Cutting Edge Programs That Deserve Your Support

November/December 1999 - By Pilanthropy Magazine


The National Jobs Partnership - Churches and businesses working together

Chris Mangum, the white executive vice president of C.C. Mangum (a Raleigh, North Carolina construction company), needed workers to fill vacant positions; Donald McCoy, a black pastor in Raleigh, had congregants who needed work. Thus was born the Jobs Partnership of Raleigh, begun in 1996 as an unlikely partnership. Since then it has achieved great success, both in preparing people to achieve self-sufficiency through employment, and in enabling local businesses to fill vacancies with hard-working, reliable personnel.

The partnership unites churches (of many different denominations, serving both black and white parishioners) and businesses (from trucking companies and realtors to florists and hair stylists). The two sorts of institutions form a true partnership: the businesses have jobs to be filled, and the churches train their members to enable them to fill them.

The program prepares workers using a twelve-week training course developed by the churches and a local community college. The course has a dual curriculum. On Monday evenings enrollees learn religious principles, which hold that work is a privilege and can itself be a form of worship. On Thursday evenings they imbibe practical knowledge designed to help them get and keep jobs, such as preparing an effective resume and learning to meet business expectations. During the last nine weeks of the program, students are also offered hands-on work experience at participating businesses.

At this point, the students are considered job-ready and are referred to the partnership’s clearinghouse, which matches them with job vacancies listed by the member businesses. The clearinghouse also coordinates the partnership’s educational programs offering training in literacy and computer skills—all privately financed by the member businesses.

The program is small: it currently trains about 60 workers per year. Its success rate, though, is extraordinarily impressive. According to David Spickard, the partnership’s director of operations, 93 percent of those whom it has trained are currently employed. The success rate results not only from the effective training, but also from the support graduates receive after their formal training ends. The students are sponsored by partnership churches, and students have mentors who continue to advise them through their first two years of employment. Additional on-the-job mentoring is provided at the workplace. In addition, the churches provide a support system that makes it easier for graduates to remain in the workforce by helping them find child care and transportation to and from job sites. Businesses therefore have considerable confidence when they hire partnership trainees. They know that these employees will be getting the kind of assistance that will enable them to get to work regularly and punctually.

The Jobs Partnership is a remarkably effective alliance between two sectors which, regrettably, too often remain at arm’s length from one another: religious institutions (which frequently question the motives of for-profit enterprises), and businesses (which frequently question the relevance of religious doctrine to their hard-headed, bottom-line concerns). In fact, the two sectors have complementary concerns with which each can be aided by the other. The partnership demonstrates how churches can seek to promote the self-reliance and financial self-sufficiency of the poor, by encouraging the most effective welfare program of them all—a job. It also demonstrates that businesses can garner bottom-line benefits because of the efforts of churches to foster responsibility and dedication among their parishioners.

The partnership’s unique approach has won some converts in yet another camp—donors. “We helped them early on with a grant,” explains Tony Pipa, director of philanthropic services at the Triangle Community Foundation in North Carolina. “This is a phenomenal example of a community working together. Folks get trained and learn to become employable. That builds people who are self-sufficient.”

Although the efforts of Raleigh’s jobs partnership are already impressive, exciting developments are now underway that promise to make the partnership more effective. The Jobs Partnership of Raleigh has now evolved into the National Jobs Partnership. Comparable partnerships either have been created or are currently being created in dozens of other cities, including Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Orlando, Chattanooga, Knoxville, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Businesses can do much on their own to help the poor, as can churches, but jobs partnerships—one of which may well be coming soon to a neighborhood near you—suggest that the poor are aided most effectively when businesses and churches act together.

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