This is a perspective of a community center staff person who made a GOALS referral. We always appreciate it when people share, their perspectives on GOALS!
Probably last November I had a young man come into my office. He had been coming into our Oaklawn Community Center daily and I had been gradually getting to know him over the few weeks prior. When he came into my office that day he was in poor spirits as he had been all the other days I had seen him. He told me he was living with his mother because he didn’t have a choice, he hadn’t worked in quite some time and he struggled to hold down a job when he did get one. Because of the fact he hadn’t had steady income he also had no transportation so he was foot or had to find someone’s car to borrow to job search. In talking to this gentleman I was somewhat overwhelmed by his barriers which extended even beyond what I have listed.
Of course I immediately thought of GOALS and told him about your program and asked if he would like to be referred in. I can still see him sitting in my office that day and he said “I’d be willing to give that a try”. He came back to visit the next week and shared that he had been in for his first appointment, and there was a small smile when he said it. A few weeks later he stopped being a regular every day person at our center and I wondered what happened. I found out the answer a few weeks ago when he came walking into our building, his clothes were the same as they had been in the past with holes in them, but there was a big smile on his face, he was happy, and he stood straighter. He immediately started sharing that he had been too busy to come in to our building because he was in the Bridges program (I’m still not quite sure what this is, however whatever it is it must be amazing). His level of confidence was something I had never seen in the past. He shared what he had been doing but something that must have stood out to him is, in the class they had told him he could walk into places he was interested in working and inquire if there were job openings, and he said that is exactly what he had been doing after class (I don’t know what you guys did to this guy but the transformation in self-esteem is amazing). The frosting on the cake to our customer though was he received a suit. He said he had never owned a suit in his life and the smile on his face when he told me about it was huge. He was so proud.
A few days after he came in to tell about the suit, he came back with pictures of himself in his suit to show it off. He told me how much he appreciated me putting him into your program, I am passing this along because all I did was refer him. You guys are absolutely making a difference in people’s lives and I know we don’t hear it enough in our line of work, so I wanted to pass along our customer’s thanks.