Better Together and rehabilitating women with no opportunities

I got the bus wrong. That is the honest first fact of this assignment, and it set the tone for the rest of the morning. I had pictured a job fair the way a nineteen-year-old pictures one, which is to say a gymnasium, folding tables, banners for companies you have heard of, and a lot of lanyards. What I found, after walking the last half mile because I misjudged the route, was a church annex on the west side of Jacksonville with the air conditioning running hard against a May morning that had already given up on being pleasant.

Inside there were tables, so I was not entirely wrong. A woman near the door checked me against a clipboard, decided I was harmless, and pointed me toward the coffee, which was bad in the specific way that church coffee is bad, thin and too hot at the same time. The room filled slowly. Most of the people arriving were women. A few came in work clothes already, as if the interview and the shift were the same appointment, which for one or two of them it turned out to be.

I ended up talking for most of an hour with one of them, a woman maybe a decade older than me who had come out of the county system over the winter. She was careful with what she told me, and I tried to be careful with how I listened. She said the hardest part had not been the time inside. It was the morning after, when the paperwork ran out and nobody was waiting with a next step. She had a phone with a cracked screen and a list of places that had already said no.

It was the morning after, when the paperwork ran out and nobody was waiting with a next step.

Better Together, the organization running the morning, calls this side of its work Better Jobs. The mechanics are plain enough. They hold hiring events inside churches, they line up employers who have agreed in advance to look past a record or a long gap on a resume, and they put the two sides in a room together. The founder, Megan Rose, built the group out of a state-funded effort down in Naples around 2015, and it has since grown into something that runs job events across a couple dozen states. I had read the figures on the plane. They meant very little to me until I watched one handshake.

What the state does well, or at least does reliably, is hold people and then release them. Whatever happens on the far side of the gate gets left to whoever shows up, and often nobody does. The women I met had no use for sympathy. What they wanted was a shift schedule and a bus that actually ran to it. Beyond that, someone willing to make the first call to a manager on their behalf. The distance between a kind word and a phone call is roughly the distance this program spends its days trying to cover.

※

There is a second half to Better Together that I had not understood until that morning, and it is the half that gives the first one its point. The organization started with children. Its Better Families program asks a parent in a bad stretch to place their kids, voluntarily, with a host family from a local church, for a spell that tends to run about six weeks. The parent keeps custody the whole time. The idea is to catch a family just before it slides into foster care, which is a thing easy to fall into and very hard to climb back out of.

For a woman leaving incarceration or coming up through recovery, the two programs fold into each other in a way that is obvious once someone points at it. A job is how you get your kids back, or how you keep them. One of the volunteers explained, without my asking, that the parents in the host-family program are working a plan the entire time, and that the plan almost always has work sitting at the center of it. Sober was a word people used quietly, in passing, the way you might mention the weather.

I watched a woman fill out an application at a table near the window with a toddler asleep against her shoulder. She wrote in block capitals, slowly, and stopped twice to shift the kid's weight to her other arm. Nobody hurried her. A man from a warehouse company sat across the table and waited, and when she finished he read the page, nodded, and wrote something on the back of a card before he handed it over. I have no idea what he wrote. She read it twice before she put it in her bag.

I had come expecting a certain amount of theater, the kind of uplift that ends up on a grant report. There was almost none of it. The organization is privately funded on purpose, someone told me, so that it answers to donors and churches rather than to a state contract, and whatever you make of that arrangement, it does leave the room feeling less like a program and more like a favor being called in among neighbors. People were tired. The coffee stayed bad.

※

Near noon the woman I had talked to first came past me on her way out. She had an interview lined up the next morning, a real one, for a job stacking and sorting at a distribution center somewhere off Pritchard Road. She showed me the address written on the back of a card, same as the others, and asked me which bus she should take. I did not know. I had gotten the bus wrong on the way in, remember. She laughed at that, which was generous of her, and went to ask the woman with the clipboard, who did know.