Allan Appel Photo
Anthony Proto, who has a degree in economics and math from Southern Connecticut State University, spent time in jail for narcotics possession back in 2000. He has relapsed a good number of times since then, worked for five years with an oil company, relapsed again.
Proto has been clean for six months. He was ready to reenter the work force. All he needed was to renew confidence in himself, brush up on how to present himself, and get practical tips and leads.
Proto gives a congratulatory smooch to fellow graduate Timeka Daniels.
He got all that and more — and marked it with a dozen colleagues Thursday afternoon as Proto and the other graduates STRIVE, a longtime job readiness program that has become part of the statewide Career Resources Inc. (CRI), Inc., celebrated completing turning to new chapters in their lives.
The optimistic ceremonies unfolded at City Hall’s aldermanic chambers before family, friends, and admirers. The event included a mayoral address and charge to the graduates.
“Sometimes the things that happen in your lives, as in mine, can take away the energy to move forward and hold you back for the rest of your life,” said Mayor Toni Harp, who lost to Justin Elicker in a Democratic mayoral primary but is moving forward as the candidate of the Working Families Party in the Nov. 5 mayoral general election.
“There will be people who will yap at your heels to dissuade you from moving forward,” she said. “What you believe about yourself is your protection.”
She hailed the graduates, read an official proclamation acknowledging STRIVE/CRI’s contribution especially to helping back to the workforce people who have been incarcerated, and predicted the graduates will go on soon to become mentors for others coming after them.
Graduates Timeka Daniels and Danny Turkvan.
Among other graduates of the program were a half dozen folks currently enrolled in the New Haven Job Corp and others, like Timeka Daniels who participate in New Haven’s Project Fresh Start, the city’s prison re-entry program.
“I wasn’t ready for the STRIVE program the first time,” said Daniels, who was candid about how she spent five years of her early 30s in prison. She learned carpentry in jail, has worked in retail for a number of years but has now shifted her focus to begin to learn how to do social work and become a case manager focussing on women, like herself.
She too needed to hone presentation, networking, and job-hunting and job retention skills. The STRIVE program provided her that, she said, along with new friendships. “I’ve grown up. I’m much more focused,” she said.
STRIVE CT Program Manager Markus Cherry said the four-week program from which Proto, Daniels and the others graduated spends the first week on “self discovery;” the second on professional development; the third on career readiness, and the fourth on interviewing skills, role-playing, resume and cover letter tips.
STRIVE provided the course both at New Haven Job Corps sites and at Fresh Start, which is headquartered in City Hall, which occasioned the first graduation ceremony that the 34-year-old organization ever convened in an aldermanic chamber.
Proto gets his certificate, flanked by Cherry and STRIVE case manager Samantha Steffin.
New Haven Job Corps Manager Renee Venturino said that while Job Corps trains people in the nuts and bolts of a trade — culinary arts, facilities management, plumbing, carpentry, and, mos recently, practical nursing — it’s often the “softer skills,” such as communication ability, team work, presentation of self and so forth — the heart of STRIVE’s course — that employers are also keenly looking for.
Cherry said once people complete the course, STRIVE stays in touch with them, graduates are a member of a kind of club that nurtures them along on job paths for life.
He said over the years the 15 years that STRIVE has been operating in New Haven, hundreds of city residents’ lives have been touched, and the job placement rate is 70 percent.
The good news for Daniels is that she’s already interning as a case manager at a non-profit in New Haven and through networking connections, STRIVE has also arranged an interview for Proto next week to do sales for a tire company in East Haven.
“It’s a good place for me to start,” Proto said.