Author: Jimmy Donlon Major: Marketing, Management

One of the biggest barriers to self-sufficiency is unemployment. For people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity, re-entry to society is predicated upon (among other things) the consistent income associated exclusively with a steady job. My research attempts to create a job training program specifically for people experiencing homelessness.

The first step is to connect local homeless centers and shelters to Goodwill. You probably know Goodwill as a thrift shop, but each location doubles as a career services center, where employees help clients prepare for every stage of the job search process. Goodwill offers a number of educational programs, and in this project, we use one called Goodwill 101. The class is traditionally taught at a Goodwill location once a week for an hour, and it covers the basics of job skill development. That means instruction on professionalism, effective job searching, resume creation, common interview questions – things that every university student across the country has access to in their school’s career center. For this project, Tammy Jones, Goodwill’s area manager for career services, brings that program directly to a homeless center.

Goodwill 101 is not enough, though. Its target audience is the average Goodwill client, and we want to make something that directly addresses people experiencing homelessness. Despite society’s depiction of homeless people, they are not a monolith. Each individual has a different combination of unique factors contributing to his or her homelessness, which can sometimes, but not always, include the things that many people associate with homelessness: substance abuse, criminal offenses, or a lack of education, for example. Some of these common experiences create additional barriers to employment that the average Goodwill client does not experience. If we tailor Goodwill 101 to some of the commonalities in the clientele of a homeless center, we hope that it will be a much more effective tool for one of the populations that need it most.

The first center that we worked with was Souls Harbor NWA, in Rogers, AR. It’s a transitional living community for men, where residents have access to not only stable, long-term housing, but also food, showers, counseling, and an assortment of educational and counseling programs. The most impressive thing to me about Souls was the network of support that the residents had created for each other. They never complained about anything in my presence, even though for most residents, Goodwill 101 was taught after a grueling eight-hour workday of manual labor. There were around fifteen men who attended the class, which we taught from 6 PM – 7 PM on four Thursdays in September and October. Tammy does the teaching, and I sit in the corner and take notes. Apart from the valuable job training, Tammy does a great job of promoting the other various Goodwill programs, which can help clients get a GED, learn to code, and obtain valuable licenses and certifications – all for free. The men almost all had a job at the start of the class (one of the requirements for staying at Souls), but they were fascinated by the opportunities at Goodwill. Several of them, I’m told, have met with Tammy outside of class to increase their involvement with the company.

We repeated the process the next month at a shelter called Micah’s House NWA. The residents at Micah’s House are all eighteen-year-old boys who have aged out of the foster care system. It is literally a house and has “house parents” who live there full-time to mentor the young men who pass through. It was difficult to get the residents to focus, and it seemed as if they didn’t care as much as the older men at Souls did. Not exactly a mind-blowing observation if you remember your own priorities when you were eighteen. We’re working with a third shelter, Magdalene Serenity House, in January, the residents of which are all women who have recently been incarcerated.

The second part of the project is a series of follow-up interviews and surveys. To better understand how to alter the class, we ask the participants about their success on the job market. Did you keep your job? Did you get a raise or a promotion? Where do you work now? Where have you applied, and how did it go? Questions like these show us the most common problems experienced by participants that we need to address when we teach the class. Some of the men told us that they wanted a new job, and some told us that their only goal was to stay sober. Every participant has a different goal, and we want to help each of them meet that goal, whatever it is, through our program.

I wanted to avoid doing highly theoretical research by making a project with immediate practical application, and I think I achieved that goal. The research hasn’t been completed yet, but quantifiable results are already visible. We brought Goodwill 101 to two homeless shelters and over twenty individuals experiencing homelessness this semester, and we’re working to help all of them get and keep a job they’re satisfied with. In the long term, we’re well on the way to creating both a program and a delivery model that Goodwill can use indefinitely to help one of the neediest demographics.

Homelessness is in the category of problems that are so big and so pervasive throughout time and geography that we often feel like there’s no hope for a solution. Food insecurity. Climate change. If there’s one thing I learned from being around the men at Souls Harbor and Micah’s House, it’s that there’s always hope. We won’t end homelessness with this project, but even having a small impact on one person’s life is a step in the right direction. At Micah’s House, one of the volunteers who schedules programming told me, “We love to have people come in because it shows the boys that they have a support system in the community.” Just showing up can mean so much to someone. At the end of the day, no matter your resources or the size of the problem, you can either do nothing or you can do something. My hope for our research moving forward is that we continue to do something.