Hamilton Families on Medium.com • June 8, 2021 • By Cory Winter
Helping to end a family’s homelessness by providing housing is only as effective as a family’s ability to keep that home. In a job market that is pushing to be more remote, families experiencing homelessness need new digital skill sets if they are to stabilize and thrive.
According to a report from the City of San Francisco’s 2019 Homeless Point in Time Count, the leading primary cause of homelessness among respondents was job loss (26 percent). This is where workforce development comes into the picture. By equipping families with skills matching and job-readiness training, the likelihood of a family experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity to stabilize increases drastically; a recent study from the ICA Group finding that workforce development programs are reporting successful employment outcomes ranging from 24 percent to as high as 75 percent among their participants.
Hamilton Families has embarked on its own workforce development plans to support the employability of families experiencing homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area as they stabilize in their new housing. The need arose as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and companies pivoted to virtual workspaces, imposing a grim reality upon families who were already at-risk losing their homes with the added burden of having to find work in a landscape where their skills might not be valued.
Enter Desiree Raja-Tejero, Hamilton Families Workforce Development Coordinator, who is undertaking a massive endeavor to ensure families experiencing homelessness have the skill sets they need to compete in a remote-work job market by building Hamilton Families’ new Digital Literacy program.
“Housing stability comes with employment and income stability,” says Raja-Tejero, “we can’t have one without the other. Our goal is to use employment as a tool to prevent and end chronic homelessness.”
In partnership with the Community Tech Network, the brand-new Digital Literacy program has already begun graduating participants with the first of eight cohorts to come, each cohort composed of up to ten participants, each course available in both English and Spanish. Pulled from each of Hamilton Families’ programs, Digital Literacy program participants learn the basics of how to work with a computer, how to navigate the internet, and how to prepare job-readiness tools like resumes and cover letters using word processing software. The best thing, participants receive a laptop computer as part of the program and keep the device upon completion.
“I learned how to set up meetings and appointments in the calendar. Also, how to detect scams and phishing emails. The third important skill I learned was typing correctly in a keyboard,” said Aurora Zuniga, a participant in the first cohort of the program who primarily speaks Spanish (Poder programar citas en el calendario, otra detectar los correos fraudulentos y la tercera seria tipografia para poder escribir en la computadora).”
Free laptops aside, the impact of programs like these on a family’s stability is the true benchmark. We live in an age where a family’s ability to acquire digital literacy skills is tantamount to a family’s survival; there is an argument to be made that it is just as significant as a family’s fiscal literacy: their ability to maintain stable income, to cultivate a healthy savings account, and to achieve a good credit score. Raja-Tejero describes the magnitude of the program on the families that make up Hamilton Families’ participants:
“By breaking the digital literacy barrier, our participants have more tools to navigate the employment market and become self-sufficient.”
The second cohort is set to begin in July 2021.
For more information about workforce development for families experiencing homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area, contact Hamilton Families at hamiltonfamilies.org.