Today, for our fifth installment in our Summer in a Safe City Campaign (#NYCSafeSummer) grantee highlights, we want to introduce another one of our grantees, New York Cares. New York Cares is the city’s largest volunteer management organization, running volunteer programs for 1,350 nonprofits, city agencies, and public schools. The organization addresses critical problems plaguing communities across New York City by organizing a large group of volunteers to tackle these issues. Their model is to partner with a non-profit and identify what are the systemic issues afflicting the non-profit’s community. After much research and planning, they create programs curated to fight the problems. A group of volunteers are then trained and deployed to help the nonprofit with bettering their community.
To tackle the rates of recidivism for the formerly incarcerated, New York Cares has created Career Preparation programs. The formerly incarcerated face many barriers when they reenter their communities and attempt to rejoin the workforce. Ex-inmates face a large amount of state and federal restrictions on employment eligibility and limits on their access to public housing.2 Dependent on how long each individual’s sentence was, the individual may find him or herself not properly equipped for the workforce; or his or her’s set of skills are either outdated or inadequate for the demands of the current state of the workforce.
Our grant supports New York Cares’ Career Preparation for the Formerly Incarcerated programs which consists of training workshops that cover resume and cover letter writing, interviewing skills, job readiness workshops, and GED tutoring. These workshop trainings last for two weeks–with hours long seminars to help prepare these individuals for the workforce. By the end of the workshop training sessions, the participants are more confident in their abilities and preparedness to find employment.
Your donation to our Summer in a Safe City Campaign will help supply the workshops with the quintessential tools needed to strengthen the abilities necessary for the formerly incarcerated to re-enter the current workforce. Help one more person combat the risks (poverty, re-arrests, and imprisonment) associated with unemployment. With the help of New York Cares and the Reisenbach Foundation’s grant, these individuals will have greater chances of finding employment and thus make New York a better and safer place.
Click here to donate.
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