Peoria's Community Transformation Ministry is working to turn poverty into prosperity.
The faith-based program has several vital ingredients, including green energy jobs training and boosting financial literacy.
Tim Shelley recently spoke with Jobs Partnership Peoria career coach Tyrone Brown and Reverend Tony Pierce of Heaven's View Christian Fellowship Church about their work.
TYRONE BROWN: It's meant so much to me, this program. And what we do is such a benefit to the community and to the city of Peoria. It's faith-based, first of all, and our mission is to help those that are unemployed, underemployed, those transitioning from incarceration. Basically, any and everyone who is reaching out for help, and they're struggling within our communities. That's our goal, is to help them.
TIM SHELLEY: What kind of jobs specifically are you training them for? How do you how do you go about helping people?
TYRONE BROWN: Well, for a specific job or trade, we have a solar panel installation training that is taking place on the campus. Also at ICC, which we are affiliated with.
So outside of the solar, there many of other positions in jobs, semi-skilled and skilled labor, jobs, also administrative, anything that your skill set requires, we can find you work in that area.
So with this with the solar piece, and the other jobs, our goal is to help you find and not only just find, but be able to work the job for a long period of time, until you decide, you know, you may want a career change or for a better opportunity.
But it's on your terms, not the terms of the employer, where a lot of cases in the past, we are not prepared mentally, you know, to deal with situations on the job which causes us to lose jobs, you know, have attendance issues, not show up, or attitude issues while you own a job. So many of our workshops are designed to curtail that activity on the job site.
TIM SHELLEY: And really help people be better employees and be able to retain those jobs.
TYRONE BROWN: That's the goal. That's the goal. Now, outside of just employment, there are many of other things that young men and women throughout Peoria struggle with, you know, just consider they have situations with housing, addiction, you know, even being able to deal with the trauma they've experienced in their lifetime, and not having an outlet to be able to deal with that.
You know, what we can do, we provide them with other resources and services, referrals and things of that nature, through our network of community, activity wise, place like churches, community centers, schools, things of that nature. So we tried to, you know, spread our wings, so to speak, and be able to contact and develop relationships with those other entities, as well. So we can try to work hand in hand, you know, to help.
TIM SHELLEY: So it's gonna be multifaceted. I mean, if you're dealing with a housing issue or an addiction issue, that's obviously going to impact job training. So you can't just look at it through this narrow lens; it's got to be wide.
TYRONE BROWN: Exactly. That's what our vision is. Because we've seen many times where people do get the jobs, but (not) being able to hold on to them, despite living life on life's terms.
You know, I see it all the time in my community. And my passion is to really help those turn other side up, or live on this side of the fence, so to speak. So we do reach out to a lot of people that's been involved with criminal activity, have addiction issues, and things of that nature. We really want to help them and try to do what we can to, to save them from the streets and the violence that's been really taking place here in Peoria. So we have a grand mission. And we're not done yet.
TIM SHELLEY: And part two of that, I guess, is the financial piece.
REV. TONY PIERCE: Yeah, that's the Financial Opportunity Center. And perhaps Ty and I both can speak to that. I'll let Ty go first. Because obviously, when it comes to employment, which he was speaking on, from the standpoint of Jobs Partnership, the Financial Opportunity Center provides services that can help people pre and post securement of employment. And so maybe Ty might want to start us off there.
TYRONE BROWN: The FOC. It was developed for the simple reason that, okay, there's unemployment, you haven't worked in quite some time. Now you get a job, okay. Now, do you budget your money correctly? Do you take full advantage of the money that you do make, right? It's one thing to make $12 an hour, and struggle. But it's another to make more than that, $20 an hour, but if you're not budgeting correctly, you're gonna still struggle.
So part of the reason financial center was developed was to add another component of jobs Partnership, which is financial literacy. And we have a great young lady on staff, Mr. Vicki Eckhart. She's our financial coach. And she has many years of a background in finance. And to be quite honest with you, she loves the jobs, she does it very well. And I see the benefit of her having her own staff.
These people are learning how to budget their money, they're learning how to repair and rebuild their credit. So they put themselves in a better position to buy homes and vehicles and cars and things of that nature. And that's part of what the financial also does is, help create help. The participants pretty much live out a lot of their dreams.
REV. TONY PIERCE: I'll add to it, because even though we've limited the conversation around our apprenticeship, Peoria and the Financial Opportunity Center as well, there is more to (it). Our brand is Community Transformation Ministry.
Poverty is a market based reality. So let me first say that not-for-profits need to be involved in helping people, and Jobs Partnership Peoria and the Financial Opportunity Center are not-for-profit entities that are involved in doing that. But not-for-profits alone cannot and will not solve the problem of poverty, because poverty is a market based reality. And so you've got to involve the market, which is business, and other entities that are part of serving the community to solve the problem.
So we do have our not-for-profits involved. Our church community, which is a not for profit as well, our church is praying all the time for this, the success of this.
But then you have to have government involved, because government creates regulations that create the environment for the businesses to operate in.
And so within the video, it will refer to something called CEJA, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. That regulation took us years of negotiation to get passage. It just got passed in the General Assembly in September and signed into law by Governor Pritzker. So I was part of the negotiating team that worked on that for years. One of the other members from our local community here that was part of the negotiating team was Tracy Fox. The Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition consists of over 200 member organizations, but there was a 20 person negotiating team. So we were two of the members of those 20 people, but there were a lot of other people beyond that, that got this done.
So you need the regulation done. That's one part in the organizing and environmental communities as well as other communities were involved in the negotiations, labor, clean energy companies, utilities, etc. So we got all that done. So in addition to solving this problem, power, you have to have the nonprofits and you have to have the government involved in the regulation. And then you have to have business involved. Because if you train people for jobs and there are no jobs, you've just set them up for failure. And they will resist training after that, because they'll say 'I went to training and you didn't even help me with a job.'
So as we were putting together this model, which took us many, many years to put together, we looked at why a number of the existing training programs out there didn't succeed. And that was because on one hand, you have one set of people, which are typically social workers involved in the training, you have a whole different set of people, which are business owners involved in the distribution of jobs, these groups many times don't know one another.
And the business owners care more about profit and the bottom line. If they don't believe what you're doing, it's gonna contribute to that they're disinterested in what you're doing. So we looked at as we were putting our model together and said, 'Okay, we've got to own some of these businesses.'
And so today, we own our own solar marketing company, our own solar design building construction company, and we own our own electric vehicle company. And that's those were for the purposes that we can control, hiring to a degree and also model hiring of folks that come out of this programming to show other businesses that they make good employees and help with the bottom line, and you can trust them and hire them too.
So you need all of this to make it work. And so when we say, Jobs Partnership was very necessary to make it work, when we talked about the Financial Opportunity Center, which is very necessary to make it work. Also necessary to make it work is the regulatory work that is involved in getting the regulations in place. And then also necessary to make it work is our businesses that have an affinity or love for or interest in hiring people that come from these backgrounds, with the knowledge that these people can help your businesses to succeed.
This interview was condensed and lightly edited for length and clarity.
