As a teenager growing up in Seattle, Sheryl Nelson looked forward to volunteering at her local hospital.

"When they asked me what I wanted to do," Nelson says, "I told them I wanted to talk to people and bring flowers."

Instead, Nelson, blind since birth, spent each of her three-hour shifts doing menial work alone in the hospital’s basement.

"Nobody knew what to do with me," says Nelson, 57. "That was typical for the times."

Nelson was all too accustomed to being overlooked and underestimated, to bucking against the restrictions imposed on her by other people’s low expectations and unfounded fears.

At age 6 she was placed in a boarding school for the blind; she would remain there for more than a decade.

"I felt like I was not a part of the world," Nelson says. "I felt that if I didn’t leave, I’d end up doing nothing. I didn’t know what that actually meant, but it scared me."

Nelson persuaded her parents to let her transfer to a public school for her final two years of high school. But being in the sighted world made Nelson painfully aware of how isolated she had been. In her first month of school, she was driven to distraction by the strange scraping and tapping noises her teachers made. She had never been in a classroom with a chalkboard before.

Nelson would graduate from high school and earn a degree in recreation from the University of Washington.

At 23 she moved to Hawaii. After a few employment ups and downs, she founded her own company, Open Access, to help hotels, restaurants and government agencies improve their attitudes and policies toward disabled people. In 2006 she was hired as executive director of the Statewide Independent Living Council.

Despite her success, Nelson says she still longed to make a real connection with people.

Then, two years ago, coffee roaster Kamaka Hoo­pai called Nelson with an intriguing and admittedly desperate proposition.

Nelson had met Hoo­pai a few years earlier when she worked with his boss, Koko Crater Coffee Roasters owner Karen Ertell, to develop new coffee blends.

When Ertell was murdered by a teenage neighbor in 2007, Hoo­pai helped to keep the business going as it made the transition from Ertell’s estate to a large corporation. Now the business was in imminent danger of closing, and Hoo­pai wanted to know whether Nelson would consider being the new owner.

"My first thought was he was calling because he felt I could do it," she said. "I thought, ‘I don’t get these kinds of phone calls!’ It was refreshing."

Today, Nelson is the proud owner of a small but thriving business that supplies coffee to cafes and restaurants around the state.

"I’d like to eventually open a shop where people could come and sit and have coffee," she says. "Even after all these years, all I really want to do is talk to people and bring flowers. I guess that could be my way of doing that."

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Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.