The Power of Community Connections

The Power of Community Connections

The Power of Community Connections

A belief in working together is key

 

BETTER WORK Columbus is connected with groups and organizations across the Chattahoochee Valley. These groups include both the Chattahoochee Valley Poverty Reduction Coalition (CVPRC) and the Mayor’s Commission on Reentry. A belief in working together in the local community as the key to eliminating poverty in our city is the common thread binding these groups together.  More specifically, the CVPRC holds a shared vision to reduce the poverty rate in the Chattahoochee Valley by 50% over the next 10 years.

BETTER WORK Program Manager, Kristin Barker, plays a leadership role in both of these groups. As forthcoming chair of the Reentry Commission, she works to identify key people in our community and bring them together to address the needs and concerns that impact individuals who are justice-involved. This is necessary to further the mission of preventing recidivism by strengthening cooperation and collaboration between law enforcement agencies, corrections and supervision entities, resource agencies, social service and non-profit organizations, faith-based non-profit organizations, community members, and other private and public stakeholders. Embedded in the group’s purpose is a focus on finding key people in the community and bringing them together to address the needs and concerns that impact individuals who are justice-involved.

 

The Success Sequence provides an outline of how to reverse the cycle of poverty in our communities. GCO uses this as a framework for much of our work.

Local Connections and National Partnerships

It is these local connections and national partnerships like Jobs for Life that will allow Columbus to discover the high-impact strategies needed to support families in poverty and connect them with resources that will move them toward self-sufficiency.

Find more information about the Chattahoochee Valley Poverty Reduction Coalition and the Mayor’s Commission on Reentry online.

Partnerships and Building Blocks Come Together in Columbus

Partnerships and Building Blocks Come Together in Columbus

Partnerships and Building Blocks Come Together in Columbus

Building a stronger network of resources

On November 4th, BETTER WORK Columbus hosted a reception to announce a new partnership with Jobs for Life to bring its proven curriculum and a nationally recognized program to help struggling people find meaningful, self-supporting work. During the event, Ryan Ray, President and CEO of Jobs for Life, shared his heart as well as the passion behind the Jobs for Life training program and the power it has to impact lives in a transformative way.

Problem:

In Columbus, 11,406 people are unemployed, despite more than 6,500 job openings. The problem is not an issue of availability but an issue of access. There are personal, educational, and systemic barriers that prevent some of our neighbors from working or thriving at their jobs. Without work, many begin to identify themselves with their circumstances which creates a vicious cycle of poverty—economically, spiritually, and emotionally.

Solution:

Our BETTER WORK Columbus team has already built a strong network of partnerships and has been using the Jobs for Life framework to recruit and train mentors. Now, we want to take this a step further by extending the network of support to Jobs for Life training sites in our community.

Our BETTER WORK Network has allied with Jobs for Life to help break the cycle of poverty and build up our communities. JFL sites are uniquely positioned to address the root causes of un- and under-employment by uniting churches, businesses, and community organizations and facilitating positive transformation within lives and communities. This model reinforces work as more than just a paycheck but a source of pride and dignity. It is designed to address the loss of identity which often accompanies unemployment.

We will join hands and work together to bring the change our community needs.

How can we work together?

It starts here! We will join hands and work together to bring the change our community needs.

If you live in the Columbus area, we need your help! You can: 

  • Champion a student through mentoring, 
  • help us with recruitment, 
  • hire a graduate, 
  • or simply celebrate with us. 

 

You may also choose to donate by giving online

Then send an email to kristin.barker@georgiaopportunity.org to have your gift support local Jobs for Life classes. Include your name and the subject line – “I donated to the BETTER WORK Network and Jobs for Life”.

5 Ways to Impress an Employer (Soup to Nuts)

5 Ways to Impress an Employer (Soup to Nuts)

5 Ways to Impress an Employer (Soup to Nuts)

cropped impress employer

5 Ways to Impress an Employer (Soup to Nuts)

Let’s pretend you’re getting ready for an interview. You’re probably wondering what you should wear and whether you should prepare to shake hands or fist bump in the post-COVID world. You may even be practicing eye contact and commanding your best smile in the mirror. While these things are great, and I encourage you to pay attention to them, the real preparation to impress begins long before you even secure that interview.

The impression you will make on your future employer begins with the very first touch. Maybe that’s the instant your friend who works for the company sends an email inquiry on your behalf or the minute the hiring manager first views your application and resume. An impression is formed from those first moments and through every point of contact (whether virtual or in-person) until you accept a job offer.

This means you must consider every response to every email, text or phone call, and anything else that can be searched and discovered about you online as admissible in the court of employer perception.

Here are 5 ways that you can prepare to impress an employer and set the stage for a good relationship:

  1. Make a good impression by cleaning up your online presence

Search for yourself on Google to see what you find. (One tip is to include your city and/or state in search to refine the results.) Change your settings on your social channels so that only your friends can view your profile, and remember that employers expect to find some information about you on Facebook and other social channels. This makes it important for you to share a public post every so often that paints a picture of yourself that you are proud for employers to see.

 

  1. Keep your communication professional

When you respond to an email or a text inquiry from an employer, use full sentences and punctuation. Don’t talk like you would to your friends. Instead, pretend that you are already talking with the employer in an interview and respond like you would in that situation.

