When Benjamin Perez spoke with The Daily Progress last October, he’d been living on the streets for 15 years. He was sleeping in a homeless encampment at Market Street Park in downtown Charlottesville, and all of his belongings fit into a red suitcase and a couple of small bags.
A year later, Perez has found gainful employment as a long-haul truck driver and “literally carries his housing on his back in his truck,” Ridge Schuyler told a crowd of roughly 100 on Monday morning. Schuyler leads Piedmont Virginia Community College’s Network2Work program, an initiative that not only connects people with employment opportunities but also the necessary resources and support infrastructure to be successful in those roles.
“[Perez] called his coach, giddy from his new job and excited to share that he was finally earning enough to get a nice apartment for his mother,” said Schuyler, briefly becoming overwhelmed with emotion before adding that Perez was able to acquire his commercial driver’s license after enrolling in Network2Work.
More than 2,000 other job-seekers in the Charlottesville area have made their way through Network2Work over the past decade.
The program’s 10-year anniversary was celebrated at PVCC’s campus just south of Charlottesville on Monday with the community college’s administration, staff from the University of Virginia’s Equity Center and multiple Charlottesville officials and community leaders.
The celebration was held in the newly completed Bolick Advanced Technology and Student Success Center, the first higher education facility in Virginia, and one of the few in the country, to achieve net-zero energy. That was made possible at Bolick thanks to the installation of 1,000 solar panels lining its roof and adjacent carport.
“There are so many families struggling in our community, but not too many, to help,” Schuyler told the press after Monday’s ceremony. “These families are struggling, like all families, to provide for their children and to provide a better future for themselves and their children, and we have been honored to work with them for the last 10 years to help them achieve the goals that they’ve set for themselves.”
Despite the “corrosive myth of the American dream,” that if one simply works hard enough the money and success will follow, 62% of the individuals who come to Network2Work from Charlottesville and the surrounding counties of Albemarle, Buckingham, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa and Nelson already have some form of employment; their income is just not enough to sustain themselves or their families.
This is where Schuyler and his team come in with an approach based on building personal relationships among job-seekers, potential employees and community providers who assist in making the families self-sufficient. Working with roughly 400 to 500 people annually, about 70% of those who enroll in Network2Work are able to find employment and see a wage increase of 104%, or more than $17,000.
“The benefit to our community in this year alone is $12 million more of income circulating in our community because of the wage gains these job-seekers have achieved,” said Schuyler during his remarks on Monday.
Network2Work was first launched in 2014 as the Charlottesville Works Initiative working, with only 10 job-seekers enrolled. A couple years later, the program was brought under the umbrella of PVCC’s Division of Community Self-Sufficiency Programs, where it was able to expand its clientele by 97%.
Though Network2Work may have celebrated its 10th year on Monday, Schuyler’s involvement in Central Virginia’s workforce development and research on economic insecurity goes back more than a decade.
“A bold vision begins with a visionary, and Ridge Schuyler, our dean of student support and community partnerships, is a visionary,” said PVCC President Jean Runyon in her address Monday. “He is someone who sees the world not just as it is but how it should be.”
In September 2011, Schuyler, an Orange County native and graduate of UVa School of Law, and his colleague, Meg Hannan, published the first iteration of the Orange Dot Report, examining the economic health of families residing in the greater Charlottesville region. That first study found that 29% of households in the city did not have the income to meet their basic needs.
Ever since, Schuyler has released a report about every two years — joining forces with the UVa Equity Center since the Orange Dot Report 5.0 — helping Network2Work identify how local families are faring financially and how to best assist them.
“We can’t solve a problem unless we understand it,” said Schuyler. “For too long, the people who’ve been left in the shadows of our economy have been overlooked. This Orange Dot Report shines the light on those people who are just trying to provide for their families.”
“We all have a role to play in helping these families get to where they’re trying to go, and that we all benefit when those families do get to where they’re trying to go,” he added.
Monday also marked the release of the Orange Dot Report 6.0, which found that 14,990 families, or 22% of the households, in Network2Work’s coverage area do not have the income to be self-sufficient, meaning they are unable to cover necessary expenses such as adequate housing, transportation, food, child care and medical treatment.
The struggle is not evenly distributed across the region: 33% of families living in Nelson County do not meet the self-sufficiency standard as defined by the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work. In the city of Charlottesville, that figure drops to 27%, and in Albemarle County it is as low as 18%. For each of these localities, the standard is set at an annual household income of about $60,000.
Not only does economic inequality vary based on place, it also varies based on race. The Orange Dot Report 6.0 determined that 47% of Black families in the region are struggling compared to 35% of Hispanic families and 18% of White families.
“Part of the power of this report is really bringing a shared understanding to what our community is experiencing,” Michele Claibourn, the Equity Center’s director of equitable analysis, told the press Monday. “So we can all kind of be looking at the same thing, working towards the same goals, and work together for those goals.”
A number of local nonprofit organizations, aside from Network2Work, whose missions also focus on those goals of closing the racial wealth gap and addressing families’ basic needs were also present at the Bolick Center on Monday, including the United Way of Greater Charlottesville.
That organization’s president, Ravi Respeto, pointed out her team often relies upon the Orange Dot Report’s findings to shape its own initiatives and methods to meet the needs of the community.
“This isn’t just a report that sits on a shelf,” she said in her speech. “It’s something that United Way uses all the time in our program design; we’re constantly assessing how we’re supporting clients.”
The report is also something city officials take into consideration, Charlottesville City Councilor Lloyd Snook told The Daily Progress following the ceremony. Snook pointed to the city’s recent acquisition of the Charlottesville Area Technical Education Center, formerly the Charlottesville Albemarle Technical Education Center, saying the career-oriented school can be a useful partner to Network2Work and fill some of the employment gaps identified in the Orange Dot Report.
“It’s not a secret what we need to do, we just need to do it,” Snook said. “We need to get the people to do it, the money to do it, the programs, whatever it’s going to take.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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