SJC Bridges

Upcoming Trainings!

Bridges Out of Poverty Day One Training: 

Thursday, April 18.

This training is a comprehensive approach to understanding the dynamics that cause and maintain poverty from the individual to systems level.  Bridges Out of Poverty uses the lens of economic class and provides concrete tools for a community to prevent, reduce, and alleviate poverty.

Learn about proven concepts, strategies and approaches. This training assists employers, community organizations, social service agencies, and individuals gain insight and strategies.   This training assists employers, community organizations, social service agencies, and individuals gain insight and strategies.

Day One training is a prerequisite for the Getting Ahead facilitator training.

“…I would highly recommend this training for anyone wanting a better understanding of what it really means to live in poverty…”

Jim Williams, Executive Director, Habitat for Humanity

Getting Ahead Facilitator Training: Friday, April 26.

Getting Ahead in a Just Gettin’ By World is a program that supports people in poverty to create their own plan for stability.  It embeds the concepts of Bridges into a co-investigated format with trained facilitators.

Bring this powerful program to your community by learning how to facilitate Getting Ahead.  You will hear from seasoned facilitators and Getting Ahead Graduates, and gain insights and strategies into how to run a high quality program.

For more information, call 574-246-0533 or email events@sjcbridges.org.

We need your match!

Community Foundation Grants $40,000.  Now we need your match. 

The Community Foundation of St. Joseph County has awarded SJC Bridges a $40,000 grant to launch our Employer Resource Network. Like all Community Foundation grants, this is a match – which means that we need your dollars to help us get this program off the ground.

What could be a better gift to hundreds of workers in St. Joseph and Elkhart counties than a program that will support them to stay employed, build their resources and achieve greater stability?  We know we’ll also be impacting CEOs, Human Resources and other management staff through our efforts as well that can result in workplace changes like the kind at Rhino Foods.

So every dollar you donate means another dollar we’ll receive from the Community Foundation.  This is the way Nancy King, our Board Chair and business leader, puts it:

Our community cannot sustain itself unless we address and significantly reduce the amount of poverty that exists in our county. More importantly, as a human being, I believe that we must make it possible for individuals who live in poverty in our community to achieve self-sufficiency. The Bridges Out of Poverty process is an effective strategy to accomplish both of these goals.

To donate, just go to our webpage and click on the donate link.  Or send us a check to:

Questions?  Give Bonnie Bazata a call at 574-339-1232.

South Bend Tribune

Read more about the innovative Employer Resource Network we are launching in 2013 in the South Bend Tribune. An article by Gene Stowe.

Employer Resource Network

On November 5th, we passed our four year anniversary as an up-and-running nonprofit. It felt like a huge milestone with much accomplished and many challenges ahead.

Over the last four years, SJC Bridges has impacted thousands of people by offering new approaches that have increased the motivation, skills, and leadership for people in poverty to move to self-sufficiency, enhanced the capacity for agencies and individuals serving the poor, and brought people together across lines of economic class and race in greater numbers and more depth than many other programs.

This fall has been a period of transitions and some good hard work. We’d like to give you an update and explain why you haven’t heard as much from us lately - and why we need your support now more than ever as we launch an exciting new program direction, our Employer Resource Network or ERN.

What we have found is that while many resources are needed for someone to leave poverty, it ultimately comes down to employment. But what we often fail to see is that living in poverty means that keeping a job can be much more difficult than getting a job.

Across the country, there is a new model emerging called Employer Resource Networks (ERN) that are proving capable of helping low-income, entry level workers not just keep jobs, but build stability that can be the pathway to self-sufficiency.

• Look for an article soon in the South Bend Tribune’s Business Section by Gene Stowe. 

It also brings valuable community resources directly to the working person, reducing “agency time,” or the time, expertise, and energy to discover and connect with assistance when it is needed.

And that isn’t the only problem they solve. They have proven to lower turnover rates and absenteeism, thus strengthening the employer’s workforce and their bottom line. Most ERNS show a 90%+ retention rate for those served by the program even when the overall company retention rate may be lower. The SOURCE based in Grand Rapids, reports a 290% return on investment.

It also engages employers to better understand the challenges and strengths of low-income workers, and as a result some become champions to address poverty in their community. Rhino Foods is one of those companies, and you can watch this 5 minute video to see the difference Working Bridges in Vermont has made through their ERN program.

Our partner in 2013 will be Specialized Staffing and its CEO Jacqueline Barton and her staff. Jacqueline, who also serves on the boards of both the Chamber of Commerce of St. Joseph County and the Greater Elkhart Chamber of Commerce, explained why she wants her company to lead this project:

Once I attended the Bridges Out of Poverty workshop, I had my ‘aha moment’ and gained valuable insights into why our best efforts were often not enough. Now we are changing the way we do business for better outcomes. I know this will improve my company’s performance. But what equally inspires me is that I can help bring an effective process to other companies in our area – and this is in my mind, the surest way to address poverty.

So starting in 2013, we’ll be launching our own ERN.  But we need your support.

The Cost of Living Segregated Lives

 The Cost of Living Segregated Lives                        

 by Bonnie Bazata

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about income segregation, how it operates and what it means.

Fundamentally, I think it is one of the most significant barriers to a thriving democracy and a

health community.

Poverty concentrates.  So in South Bend, where one in four people live in poverty, it isn’t evenly

spread across all zip codes.  Instead it gets concentrated so that we have contiguous blocks of

people in poverty, some in deep poverty, so just above the threshold. It means we may we live

only miles apart, but the economic separation of

our lives creates a kind of geography of

difference that can be as extreme as living

worlds apart.

To read the full article please click the link twice  The cost of living segregated lives.