 

  1. Don’t over share

When responding to an interview request, it’s ok to ask for an alternate date or time. However, you don’t need to give a potential employer every detail of your situation. There is no need to tell an employer that your child has the flu or that you have to take your father-in-law to the doctor. You want to be honest, but this is far too much information to share right away, and there are much better ways to find out if an employer has family-friendly values. 

BETTER OPPORTUNITY is a project designed to bring together the communities we serve to BETTER the lives of our neighbors. As a first step we currently have work resources available that help individuals find and maintain work.

Over the coming months and years we will be expanding our efforts and locations to include family and education resources.

A job is so much more than a paycheck. BETTER WORK is proud to be serving local communities.

  1. Refine your resume 

Of course, preparation doesn’t end here. You will want to keep your resume fresh and mention the skills that make you a good fit for the job you’re applying for. If you don’t think you have all of the needed skills, find someone who can help you refine your resume. Working together, you can usually identify skills you do have that are transferable.

 

  1. Be able to explain during an interview why you are interested in the job you have applied for 

As a rule of thumb, everything you say and do must show that you care about the job and understand why it is important to you. If you can do this, you will have a good chance of getting a job offer. I recommend that you never answer the question, “Why are you interested in this position?”, with the response, “I just need a job. I’m happy to do anything you need me to.” This answer has kept many good candidates from receiving the offer they hoped to get.

 

Wrapping up

All of these steps are important and more. You must research the company before you apply and review that information before you show up for an interview. You will also want to prepare to follow-up in an appropriate way after the interview. It’s a good idea to ask the interviewer how and when you should follow-up. This is one way to show that you care.

As mentioned earlier, it can also help to have someone in your corner to encourage you and help you consider transferable skills or prepare for interviews. If you are looking for better work and would like someone by your side to help you prepare to find and keep a job that meets your needs, BETTER WORK communities have mentors who are available to walk alongside you during your journey. Visit betteropportunity.org to find out more.

 

How to Take Away Something Positive from the COVID Crisis

How to Take Away Something Positive from the COVID Crisis

How to Take Away Something Positive from the COVID Crisis

By Kristin Barker

The year 2020 has been difficult for everyone. It has caused organizations and businesses to pivot from their planned strategies and shift quickly to identify new ones. It has forced individuals to find new career paths and create new support structures. It’s kept us from our families and isolated us from the communities we are used to counting on. In short, it has been one tough year.

It has been the most difficult year I have seen over my lifetime. But I will say it has also been inspiring. I have been inspired by the ability of our community and its leaders to come together. Leadership in Columbus has been able to connect in new and sometimes surprising ways to support and meet continually changing needs. 

Betsy Covington at the Community Foundation and Ben Moser at United Way acted very early in the year to coordinate COVID Response calls to keep Columbus connected, positive, and focused throughout much of this crisis year. Their efforts and the efforts of others to join hands and find out-of-the-box solutions in the moment has been very encouraging.

While seeing these efforts gives hope to myself and (I’m sure) to others, our Hiring Well, Doing Good (HWDG) partners also know there will be many additional challenges to address and emerging issues to tackle in the future. We began to talk about the shifts that were happening with our own efforts in Columbus. We heard about the new practices that our business and nonprofit partners were having to adopt and the heightened needs that continue to arise among the populations we serve. 

Our subcommittees began to ask, “What can we learn from our ability to pivot in 2020 that will allow us to react more effectively and responsively in 2021?” This question led us to develop a series of events focused on The Changing COVID Workforce

Our first event in this series will be held on January 21, 2021. This event will address Economic Forces During a Pandemic: How COVID is Shaping the Labor Market. During this event we examine the labor-supply gaps that exist and look at business policies and practices that impact workforce participation. This discussion will set the stage for later events and will consider the need for possible shifts in training and hiring practices. 

Our second event in the series will be on March 24 and will examine how we leverage our community assets to mitigate the impact of COVID. Betsy Covington and Ben Moser are going to speak during this event and help us think through what our community did really well in 2020. We will discuss how we can leverage what we have learned to navigate 2021 and to improve our community in the future. The final event on May 19 will focus on maintaining the strength of our workforce.

All three of these discussions will help us prepare to successfully repair our local economy in light of the COVID-related adjustments we have been forced to make along the way. We need to be sure that businesses (large and small) can prosper while keeping all people in our community safe and avoiding as much collateral damage from this virus as possible. 

There are also some existing issues that COVID has shined a light on. In comparison to other areas of the country, Columbus has very low average wages. This has created a situation locally where national stimulus efforts may harm our local economy disproportionately. In some cases, businesses have shared that their challenges in hiring additional labor have hamstrung their efforts to produce at scale or accept additional contracts. In other cases, employers have had to scale down production due to workforce restrictions. These situations open up an essential conversation about both average and living wages in Columbus, because it’s important for everyone to earn enough to support their families.

Ultimately, I see a heart at work in our community that is something I don’t believe you can find everywhere. There is a genuine and pervasive desire to work together for the common good. This is something special about Columbus, and I believe the Changing COVID Workforce event series will allow us to take greater advantage of our outstanding community spirit.