Two organizations have joined to create a series of specialized workshops to help previously incarcerated individuals reintegrate into meaningful employment.
Goodwill Industries of Middle Georgia and the CSRA and ReNforce, an Augusta-based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping justice-involved individuals, will use existing programs and services to create pathways to employment by offering job readiness training workshops.
“They cover things like time management, customer service, conflict resolution, skills, preparing for your interview,” Leah Pontani, Senior Vice President of Career Development at Goodwill, explained for ABD. “If you’re incarcerated for a number of years, you kind of lose touch with how to manage your own schedule. There’s just a lot of things that we take for granted on the day-to-day that we reinforce on them in these workshops.”
Charlotte Garnes, Founder and CEO of ReNforce, said her organization can provide additional support for Goodwill and those needing help navigating the return to life as productive citizens with jobs and careers.
“They have individuals there to do the work, but may not be able to tap into jobs just as impacted population, because let’s be real, this is a stigma and a topic a lot of people shy away from,” she said. “People don’t want to admit that they have been impacted by the legal system in some way.”
Pontani said, although the primary goal of the workshops is to help them feel more self-motivated, more believing in themselves when approaching a potential employer, they will also understand their rights.
“To understand when an employer is allowed to ask about their criminal background, how they should disclose it to an employer,” she said. “We certainly don’t want individuals to lie about their background, but there’s a way to frame what has happened to you and put it out there ahead of them, to let them know that something may flag on a background check.”
Garnes said it is time to find ways to provide opportunities to individuals who were incarcerated.
“We need to be doing something different, and how does that look and being able to support and provide because my question is, how do we anticipate someone going in at 18 or 19 years old, doing 20 years, and coming out in this day and time with technology to be successful? How do we do that without supporting them? That’s impossible. Goodwill sees that. Goodwill knows that, and Goodwill supports that.”
Without help, Garnes said desperation can force a recently released individual back into criminal acts just to survive.
Pontani agreed.
“That’s going to happen more and more if employers don’t step up to help us close this gap. People can want to change and want to be the best person,” she said. “You could be completely rehabilitated, but if you come out and there is no opportunity to put food on your table with a job, what other choice are you being left with?”
The workshops offered by Goodwill and ReNforce deal with the short-term need of how to give recently released individuals real-world tools to prepare for a job search. But this also opens another door to the variety of job training programs available at Helms College at Goodwill’s Washington Road campus.
Beyond that, Pontani said it will be up to potential employers, adding some are beginning to see benefits in hiring someone who served time.
“If you Google a lot of employers online right now, they’ll say that they’re “Second Chance” employers. What that really means is they have hired somebody with a criminal background in the past, but employers that are really, truly open to assisting and being part of closing that gap for us, are few and far between in our community,” she said.
The partnership with ReNforce is the second program Goodwill entered to help what are also called “justice-involved” individuals. It joined with Augusta Judicial Circuit District Attorney, Jared Williams to launch Checks Over Stripes. Its goal is to prevent individuals from becoming career criminals by providing job skills, education, and employment opportunities.
The workshops with ReNforce are held at the Goodwill Peach Orchard Job Connection at 3120 Peach Orchard Road. The next workshop is starting the week of Aug. 19th. To register, contact Ikethia Daniels, Workforce Management Developer at ReNforce at
(307)399-2786 or ikethia@renforce.org.
