R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to the marginalized members of society and you may just have the basis for a successful job training program.
Over the years, welfare-to-work programs have had little success finding permanent employment for the inexperienced and the unskilled, reports Kay Hymowitz in the Winter issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute. A notable exception is a privately-endowed effort called Strive, which Hymowitz describes as "a break-the-mold job readiness program utterly unlike government-funded programs." Headquartered in East Harlem, Strive maintains 19 sites in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. In the last five years, it has put 14,000 people to work.
What makes Strive successful? Hymowitz points out that, "while other programs focus on 'hard skills' like computer literacy, word processing, and job search techniques, Strive's staff is skeptical about such instruction. Instead, convinced that employers want to hire eager, presentable workers and are willing to train them once on the job, Strive staffers concentrate on building what they see as the all-important 'soft skills': not just the familiar problems of initiative and punctuality but a more subtle understanding of the manners and values of an alien mainstream work world." Strive is different in another respect. Unlike most programs, Strive makes "a lifetime commitment to clients [and] has been able to ensure that close to 80 percent of those placed are still working after two years."
The staff at Strive have walked in their clients' shoes. They've "traveled the gulf between the street culture their clients now inhabit and the office culture they seek to join," says Hymowitz. "The staff at Strive are hardly the first to note the difficulty many inner-city residents have adapting to the requirements of the workplace. What makes them unique is their sophisticated grasp of the psychology behind this well-known, if widely denied, problem. Without scorn or pity, they see through the self-defeating postures their clients have adopted, postures that dramatize their indignant sense of racial exclusion and perpetuate their marginalization."
The staff at Strive understand that "the real problem isn't discrimination but 'attitude,' the quasi-defensive, quasi-aggressive posture their clients have adopted to anticipate discrimination." Staffers work hard to help their streetwise wards inure themselves to "the alien atmosphere and petty humiliations inevitable at almost any workplace." The effort can be an arduous one. "Day after day, staffers will challenge those who need it to recognize the depth of their resistance to authority and to repress its subtle symptoms -- bored facial expressions, smirks, slouching, and almost unconscious clucks of disgust."
It all comes down to respect, giving it and getting it. "Rather than merely pitying the poor as victims and thereby reinforcing their helplessness," says Kay Hymowitz, "Strive instead believes in their competence and appeals to their ability to climb atop their miserable circumstances and see new possibilities. It's a tough climb," she concedes, "but, for those willing and able to make it, it works wonders."
