Pete Baker ran his own business rehabbing houses for more than 20 years, and, he admits, he might not have hired someone who had done time in prison. But for the past six years, he’s run a job-training program for ex-offenders, and he’s learned a lot himself.
“I might have had a problem before. But that would’ve just been my bias, I guess,” Baker said recently as his students in the building maintenance program at the Michael Barlow Center threaded wiring through conduit in a mock construction house.
“But the motivation to work, the work ethic of these students is as good as anyone I used to hire,” he said. “They’ve made mistakes, but now they want to make a living. If they’re here, they want to move on. They don’t want to go back.”
The Barlow Center is a program of St. Leonard’s Ministries, which has aided former felons in finding work since the 1950s from its offices on Chicago’s Near West Side. St. Leonard’s work with ex-cons began when the Rev. James Jones, an Episcopal priest, who served as a chaplain at Chicago’s Bridewell Jail, began finding odd jobs for inmates upon their release, Executive Director Lynne Cunningham said.
Today, the Green Building Maintenance Program, as well as the Culinary Arts program, has sent hundreds of graduates into area kitchens and building trades and janitorial jobs.
The program is supported by Chicago Tribune Holiday Giving, a campaign of Chicago Tribune Charities, a McCormick Foundation fund.
Tashawnda Fort was in the sixth week of the 10-week maintenance program and found the carpentry, electrical and plumbing work she’s learned to be a far cry from the jobs she’d held since she was released from a three-year sentence for a drug crime.
The felony conviction has followed her as she applied for jobs. But she hopes that her new skills, as well as interviewing skills and job leads from the Barlow Center, will make employers look past her record.
“I have not seen one application, ever, that doesn’t ask” whether the applicant is a felon, said Fort, 29, a mother of two. She hopes to find work as a janitor and to continue training in building trades until she can become a building inspector.
“Give me a chance. The mistakes I made, I’m a different person now,” she said. “I’ve got two kids. I need a job.”
The Barlow Center has just six staff positions. The building maintenance courses begin with the new students gingerly tearing down the 192-square-foot “house” built by the previous class. Then the students rebuild their own, framing the walls, installing wiring, plumbing and siding, then finishing the interior.
The budget for the program is lean: each 2-by-4 might be used four or five times, Baker said. Culinary program students cook meals for recently released offenders who participate in residential programs at St. Leonard’s, as well as their classmates in the building program.
With more funding, Cunningham said she could provide more staffing to find job placements for graduates.
Cunningham said that many former offenders, who leave jail or prison with little money and daunting job prospects, struggle to get to classes daily without cars. The center provides CTA passes to some students, with the understanding that they try to repay the program with money from their first paychecks.
“Even though those checks might be small, we’ve never had a problem collecting from the graduates,” she said. “There is a real sense that they need to help out the next guy to come along.”
For more information on Chicago Tribune Charities, go to chicagotribune.com/holidaygiving.
