’t a temp agency. It relies on public funding, rather than employer fees, for its work. But the program offers a range of assistance that extends beyond what a temp agency would provide. HireAbility can pay for job training or some college coursework and arrange work experiences that prepare clients for longer-term employment, field services manager Hibbard Doe said. Counselors who frequent recovery centers help clients create employment plans that are tailored to their career goals.
The Burlington program has placed 46 people in jobs. State lawmakers in June approved $850,000 for the project using money Vermont received from legal settlements with opioid drug manufacturers and distributors. The cash will enable HireAbility to maintain the Newport office, add staff to the Burlington one, and deploy new teams in Rutland and Bennington.
The settlement money, however, only covers about one year of operations; HireAbility, a division of the Vermont Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living, will need to find more cash to continue the work beyond next year.
Daniel Franklin, executive director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health & Addiction Recovery, said services such as Working Fields and HireAbility were sides of a complex “Rubik’s cube” of support. His organization is setting up a certification program for businesses that seek to become “recovery-friendly workplaces.”
New Hampshire has a similar, more robust initiative that’s been backed by its governor.
In Vermont, the loss of Working Fields is merely the latest in a string of discouraging developments, Franklin said. The addiction field has also seen service cuts to residential treatment and outpatient care.
“We need to act boldly to support one another at every level,” he said.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Hiring Freeze | Working Fields, which helped find jobs for people with barriers to employment, shuts down”
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2025.
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