Meeting held at St. Joseph Cathedral. In attendance: Kate McNichols-San Jose First, Nancy Noel-Alpha Omega CSA, Art Taylor-San Jose Family Shelter, Courtney Bober (Chair)-San Jose Cathedral Foundation
Kate spoke about her Job Readiness Program, which is now housed at Inn Vision's Montgomery Street Inn. Orientations are held every Monday at 9:00 a.m. They have good volunteer support, including individuals from the business community that teach skills to job seekers to help them to "stand out, not be weeded out." Kate shared a whopping 70% success rate with her program participants finding employment.
Resumes, specifically targed resumes and targeted cover letters, were a major discussion point at this meeting. Due to the fact that many of our clients lack these specific documents which could be a barrier to their finding and obtaining successful employment. Nancy spoke of finding time in her busy schedule to write resumes for some of her program participants because they needed attention. She discussed how she wrote resumes for her clients in terms of "relevant experience" and "other experience" which may be the barrier for her program participants to find targeted work with their experience, background, and transferrable skills.
We discussed the dismal state we find ourselves in, both as committee members and individuals trying to assist our program participants on their search to find employment. Since our economy is in such disarray in Silicon Valley, we revisited the topic of using other agencies among ourselves to draw up and host volunteer positions and opportunities for our clients so that they could have a reference and experience to account for their time between employment. Using Ky Le's (EHC) previous volunteer description as our template we decided hat we would take that information back to our agencies and see if it were possible to devise this plan in and among our organizations.
We discussed, as per Art's experience, establishing relationships with some local companies or organizations to provide temporary positions for our clients, for possible permanent work or just a reference at the end of thier stint with the company to use for further employment. Art shared that the SJ Family Shelter has developed such a program with a company to assist clients. We discussed that this may be more plausible for the people that we work with because they are in need of an income and volunteer experience does not pay the bills.
As part of our ongoing efforts to assist our clients to the best of our ability, we thought that inviting a temporary agency to speak to our group about what employers are looking for in employees these days would be helpful. Along these lines, we also discussed inviting a number of hiring managers, HR representatives, and others that do the interviewing and hiring in this valley for some corporations and companies, that some of us may have contacts with, to come to speak to our groups and share with us what employers are looking for in an employee. We thought that this might be a good training for us to do around March 2004, so that we may be more knowledgeable and able to assist our clients more effectively to find employment. We all discussed that we would put our feelers out among our own organizations to see who's willing and able to do such an event.
We took a look at the 5-year plan, and decided that some of the areas were no longer applicable, due to our waning economy at this present time. So, we decided that we needed to start back at square one, namely pre-employment services, and those that deal with the barriers present to finding employment. It was discussed that a master list is essential (ie. who's doing what and where, details, etc.) Courtney will revise the previous list and distribute the most current services available, this will be useful for our clients and program staff as well. This list will be available to be distributed in the new year.
Since only 4 people were present at this meeting and at one time we had numberous individuals in attendance, we would like to recruit more members and reenlist old members. We feel that this committee is essential to the success and survival of our clients. Since there is a Shelter Provider Network (SPN) meeting tomorrow, December 10, 2003, we thought that to be a good opportunity to put the bug in that meeting's attendees ears to send at least one representative from their programs to the Jobs & Income Committee Meetings as well, in order to more comprehensively serve our population.
Our next meeting will be held at San Jose First, 24 N. 5th Street (parking around back-entrance on 6th St.) Tuesday, January 20, 2004, from 1:30-3:00 p.m. We hope to see lots of new and old faces there!! **There has been a correction, our meeting has been changed to a brown-bag lunch meeting and has been pushed up to 11:30 a.m., same date, same place** |