Voice and Vocation: A workforce practitioner's guide to building hope, jobs, and opportunity

By Maria S. Kim

For many people steeped in homelessness and poverty, the worst day is every day; and so, before we do the heavy lifting of getting back to work, we may first need to find a way to get back to hope.

For 30 years, Cara Collective has been in the business of creating hope, jobs, and opportunity so that the world can see what they see: the lim

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cara Collective
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737117926

Maria S. Kim

After 13 years in insurance, Maria Kim joined Cara Collective - a Chicago-based social enterprise engaging job seekers, employers, and community partners to break the cycle of poverty through the power and purpose of employment. Cara has helped people secure over 12,000 jobs, with permanent placements at retention rates over 20 points higher than national norms, and with 80% of employed participants transitioning into permanent housing in which their families can thrive. Maria serves on the advisory boards of the First Women's Bank and the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab. She is a 2008 Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow, a 2012 American Marshall Memorial Fellow, a 2018 Vital Voices Global Ambassador Mentee, a former co-chair within Chicago Mayor Lightfoot's 2019 transition team, and a 2020-2021 Presidential Leadership Scholar. Maria holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. At the time this book went to press, Maria was - like the participants Cara Collective has the honor to serve - in her own transition, about to step into a new role as President of REDF - a venture philanthropy in the mission of advancing the field of employment social enterprise. She attributes much of her career growth as a leader to the Cara Collective community, where she knows deep in her heart she found her own voice and vocation.

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VOICE

&

VOCATION

VOICE

&

VOCATION

A workforce practitioner’s guide to building

hope, jobs, and opportunity

MARIA S. KIM

Copyright © 2021 by Maria Kim. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Bare Design.

Interior design by Carlene Vitale.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means except by prior written permission, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in conjunction with an article in a magazine, newspaper, blog, or other publication. While the author has used her best efforts in preparing this book, she makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of its contents. Author specifically disclaims any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by a sales representative or retailer, or via written sales materials.

For inquiries about bulk purchases, permission to use any of the content of this book, or speaking availability, please contact Cara Collective at [e-mail].

Library of Congress CIP data is on file.

ISBN: 978-1-7371179-0-2 (hardcover)

978-1-7371179-1-9 (paperback)

978-1-7371179-2-6 (ebook)

Cara Collective

For Tom

who taught us that every day can be a great day,

if we choose to make it so

Contents

Preface ix

INTRO TO CARA 1

Let’s Get to Work 3

Our Story Begins in the Amygdala 5

OUR PARTICIPANTS 11

You Dream What You See 13

We Are All in Recovery 15

Mirror Exercise 20

Motivations 23

Love Exercise 29

OUR PRACTICE 31

Building Buildings on Birdcages 33

The Front Door Is Open, But the Back Door Is Locked 41

Recruitment Decision Tree 46

Thank You for Your Feedback 51

Workplace Competencies 54

Competency Observations 57

Termination-ish Exercise 58

A Dress Rehearsal Is the Best Rehearsal 63

Weekly Evaluations 66

I Am Because You Are 71

Not Charity, But Strategic Advantage 79

Placement Sales Cycle 82

Employer Credentials 86

We Are in This Together 93

Oh, the Places They’ll Go! 99

Advancement Eligibility 99

Less a Safety Net and More a Trampoline 105

It’s More Art Than Science 113

Artifacts 115

Motivations (Deep Dive) 116

Next Step + Great Wall 121

OUR INVESTMENT 123

If You Build It, They Will Come 125

Follow the Yellow Brick Road 131

Performance Update 132

Social Return on Investment 135

The Business of Doing Good 149

AND NOW 165

I Am Because You Are 167

Always Essential 171

It’s All One Song 177

References 183

Acknowledgments 189

About the Author 191

Preface

In 2019, we laid to rest a hero, a dad, a hubs, and a grandpa; a John Wayne of philanthropy and a friend to all people and their infinite possibility. His name was Tom Owens—an incredible entrepreneur and change-maker who would put all of our collective hustle to shame. Tom was also the founder of Cara—the mission and method we lift up and dissect over the course of this book.

I cried a bunch in the wake of his death—like the messy cry where your tears have tears, and the aching cry where your body is curling in on itself, confused by the tectonic shift it feels underfoot. The shift that is triggered when a giant breathes his last breath and takes his first step into a world beyond the one we know, the one we can see, the one whose air we breathe every up and down day.

Here’s the thing about the tears, though. Amid them, I also laughed at old stories, twinkle-eyed at old memories, and smiled at the warmth I’d occasionally feel when I knew his spirit was by our side.

The moment when this was most palpably true was during the homily at Tom’s funeral service, led beautifully and graciously by Father Hurley of Old St. Patrick’s Church. He anchored his homily in a Cara-ism, ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it—a phrase our students came up with years ago and has evolved into daily parlance at Cara, something we shout out when one of us uses the word try. We use this phrase as a call to action—as an invitation to not give yourself an out before you’ve even gotten started, an invitation to declare affirmatively your intention and then, in true Nike form, just do it.

Father Hurley invoked this Cara-ism to help frame Tom’s legacy story because it embodies all that was, and remains, this giant of a man; a man who went after a mission of helping people experiencing homelessness and poverty to reconnect with gainful employment with a tenacity and a hunger and a persistence that was next-level.

You knew he was on a tear for the mission when he came at you with his yellow legal pad tucked sweetly and tightly into his brown leather briefcase, a little scuffed here and there, and a great metaphor for his rugged determinism. I remember countless sheets of that damn legal pad—riddled with names and ideas and questions and tests. And because his handwriting wasn’t all that great, you couldn’t try to eye-spy it from afar. You would just sit—sometimes in holy terror—waiting for him to get through his whole list.

