PROVIDENCE, R.I. – With unemployment rising and jobs becoming harder to find, the Rhode Island Indian Council is offering training and job placement programs to indigenous people in four eastern states.
The RIIC, which was established in Providence in 1975 to serve the economic and social needs of local American Indians, is looking for people in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware, interested in upgrading skills or learning new ones, and seeking employment in some of the fast growing segments of the 21st century marketplace.
The council has an $800,000 two-year contract under the Work Investment Act, a federal employment program funded through the Department of Labor. The funding is part of a special fund set aside for American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians.
“What the contract basically calls for is for us to service roughly 250 Native people and to put roughly 188 of those clients into employment each year. As you can imagine with unemployment rates rising, it’s an incredible challenge,” said Harry Hazard, RIIC’s deputy director.
The Indian council’s offices outside Rhode Island are called the Connecticut Indian Council, the Delaware Indian Council and the New Jersey Indian Council, but they all operate under RIIC’s umbrella, Hazard explained.
When Hazard joined the RIIC staff last July, he reviewed the WIA program and strategized ways to reach the program’s goals in the new economy.
“I kind of took a look at what we had committed to and kind of kept my ears to the ground as to what the state was doing to try to improve the employment climate and what became clear was the state realized it needed skilled workers, so they found training programs for high growth, high demand industries, such as marine technology, hospitality, the medical industry, just to name a few.”
Those programs are run by Learning Gate, a private company that develops curricula to address those high demand segments of the job market. The council now sends its clients to classes there where students get 21st century online training.
“It’s basically a series of computer-based training using training technology. The student goes in and actually goes through the learning with two computer terminals. One is a hands-on terminal where the student goes through different aspects of the job, for example, if they’re doing secretarial training, they’ll prepare correspondence, and the other terminal is an online instructor. In addition each classroom is like lab so there’s a live supervisor that monitors the students,” Hazard said.
RIIC is working with local businesses and industries to match clients with the job needs of the market.
“We had a client who was a forklift operator and he had difficulty finding a job. We did some brainstorming and discovered a company here that uses forklifts, so I made contact and went and did a presentation and he was hired,” Hazard said.
Going one step further to assure the client’s job, the council made an innovative offer that was hard for the company to refuse.
“We said for a period of six-to-eight weeks we’d pay a portion of the employees’ salary. That way the company could try him out and see if it was a good fit. We recently got his 60-day job evaluation and he got rave reviews.”
Now the council is looking for more clients.
“If you hang out a shingle that says you’re an employment training center, they’re a dime a dozen. The bottom line is most of us are looking for jobs. We really want to emphasize our job training and placement program,” Hazard said.
RIIC’s job training and placement program is open to all American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians living in the four states as long as they have tribal validation. Indians can be members of state or federally recognized tribes.
Those interested in the training and job placement program can call (401) 781-1098 in Rhode Island; (860) 885-1277 in Connecticut; and (201) 529-1183 in New Jersey and Delaware.
“We’ve been successful in meeting the outcomes each year, but the program has changed over the years and, from my understanding, with this two-year cycle that ends in June 2010, entering into employment is the main measure,” Hazard said. “That’s the tough one that Indian country is faced with because nationally the unemployment rate is so high and job opportunities are so low that it’s a struggle to achieve those outcomes, but the stress is on education and training and the outcomes will be successful.”
