By Sam Baker, KERA Morning Edition Host
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-857519.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Sam Baker: Resume writing or counseling on resume writing is just one of many services that Jewish Family Service offers and to look on the Web site, Michael Fleisher, the list of services you offer runs the gamut. I mean family violence intervention, career guidance, counseling, even indigent burial. Explain the mission behind the organization.
Michael Fleisher: The mission of Jewish Family Service is to provide effective and affordable mental health and services to anyone in the greater Dallas area and we do have a broad continuum of services as you mentioned. Within our current employment service, we have a continuum of services that goes beyond the resume writing.
Sam: For instance?
Fleisher: Expertise. We help with interview skills, we host networking groups, some of which are highly specialized. We have a networking group for recent graduates, a networking group for people who are 50 years and older who are in the job market. A networking group for people who've been in the job market for over a year and are facing the challenges of being out there looking for work for an extended period of time.
To give some examples, we have a job search resource center which is a free, drop-in resource center that is open daily from nine to three. It's a large room with computer banks that people can come and use as an office to go about the business of finding work. There are other office machines available to them like copy machines. They can use our phones to pursue jobs. We also have job listings there. In fact, on our Web site we actively post the job listings through Allison's efforts of working with employers to make the opportunities available not only to the people who might come into our doors but to those people who might be in the community and looking for a variety of resources to pursue a job. We make that available to anyone in the community as we do all our services as I mentioned.
Sam: Is there a charge for the service?
Fleisher: Many of our services are drop-in and free services like the networking groups and like the job search resource center. To work with our professional counselors, with our career unemployment counselors is available on a sliding fee scale basis so that we try and not let a fee become a barrier to someone receiving service, but where people can contribute to the cost of this service, we ask them to do so.
We are a proud United Way funded agency and a proud agency funded by the Jewish Community of Greater Dallas. Many of our services are funded by the fundraising that we need to do ourselves to help support our ability to provide this kind of accessibility to people and so through the generosity of those funders, we are able to have this sliding fee scale and people being able to contribute to their cost of service, we are able to have this sliding fee scale.
Sam: How did this all begin?
Fleisher: We are a 60-year-old organization. We started actually, primarily providing resettlement services to refugees and many of those refugees were refugees from World War II at our very beginning. Once we started to bring people to Dallas, many of whom had no connection to anybody here, no family or friends. We provided for basic needs such as housing and food to help people get started, to help people get employment services.
As you work with people, you realize that life is more complicated sometimes than a roof over your head and food on the table although those are certainly the foundation that you want to start from and life can be more complicated. As we realized that people had emotional challenges in their lives, relationship challenges in their lives, we started to build counseling services and became even more specialized in our counseling services the same way our current employment services have become more specialized.
So we started to say we needed to have the expertise to truly address family violence or to address depression and mental illness with staff who are very experienced in expertise in that area or to work with children with staff who are very experienced, including children with special needs and their families.
What began was the development of a continuum of services, we call it sort of a wrap-around concept where people can come to the agency as a one-stop shop and get a coordinated, integrated service so that if they come in the door that says career and employment services but they find out they're very depressed whether it's because of their job search situation or because of other circumstances in their lives, we can address that by having them work with one of our counselors to start to build a professional team. If they have an elderly parent, because we also provide services to the elderly and their family to help them remain independent in the community and someone is finding themselves pulled between taking care of their children and trying to find work and taking of an elderly parent whose frail and needs a lot of assistance, our gerontology services may be brought in to help address those kinds of needs. So with that wrap-around service, we believe we offer a fairly unique way of, an effective way of helping people address multiple circumstances in their lives in a coordinated, holistic approach.
Sam: During this recession, have you seen more people come through your doors?
Fleisher: In every department of the agency, whether we are talking about our mental health services, our family violence services, our gerontology services, our food pantry emergency assistance services, has skyrocketed and our current employment services has skyrocketed. We have been very challenged to meet the increased requests for service with the limited resources that we have even though we're most appreciative of the resources that we have. Our challenge is to continually try and grow those resources so that we can continue to offer the continuum of services, the wrap-around services on a sliding fee scale basis and we've been very fortunate that we do have a responsive community and we hope that that will not only continue but grow.