WEST WHITELAND >> Kathleen Purcell, a former executive director at a senior home care facility, has been out of work for a year.
The 56-year-old would like to get back to work as an executive director of a small nonprofit, and she speaks openly about the toll the last year has taken on her psyche.
“It’s terrible,” she said of being unemployed. “It’s lonely. It’s frustrating. It’s nerve wracking. It’s isolating. It completely has shattered my self confidence.”
Carolyn Marchesani, an attorney and a single mother of two college-aged children, was laid off from her job with a Lancaster law office in August of 2013. Since then, she has worked on her own but, “not enough to keep the Pop-Tarts on the table.”
The estate planning and administration attorney “loves entrepreneurism,” but finds she can’t make ends meet practicing on her own.
Purcell and Marchesani were two of 25 long-term unemployed or underemployed Chester County residents who attended Tuesday’s orientation for the county’s Platform to Employment program at the PA CareerLink-Chester County offices in Oaklands Corporate Center.
The program, known as P2E, is the 18th location for The WorkPlace, the Bridgeport, Conn.-based company that runs it.
Joseph M. Carbone, president and CEO, was on hand Tuesday as Chester County’s first class started the program. He noted his own struggles with long-term unemployment – he was laid off for 8½ months in the 1990s.
“I was so out of it I started watching soap operas,” he recalled. When considering going to one job interview, he confessed, one thought was “whether I can make it back to watch General Hospital.”
Carbone said press accounts indicate the recession is over and employment levels are back to normal in the 5 percent range. Don’t believe it, he said. The real unemployment rate is 13 percent when the underemployed and those whose benefits have expired are included. And the long-term unemployment rate is twice as high as it has been in any other recovery, he said.
“It’s a buyer’s market,” Carbone said, adding long-term unemployment disproportionately affects people over 50. That’s why one of the major aspects of the Platform to Employment program is to restore the self confidence of participants. Carbone calls it, “bringing your old self back.”
According to the county, the P2E program here is a five-week preparatory program. It provides job readiness training, personal support services, financial counseling and paid work experience with the intent to secure jobs for individuals who have experienced long-term unemployment – 27 or more weeks. Chester County is the first in Pennsylvania to try the program.
The key element that sold commissioners on the wisdom of spending the $175,000 to start the program in Chester County comes after the “boot camp” style first five weeks.
That’s when P2E will match participants with area employees and pay their salaries for four weeks. After that, it will pay a percentage of the salaries for four more weeks if necessary, Carbone said. It is the matching element that results in a job-finding success rate of over 80 percent for participants, compared to an average of 20 percent without it, he said.
One of its biggest local proponents is Cheryl Spaulding, founder of Joseph’s People in Downingtown, which now has 14 chapters that help the unemployed throughout the Philadelphia region find new jobs.
Spaulding said the heads of the chapters were meeting in November and discussing ways of improving their results when she ran across an article about The WorkPlace’s program.
It was providing exactly what Joseph’s People had been working toward for the 20 years of its existence, she said.
“I can provide the assistance with resumés and with interview techniques but I cant provide one thing that they do, and it’s the most important thing: a job at the end of the process,” Spaulding said. “(And) that’s all they need.”