Called to Action: Agency's job is helping the jobless ... and business is booming

By RICHARD GAINES, Gloucester Daily Times, page one, December 31, 2002

Cape Ann's oldest and largest charitable non-profit corporation is also one of its largest employers, with more than 100 people working to help people make the daunting climb up the ladder of self-sufficiency.

Action, Inc., created in 1965 as a product of the Great Society, is in the business of helping people who, in a manner of speaking, are out of business. It's market is rock-solid, as the unemployment figures, announced each month, document.

The November number for Gloucester was 6.4 percent, meaning 1,052 potential workers were not working. Rockport (3.8 percent), Essex (2.9) and Manchester-by-the-Sea (3.4) added another 318 to the Cape Ann unemployment rolls.

While the true number of potential workers is higher, perhaps much higher, since the official count does not include many chronically unemployed who have given up reporting their status, the Cape-wide total of 1,370 is the only available measure of the inevitable inefficiency in the free market system.

To serve this market, Action, Inc. has created a product, an employment and training course identical in form to the courses offered by schools and colleges and at least as challenging.

Ronna Resnick manages Action, Inc.'s employment and training program, which in 2002 served 474 clients, and helped 141 find jobs.

"These were moderate- to low-income folks who need jobs or better jobs and want education" to enable them to bootstrap themselves upward, she says.

David Hunter, 52, is an example. He was one of 73 employees at the LePage's glue factory in West Gloucester who found themselves out of work one day in 2001 when the owners of the plant summarily shut it down. With that act, the market for Action's employment and job training program expanded dramatically.

He and many of his former LePage's colleagues turned to Action, Inc., for assistance, and it delivered.

By trade, Hunter was an auto mechanic, trained by Mercedes-Benz, but at LePage's, he had been working maintenance for 13 years.

He enrolled in Resnick's course, which entails 20 hours of classes a week for 12 weeks. The curriculum runs three pages and challenges the enrollees on a professional and personal level to assess their assets and liabilities and capture the skills required to rejoin the work force.

Anyone who has been suddenly left jobless -- and joblessness is typically a sudden and crushing occurrence -- knows the objective assessment of pluses and minuses is emotionally wrenching and altogether difficult to catalog.

The course, which is taught at Brown's Mall to classes of 12, begins with these assignments.

"Skills assessment ... Write it down ... It all counts ... Skills you have ... Skills you need ... Skills you want ... How skills translate into a job. Moving from one profession to another or one phase of life to another ... What you leave behind ... What you gain ... What you fear ... 'I don't mind change as long as it doesn't involve me.'"

These are all topics written into the curriculum.

The course immediately progresses to issues of "self esteem and confidence building," qualities in short supply in the psyches of the newly or chronically un- or underemployed.

Then the curriculum moves to the practical steps of landing a new job.

The prelude to an interview workshop covers: "Conversations that work ... How to talk so people will listen ... Guidelines for preparing talks ... How to know and sell yourself ... Finding our own voice."

Interviews, resume writing and job search conclude the general preparations part of the course, and are similar to the job placement training that displaced six-figure executives seek and get from high priced placement firms.

At the back end, the course splits into three specialized training seminars: front desk, medical and computer literacy.

David Hunter completed the course with computer literacy. This entailed 20 hours a week for five weeks.

He was a talented auto mechanic, but his experience with cars came in the pre-computer era.

"David was excluded from the work he knew because of the lack of computer skills," Resnick noted. Back when he fixed cars, "you looked up parts numbers in an old book. He was afraid of the computer."

He also lacked a high school diploma, having abandoned his formal education to join his father in commercial fishing, a time-tested choice for many on the Cape.

"He had a marvelous skill set," Resnick says.

Hunter completed the course, learned how to use computers as they are required in today's state-of-the art auto hospitals, and earned his diploma.

"His goal had always been to get his diploma before his son did, and he did it five months before his son did," Resnick recalls. "He is a big, rugged man -- it moved him and me to tears."

The happy ending to the story is this: David Hunter earned a fine job, merging his long-held talent as an auto mechanic with his newly acquired skills on the computer.

Today, he works at Danvers Chevrolet, with earnings in excess of his teacher's.

Hunter says his first confrontation with a computer in the Action program was daunting, but it was a worthwhile challenge, one that was career-reviving and life changing.

"Having never been on a computer, it was scary," he says. "I didn't even know how to turn it on. After being out of the (auto repair) business for years, I'd have been lost" without the computer literacy he obtained from Action, Inc.

Now, he says, "I do all my estimates on the computer." To do an repair estimate now, he says, "It takes me 15 minutes on the computer. It would take me three hours do it by hand.

"Without the (Action, Inc.) program, I would never have gotten back into this business again. It's a great program."

Three other former LePage's workers, sent into unemployment with Hunter, also used the Action, Inc., course as a springboard back to self-sufficiency.

One is an office manager at Bed, Bath and Beyond in Danvers. A second is an intake aide at Addison-Gilbert Hospital. And the third is an office manager in a consulting company at Blackburn Industrial Park.

Some of the students in the program come with a welter of problems the former LePage's workers could only imagine. One recent graduate now earns $17 an hour -- more than twice the minimum wage -- as office manager of a glass company. She enrolled while a resident of Moore's Way, a sober house on Duncan Street.

"(This person) hadn't worked in years, and had a sketchy job history," Resnick notes.

Participation in the job training programs is funded by a variety of sources, each with specific criteria for eligibility, which can create heart-breaking Catch-22s for Resnick.

For example, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which recently re-upped with Action, Inc. for two years at $120,000 a year, limits its funds from this grant to clients who are "homeless and transitionally homeless."

Residents of Moore's Way and other shelters qualify. Under the bureaucratic definition, she says, "living on the street or 'in places unfit for human habitation' qualify, but if you're living on an aunt's couch, you don't qualify."

David Hunter certainly wasn't in such dire straights, living as he did with his family in a home he built with his own hands, but he qualified for the program under another granting source, the private Sailors Snug Harbor Trust in Boston. Its funding was limited to candidates from the fishing industry, and his history let him in.

Until recently, when HUD approved a $1.3 million grant for omnibus services, including 20 units of assisted living and job training for those with HIV or AIDS, there was no funding for many with the virus or the disease.

"If a person with AIDS were homeless or a fisherman, we could serve them," Resnick says. "But if they were not homeless and not a fisherman and had AIDS, we couldn't.

"There's a group of people I don't have to turn away again."