By all rights, none of this should have happened to Joe Carbone.
He was well-educated, and came from a politically connected family, but when he lost his job working for a politician, he sank into his sofa and even more deeply into depression, spending afternoons watching soaps and mornings avoiding neighbors at the supermarket.
“If that happened to me, after only eight months out of work, when I had all those things going for me,” Carbone said, he could imagine what happened to millions of long-term unemployed who lost jobs during the recession, and still were fruitlessly searching years later.
Carbone obviously got a job – he heads the WorkPlace, the quasi-governmental workforce development board in southern Connecticut.
But his memory of that experience nearly a quarter-century ago led him and others to develop a plan to help the long-term unemployed that has been successful in Connecticut and other states, and was featured on 60 Minutes.
Platform to Employment, or P2E, is now coming to Chester County as a pilot program, aimed, initially, at helping 25 people, Chester County’s commissioners announced Tuesday.
Funded by $179,500 in state Labor Department money, P2E launches Sept. 1.
The county’s unemployment rate is low, 4 percent, compared with the nation’s 5.3 percent rate, but “we still face the same challenges,” Commissioner Kathi Cozzone said.
If the program matches Connecticut’s success rate of 90 percent, Cozzone hopes it can be expanded.
Those accepted into the program get a five-week package that not only polishes job search skills, but also addresses the erosion of self-confidence that often occurs. Psychological and financial counseling are included.
The idea isn’t to get applicants any job or to get them retrained, but to help them find a job in their field, using skills they have, Carbone said.
To qualify, applicants must be out of work for more than six months, have a somewhat stable work history, and be able to put aside any anger they may have about their situations. The application process includes essays and interviews.
Once the program starts, officials contact prospective employers and make them a deal.
In return for taking a risk on these workers, the program pays the first four weeks of the person’s entire salary, at market rates, and then pays 50 percent for four more weeks, no obligation after that – just an expectation that if the person works out, the job is theirs to keep. If the company takes them onto their payroll, that’s success.
Kristin Wolf of Phoenixville said she hopes she is chosen. With a master’s in international marketing, Wolf moved here from the Midwest to work in marketing for a pharmaceutical firm in 2006. Since then, she said, she has wound up on the wrong side of a series of mergers, losing her job each time.
Now she works part time as an administrative assistant, and “I look after a woman who was discharged from a hospital.”
“I’ve been out of the professional workforce for a few years,” she said. “I understand how people may see hiring me as a risk.”
Cheryl Spaulding, cofounder of Joseph’s People, a Downingtown-based network of church-run support groups for the unemployed, heard about P2E and introduced it to Chester County’s Workforce Development Board.
“It’s the most positive thing that has happened in a long time,” she said. “The long-term unemployed need one thing, and that’s a job.”
Article source: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20150722_Chesco_to_use_program_to_aid_the_jobless.html