Read below about how Our House is using Work-Based Learning to provide jobs and training for homeless individuals in the central Arkansas area.
- From the Partners in Action newsletter of the WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) program of the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services. Click here to read WIOA’s entire 4th quarter newsletter.
New ADWS/Our House Stores Work-Based Learning Partnership Provides Jobs, Training for Homeless
A new agreement connecting three employment focused entities—ADWS, the Little Rock Workforce Board and the Our House non-profit serving the central Arkansas homeless population—provides the answer to urgent needs for each. The pilot project for the Arkansas Work-Based Learning program funds paid work experience in Our House Resale stores in Little Rock and North Little Rock through June 2019. The participants—“job trainees” in Our House parlance—are also required to take classroom, computer-based training at the Our House Career Center to, according to the agreement, “teach work skills, adult education and literacy, and life skills.”
Homelessness and unemployment are the only criteria for the trainees to qualify for the program; they are not required to be residents of the Our House Shelter on Roosevelt Road in Little Rock. Staff from the WIOA program in the Little Rock Workforce Center assess them and enroll them in the Title I Adult program at the start of their employment in the stores. Transportation to and from the job sites is a part of the program, and workers are given bus passes by their WIOA case manager as a supportive service.
“It’s not just Our House residents, it’s for any homeless person,” said Justin Robinson, manager of Our House Resale Stores. “If I didn’t have anybody to hire from Our House, I could go to another shelter and hire their people.”
The arrangement helps ADWS meet the WIOA imperative to increase access to employment, training and supportive services “particularly (for) those with barriers to employment,” in the language of the law. “Partnerships are how we find individuals with barriers to employment, serve those participants better, and help both the individual and the employer succeed,” ADWS Assistant Director for Employment Assistance Kris Jones wrote. “The Our House pilot demonstrates what can be achieved by partnering local resources that share a common mission by intersecting the supply of those with barriers and employers.”
Robinson, an energetic visionary with a heart for extending a hand up those who need a break, opened the first Our House store on West Markham in Little Rock in 2016 with a big dream and a different business model from other resale and consignment shops.
“Our House, Inc., solely owned and operated the stores,” Robinson said. “One hundred percent of the proceeds went back to the shelter. So, the community support was just phenomenal.”
The store took off. A year later, Robinson persuaded the Our House Board of Directors to fund a second, much larger store in North Little Rock. But for that, he needed more than a handful of volunteers and the few job trainees he could afford to pay out of Our House operating funds.
“So, I just saw the need, and we really didn’t have an answer for it to keep growing and keep expanding our programming on campus at Our House,” he
said.
Robinson submitted a proposal to ADWS, asking that 20 job training positions to be funded, and he wrote them with specific job descriptions—not just retail customer service positions, but donation center warehouse workers, truck drivers, an administrative assistant, a marketing research and sales associate and others. As of early October, 11 job trainees had been placed in work-experience positions funded by the agreement.
“I try to find out their background and plug people in,” said Robinson, who came to Our House after starting a career as an investigator in law enforcement. “We want them to be happy, and we want them to be able to succeed and move on to unsubsidized employment after this training program and be productive citizens.”
“It’s worth noting how important (Robinson) is to this whole thing,” Our House marketing trainee Phil Vickers said. “He built it all with nothing but just diehard willpower. He’s the backbone of the whole thing.”
Donations are flooding in, thanks in part to the fact that other nearby thrift shops have closed recently. The program is working for the third partner as well.
“This sub-grant award helps us meet our WIOA Adult enrollment goals at a quicker pace,” emailed Stacy Hagan, Operations Manager of the WIOA program at the Little Rock Workforce Center. “That number goes toward our enrollment goal of 50 Adults. We are also hoping it contributes to the Employment Rate second quarter and fourth quarter after-exit goals, as it is giving these homeless individuals work experience and a stable environment to build skills and experience.”
Debra McGee is the WIOA Adult case manager at the LRWFC. A separate work-based learning initiative involving Our House Shelter and the ADWS Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has also been highly successful and was recently extended beyond its scheduled completion date of September 30. The Our House Pipeline to Employment program created an Employer Alliance of businesses to send homeless job seekers. In the second quarter, both the number of employers in the alliance (13) and the number of clients placed in jobs (56) exceeded the goals for the period.
