"E&T" up close; a look at food stamp employment & training projects in several areas - Oklahoma, Las Vegas, Delaware, San Diego

Food and Nutrition, Summer, 1988 by Wini Scheffler

"These people are skilled, intelligent, and very articulate with each other, but when you put them in an interview situation, they're literally trying to switch over to speaking the managers' language.

"To a prospective employer, they may sound uneducated or ignorant. They are not. We try to get them to hear themselves as an employer would, and then help them practice better ways to sell themselves."

After 4 days of job club, participants spend 4 days on the phone calling potential employers to arrange job interviews.

"At first, they're often kind of negative," says Kummer. "They think this isn't going to work. But when they start making calls and getting little bites and interviews, you should see their eyes light up. All of a sudden, they're really charging ahead."

Participants have different skills

One of the challenges of running a successful job club is being able to work with participants who have different skills and different levels of experience in the working world. According to Kummer, most are not the "hard core" unemployed, but people who have turned to programs like food stamps for help during a period of unemployment.

"The people who come to job club are employable," says Kummer. "They have skills but need some help landing their next job. That's why we stress confidence building and interviewing skills."

People who appear able to find jobs themselves are assigned to individual job search, rather than job club, and people who need basic work experience are assigned to workfare.

"I think basically job club shortens the time people need to be on public aid," says Kummer. "These people want to find work and we try to accelerate the process. When we do, I think we're doing them a real service."

Yvonne and Homayun are two job club graduates who found jobs with some help from Randy Kummer and his associates.

Yvonne is young, ambitious, and had worked steadily for 8 years. She was shocked when she was laid off last fall and surprised at how quickly she went into a tailspin when her initial job-hunting wasn't successful.

She lost her confidence and her motivation and began to feel her world contracting to the four walls of her home. She applied for food stamps to help keep food on the table while she returned to school and was assigned to job club.

Job club helped in several ways

"I'm the kind of person who needs a push now and then," she says. "That's what job club did for me. I've always worked, and I'd worked for that company for 2-1/2 years. I still can't believe I was laid off.

"At first, I laughed it off and took a vacation-my first one. Then I went on some job interviews and got some 'no's.' Pretty soon I started finding excuses to not job hunt, like I didn't have the right dress to wear, or it was too late in the day to start. I began sleeping in.

"My confidence went down and it got to where I just couldn't get up and go look for a job. The world was passing me by.

"Job club got my motivation back up. It rebuilt my spirit and focused my energy. Our instructor had a genuine interest in us as people, and it showed. He really wanted us to get jobs, and that made us want to get jobs. He believed in us so much, it made us believe in ourselves again.