Milestone for City Council Jobs Program

The Jobs to Build On program has trained and placed 30.000 New Yorkers into careers

When Dupreme Murphy graduated from high school, he thought he was set. He had returned to school because he wanted to get a decent job and stay out of trouble, but more than six months had gone by and he was still waiting for a job offer.
 
After three days of security training at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, he was placed into a job at Summit Security, providing security services around the city. “Restoration Corporation didn’t only help me get a job. They helped me with life, period,” says Murphy. 

Today, Murphy and 30,000 New Yorkers are in a stable career and able to support themselves and their families, thanks to Jobs to Build On (JtBO), a program funded by the City Council and administered by the Consortium for Worker Education. JtBO funds job training and placement programs at dozens of community organizations that serve workers across the five boroughs. The program reached the job placement milestone this year.

Dupreme Murphy was trained and placed into a career through the City Council's Jobs to Build On program

Two decades ago, CWE partnered with the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus to create JtBO. The goal was to support workers in New York City neighborhoods with crisis levels of unemployment, particularly among Black and Latino young men.
 
Jobs to Build On is rooted in established community organizations that New Yorkers know and trust. Residents are used to coming to these organizations for assistance with housing or child care and, with funding from JtBO, they can get trained for a career in the same building. 
   
Organizations that had previously competed for limited government grants are knitted together by the program and have used the collective funding to collaborate and support workers around the city.

Lashawn Edwards and 30,000 other New Yorkers have found economic security through Jobs to Build On career training.

Lashawn Edwards came to STRIVE, another JtBO partner, looking for help getting a job, but came away with a new confidence in herself that empowered her within and outside the workplace. Edwards grew up with an abusive parent and later experienced domestic violence in her marriage. When she found STRIVE, she was living in transitional housing. She wanted to work so she could move into an apartment with her three young sons and take control of her life.

After completing the STRIVE program, she climbed the career ladder before becoming a program coordinator at the New York City Department of Investigation. 

With her new career and renewed self-esteem, Edwards has moved out of transitional housing and is looking forward to the future. As a survivor of domestic violence, Edwards says that STRIVE helped her gain the confidence that she needed to succeed in the workplace, and in life. “They give you the encouragement that you need,” she says. “People have to break away from low self-esteem and fear. This program gives them the motivation they need to push forward.” 
 
The strength and breadth of the CWE network is an asset to all partner organizations, who can draw on the expertise and programs of other partners. For instance, when Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow graduate Sinad Wadsworth was interested in a career change, the organization was able to refer her to another JtBO partner, Nontraditional Employment for Women. She is now working in the unionized building trades.

The uneven economic recovery from the COVID pandemic and rising cost of living has left many New Yorkers looking for help. With the City Council’s continued funding for Jobs to Build On, the services they need to get a good career are right around the corner.