Texas Wesleyan’s career services office is trying to help parolees get back into the job market.
Sherri Mata, director of career services, was asked to give a presentation at an Offender Employment Specialist conference where she discussed the benefits of formal assessments.
“We want to help the ex-offenders find gainful employment,” Mata said. “A lot of them don’t have the peer skills, they don’t know how to look for a job, they don’t know about online applications, they don’t have resumes and they don’t know what they want to do or what kind of jobs they can get.”
Mata spoke specifically about the Strong Interest Inventory, a program that provides parolees with an idea of what they can do and shows them the first few steps down the right path.
Mata gave the presentation to the probation and parole officers who deal with the re-entry population. She wanted to teach the officers how to excite, encourage and empower their clients. She calls it E3.
Around the same time Robyn Fisk, Wesleyan alumna and college and career services counselor, was working with training clients at the parole office on McCart Avenue. Mata and Fisk came to realize that they were working for the same program, the Tarrant County Re-Entry Initiative, but on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Because of Mata’s connections and resources via her job, she decided to use everything at her disposal to help the TCRI even more.
“We also contacted [Wesleyan’s] counseling department because they have a huge need for counseling, these clients do,” Mata said. “So, we asked if [TCRI] would be interested in some of our students who are doing practical hours and internship hours at Glick House.”
She suggested referring the children and family members to Glick House since the ex-offenders can’t be on-campus or sending counseling interns out to their facility for intern hours.
According to Tarrant County’s Web site, the Tarrant County Re-Entry Initiative began in November 2005. Angel Ilarraza is the Re-Entry Program Coordinator with the County Administrator’s Office.
“My job is to build the capacity of our county to receive the re-entry population that is returning from incarceration,” Ilarraza said. “Tarrant County is not a service provider so it is difficult to assist these people in staying out of jail.
Most people released are re-incarcerated within three years, which is the national recidivism rate. We want to impede the persistence of that revolving door.”
Ilarraza says TCRI is really about teaching this population that there are resources available to them that they might not have previously known about. This is in the same arena as what Mata is doing with the Strong Interest Inventory.
Mata said she hopes to be able to show people that even if they have a mild interest in something, they might be able to turn that interest into a well paying job that will sustain them and their families. They won’t have to return to their previous lives.
“My hope in helping [TCRI] was to help the parole and probation officers and the counselors from these community service programs who work with the ex-offenders,” Mata said. “I was hoping to help instill in [the officers and counselors] the skills that they would need as far as counseling their clients, to motivate their clients, again, to empower them.”
Mata believes the program has the potential to be extremely successful, but will take five to 10 years before the statistics can be gathered to see how much progress was made.
“If [the ex-offenders] are successful, I guarantee you that they will be giving back to the community because of their life. That’s just how it works,” Mata said. “When you’re the underdog and you come up from being the underdog, you want to help those who are now the underdog.”
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