{"id":4835,"date":"2014-11-04T09:15:29","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T15:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gnof.org\/?p=4835"},"modified":"2014-11-04T09:15:29","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T15:15:29","slug":"goodwill-industries-helps-ex-offenders-reenter-workforce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/gnof\/goodwill-industries-helps-ex-offenders-reenter-workforce\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodwill Industries Helps Ex-Offenders Reenter Workforce"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/175305569&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" height=\"166\" width=\"100%\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Goodwill Industries provides a wide range of training, placement and workforce development services to help veterans, people with disabilities or a lack of education, and ex-offenders re-entering the workforce develop the skills needed to find jobs.<\/p>\n<p>After serving two stints in local jails, Ezimbalist Pollard wasn\u2019t an ideal candidate for a job.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was never a bad person,\u201d explains Pollard, \u201cbut when you make bad choices, people look at you as a bad person.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pollard wanted to start his life over, including his work life, and at Goodwill Industries, he found just the thing to help.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey don\u2019t judge what you\u2019ve done to what you trying to do now,\u2019\u201d he says.\u00a0 \u201cI guess that\u2019s why they call it Second Chance.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Goodwill\u2019s program for ex-offenders \u2013 Second Chance &#8212; recruits folks recently released from prison.\u00a0 Ex-offenders go through an orientation and are assigned a case manager who finds out what they need: is it computer skills to apply for jobs? financial literacy classes? GED classes? job experience? training? Whatever it is, Second Chance wants to eliminate the barriers that get in the way of returning to non-prison life.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou come in here, you get with a worker, and then they start preparing you for reentering the workforce,\u201d says Pollard. \u201cThey get you mentally prepared for the workforce. They let you know it doesn\u2019t matter what you\u2019ve done up to this point; it\u2019s what you do moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pollard had experience driving trucks and selling cars, but now he had a criminal record and had to start over \u2013 at the bottom, he says. He takes me to see where it all started.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe taking a stroll down the main hallway, and we going to the warehouse which is in back of the other building.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He leads me through the Goodwill store and the staff break room to where he worked five days a week, eight hours a day, making huge bails of clothes which weighed between fifteen and eighteen hundred pounds.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is where we started at, this is what we call the warehouse.\u201d He points to a huge bailing machine. \u201cThat\u2019s the clothes they don\u2019t need no more or don\u2019t use no more. The trucks bring them in from different stores, and what they do is bail them up and send them off to be recycled.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The quota was five bails a day. Mr. Pollard holds the record at thirteen. He worked hard and eventually, the staff at Second Chance came to him and said,<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI know you been working hard, I know you want something different.\u00a0 And I know you like being around here, but they might have an opportunity that we could come up with that would more benefit you,\u201d recalls Pollard. \u201cAnd what they said was all you have to do is ace the interview. Prepare yourself so you can ace the interview because it\u2019s a big process, a lot of people are going to interview for the job, but the only way you going to get it this job is to stand out.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The job was in transportation, and Mr. Pollard wanted it. He read up on everything about the position and the employer \u2013 which we can\u2019t name in this story for confidentiality reasons. Three thousand people applied, and in the first round of selection,<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey only chose ten. Five that was supposed to be there, two that needed an opportunity, and three that was qualified.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Those two slots Mr. Pollard is talking about \u2013 for two people who needed an opportunity \u2013 Goodwill worked with the employer to create those positions.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was one of the two that deserved the opportunity,\u201d says Pollard.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHad he gone in and applied for this job that had 3000 applicants, they never would have looked at him. They would have looked at the box,\u201d says Sabrina Written, Goodwill Industry\u2019s director of Public Relations. The box she\u2019s talking about is the one on most job applications, which asks, \u201chave you ever been convicted of a crime?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cImmediately, for a lot of candidates, they will not consider that,\u201d explains Written. \u201cIt really takes a community to change that.\u00a0 And through this program and trying to build a coalition of employers that will support those second chances, we hope to make that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Clearly, it\u2019s happened for Ezimbalist Pollard \u2013 who loves his job and how getting that job changed him.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI always been a hot head,\u201d admits Pollard, \u201cand it was hindering everything about me. It was hindering my relationships because I was so selfish about me that nobody else mattered. And by having a second opportunity at life, it gave me the made me the chance to look at and reevaluate everything about me.\u00a0 I like the person I am now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Written by Eve Abrams for the Community IMPACT Series and produced by WWNO in partnership with the Greater New Orleans Foundation. To learn more about Goodwill Industries, click <a title=\"Goodwill Industries\" href=\"http:\/\/www.goodwill.org\/?gclid=CKe7kLCe4cECFTKCMgoddQwAjQ\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Goodwill Industries provides a wide range of training, placement and workforce development services to help veterans, people with disabilities or a lack of education, and ex-offenders re-entering the workforce develop the skills needed to find jobs. After serving two stints in local jails, Ezimbalist Pollard wasn\u2019t an ideal candidate for a job. \u201cI was never&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":4836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[677,30],"tags":[666,733,734,683,736,735,329,100],"class_list":["post-4835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-front-page-small-feature","category-our-community","tag-eve-abrams","tag-goodwill","tag-goodwill-industries","tag-radio-segment","tag-second-chance","tag-veteran","tag-workforce","tag-wwno"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Goodwill Industries Helps Ex-Offenders Reenter Workforce | Greater New Orleans Foundation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/gnof\/goodwill-industries-helps-ex-offenders-reenter-workforce\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Goodwill Industries Helps Ex-Offenders Reenter Workforce | Greater New Orleans Foundation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Goodwill Industries provides a wide range of training, placement and workforce development services to help veterans, people with disabilities or a lack of education, and ex-offenders re-entering the workforce develop the skills needed to find jobs. 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