Street Reach shelter offers job readiness training to help homeless get back to work

New Directions continues to expand the services it offers to the homeless in the Myrtle Beach area, recently adding job readiness training to its back-to-work program.

The three-day training kicked off at Street Reach homeless shelter at the beginning of the year, and about 10 people who are part of the 30-day back to work program “graduate” each week. New Directions, which includes Street Reach, is a coalition of organizations in the Myrtle Beach-area that work with those who are homeless, in poverty or victims of domestic violence.

“To set our folks up for success, we needed ... a job readiness program,” New Directions Executive Director Kathy Jenkins said. “If we can’t set our people up for success, then what are we doing?”

People in the back to work program have 30 days to find employment. For the past year, more than 400 clients have stayed at the Street Reach homeless shelter – where they pay a small fee per week for their accommodations, work with a case worker and look for a job. The job readiness training is a new component to the program.

“They receive computer-skills training ... where they learn things like how to search the Internet for jobs, how to fill out a resume and application online,” Jenkins said.

Kalylan Willett, who graduated from the job readiness training Wednesday, said the program taught him how to handle himself on a job. Willett most recently worked in retail but does not yet have a job lined up.

“It taught me to be assertive and up front,” he said. “It taught me to be professional about what I do. And to be on time to work.”

Those who go through the program also learn lessons such as how to solicit references and letters of recommendation, communication skills, anger management and coping skills and telephone etiquette. They also participate in mock interviews.

Willett, originally from Miami, said he’s lived in Myrtle Beach for about two years. He said he lived with family at first then on his own. When he lost his job in retail, he found himself to be without a place to live. He’s been staying at Street Reach for about three weeks.

Willett said he has an associate’s degree in psychology and hopes to one day be able to go back to school to become a psychologist.

“I love the human mind,” he said. “I’m always psychoanalyzing things. ... I want to go into family counseling.”

But for now, Willett said he’s just looking for work.

“Retail, fast food, basically anything,” he said. “Whatever will take me, I’ll take it.”

Bill Greene, who designed and coordinates the job training, said graduates of the program have gone on to secure maintenance jobs with the city or local golf courses or in retail. He said he wasn’t sure how many graduates have secured jobs.

He said the program helps a range of people.

“We always say that so many people in our community are one to three paychecks from losing everything,” he said. “You lose your job, then you lose your home, then you lose you car, then you lose your family.”

Jenkins said New Directions -- which offers transitional housing through the Center for Women and Children and the Life Line domestic violence shelter, in addition to Street Reach -- also has had discussions with Myrtle Beach Municipal Court and city officials to find ways to work together.

“I don’t have the numbers for 2014 yet, but of the number of arrests made in 2013, 46 percent were homeless,” Jenkins said.

The city of Columbia recently launched its Homeless Court, modeled after a nearly 30-year-old California program, which allows those who are chronically homeless and qualify for the program have their misdemeanor, nonviolent charges dropped.

Jenkins said she thinks the Columbia program is interesting. She said she wasn’t at liberty to give details about what New Directions is working on with the court in Myrtle Beach.

For now, Greene said he hopes that those using the job readiness program apply their newly learned or refreshed skills to help them move out of homelessness and stay out of trouble.

“When they leave here they’ll probably get an entry-level job somewhere,” he said. “But we want them to move from a job to a career.”

This story was originally published January 29, 2015 at 12:30 PM with the headline "Street Reach shelter offers job readiness training to help homeless get back to work."