Goodwill Industries Offers Life Skills Classes:

Company Helps Welfare-to-Work People

Aired December 21, 1999

It is December 21st, 1999, I am David C. Barnett, welcoming you to INFOhio After Nine, and today we're going to get down to the basics, the basics of life that many of us take for granted, but for someone who has never been in the workforce before, and who comes form an unstable home situation, maybe no home situation, well, learning to get into the workforce can have all sorts of challenges, which we'll explore this morning. A segment of the welfare population has personal and professional barriers that may not be obvious to future employers. As our series, "The Changing Face of Welfare," continues, 90.3's Yolanda Perdomo reports on a program designed to get people out of their homes and into a job by helping them get over their personal hurdles.

Yolanda Perdomo–Goodwill Industries on Cleveland's east side likes to pride themselves as a one-stop shopping place to get a new start. It offers training programs for just about every type of job under the sun, from computer classes to maintenance training for those looking for custodial work to those who are mentally challenged, learning how to sort screws for construction companies. Showing that anyone can do anything is what the center is all about, says Maureen Wallace. She is the Assistant Director of Vocational and Rehabilitation for Goodwill Industries. When a group comes in for life skills classes, one of the first things Wallace does is give a tour of the center, to show them how much pride the disabled have in their work. Wallace says it serves as a wake-up call.

Maureen Wallace–Many of these women have been told that they could be successful. they've always been told what they couldn't do versus what they could do, getting past anger. They're angry, they're angry with society, they've got resentment. It's a lot of that that they have to overcome in order to move forward.

YP–Wallace was once on public assistance herself several years ago. She says the life skills classes are for the women who have been isolated for some time by their personal choices.

MW–They stopped going to school in the 9th grade, became a parent. Depending on their situation, they may have been just in that environment, not outside of the box, so to speak, and their world was whatever they dictated. To come outside of that box, and have to go out now and meet people and get along with people, it's very challenging for many. They don't know, they haven't been respected, so they don't know how to earn respect or give respect even, and then we get a lot of women now who's coming, trying to come out and look better and do better and then we look up and she's got a black eye in a week, so now you've got these other issues.

YP–Attending a life skills class can be mandated by the county before getting into a job training program. They're held 9 to 4, Monday through Friday, and they cover a variety of topics. Again, Maureen Wallace.

MW–Life skills can be as simple as learning how to care for yourself as far as hygene, grooming, that type of thing, we begin there. It can be as simple as those types of things, getting up in the morning on time, getting up on time, having something to do every day, establishing goals, doing some time management, doing some planning around where you're going to go the next day.

YP–Jacqueline Middlebrooks teaches job-seeking skills at Goodwill Industries. Middlebrooks admits that classes are geared to the issues most affecting the clients day-to-day.

Jacqueline Middlebrooks–Problems at home, problems with their children, issues about self-esteem and self-confidence and being stuck on the system and ways to overcome it. We talk about real-life example because we have some people on staff here that came off of public assistance and are now self-sufficient and successful, and we just discuss everything. Life skills is discussing everything, from unpaid bills to maybe how better to help your children learn in school.

YP–Goodwill Industries assists about 400 people every day in Cleveland on a variety of training projects. Tomorrow, the story of one person who graduated from a life skills class, and her continuing struggle to stay out of the welfare system. For INFOhio, I'm Yolanda Perdomo in Cleveland.