The last time I saw him before he passed was at his home. What a gift that was. He had lost so much weight by this time that his face was very thin, and yet even at the tender age of eighty-two, he looked incredibly boyish—complete with a mischievous grin at all the right moments and a co-conspirator’s look as we conjured up what was next for the mission that he first built almost thirty years ago.

While we were sitting there at his kitchen table, he asked for his yellow legal pad. Everyone around the table inhaled deeply, knowing all too well what this pad meant. And then he, in true Tom fashion, surprised us all. He wrote down the names and numbers of colleagues we mentioned who were key to recent successes. He called all of them in the days that followed. I was so grateful—as I know they all were—that they had this precious moment with him. We didn’t know it then, but these were the last conversations he had with any members of the Cara staff.

As Father Hurley concluded his homily, he turned the conversation to us and asked: with the passing of leaders like Tom, how will we rise up? As leaders, as friends, as parents, and as community members—how will we rise up and run the trail that Tom and others have paved?

The responsibility of that feels incredibly daunting, and yet absolutely how it should be. Singularly, we may not presume the role of a giant like Tom; but together—oh, together—we can change the world in a way even giants cannot do. And we can take what he dreamed so innovatively and so selflessly three decades ago and bring it to new heights, because we can stand tall on his broad shoulders and put our own backs in it too.

May this book be an invitation for you to walk in the way of a giant, to take what resonates—both in the insights of interventions that have worked, and in the aha moments of those that have flopped. May we learn together, lean on each other, and do what Tom did: be tenacious, be hungry, and fight to deliver solutions that connect people experiencing poverty with hope, jobs, and opportunity.

Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it.

INTRO TO CARA

Let’s Get to Work

Imagine what life would be like if your worst day was on repeat:

the day you were laid off…

the day your partner beat you so hard, you knew it was time to flee…

or the day you lost a loved one, and then you lost yourself.

For many people steeped in homelessness and poverty, the worst day is every day; and so, before we do the heavy lifting of getting back to work, we may first need to find a way to get back to hope.

I’m no fancy subject matter expert—just a reformed insurance professional turned feverishly passionate leader and learner in the complex, hopeful, and challenging space of poverty alleviation. And this book is a labor of love, created by and through leaning into leaders of all kinds—those who wax on about the work, those who are knee deep in it, and those with whom we have the privilege to partner so they may secure and sustain gainful employment.

And though some of us may bear the title, we are not trainers in the classic sense; we are more coaches and locksmiths, on a mission to unlock the strengths and the genius in talent whom private industry sometimes does not fully recognize today.

The truth is, we believe there is an incredible and untapped talent pool in our country—one in the year of COVID-19 our society ironically called essential but had not treated essentially. This pool often comprises people experiencing homelessness and poverty, with keen emphasis on the word experiencing, meaning that their poverty is a situation that they are in, and not a definition of who they are. They too are asset-rich—of skills, and tenacity, and an innate sense of leadership that is often not recognized, and almost always not leveraged, to its fullest and most dynamic potential. Our job is to unlock the strengths they already have and showcase them anew to the world.

In the pages that follow, we share our lessons from the field—mostly driven by this belief that an expanded sense of agency drives an infectious sense of possibility. When you know in your bones that life may serve you a check, but you still have within you a checkmate, then you realize you are in the game too. Over time, you can see that your future has infinitely more options than past injustices or past misfortunes may have led you to believe. Your thoughts then breed actions, those actions then breed outcomes, and the momentum, you realize, feels good to you and looks good to others—modeling behavior for neighbors, friends, and generations to follow.

Our hope is that in sharing some of our lessons with you, we will reinforce our own learnings, continue to see what works given the moment we are in, and together, collectively build our skills so we can bring more of our neighbors to the power and purpose of gainful employment.

As we say at Cara, let’s get to work!

Our Story Begins in the Amygdala

The amygdala is the part of the brain where the intersection of head and heart reside—the beautiful nexus of our rational views of the world and the emotional undercurrents beneath them.

I chose to work at Cara because it is all amygdala, all the time. In a nutshell, Cara helps people experiencing homelessness and poverty to get and keep good jobs and, more importantly, get and keep great hope in the process. We do this in four key ways: we rebuild, we train, we place, and we coach.

We rebuild by focusing on the person, often before we dive into who they are as a professional.

We train by layering new job skills on top of that rebuilt esteem to ready individuals for reentry into the workforce. We even stress test those skills learned in the classroom by applying them in a transitional job working for us in our own social enterprises.

We place candidates in gainful employment, jobs that they can eventually forge into careers.

And finally, we coach, knowing it’s not just about getting a job, it’s about keeping it over the long term and building that momentum for the future.

This book intends to walk you through some of the ways in which we do this, through a sequence of concentric lenses:

our participants (the people experiencing poverty whom we have the honor to serve), whose stories and strength largely informed our roots in deep social-emotional skill-lifting and the ways in which we rebuild;

the practice we have built over time, which has flexed in its design and delivery to meet the demands of a shifting market and a shifting population;

the investment proposition and the ways in which this organization has diversified its revenue portfolio as it has grown; and

our point of view on the future—on where we believe we can have a deeper impact the more we understand our own power to influence a culture of inclusion in the workplace.

You will see three tools used to help support how you may want to interact with this book over time:

INSIGHTS

Lessons we have learned, often the hard way, of how to bring this work to life

ACTIVITIES

Discrete exercises or activities we have stumbled upon or put in place, to deliberately bring these insights to the surface

SIDEBARS

A mixture of everything from fun facts to more probative