During these challenging economic
times with high unemployment rates, unemployed and employed
residents are taking advantage of a program that can help boost
their potential to get higher paying jobs in the health care
sector. A new program called Stepping Up, led by
director Aime Brissette, is helping to shape the next generation
of certified nurses, medical assistants, radiology technicians,
and so many more.
Not to be mistaken for a job placement agency, Stepping
Up partners with local hospitals and nonprofit programs like
Dorcas Place and Genesis Center’s Career Exploration Classes to
recruit and then train both motivated individuals from low-income
communities and individuals already employed by hospitals to
prepare them for higher skilled, higher demand jobs.
City News caught up with Brissette at Stepping Up's
headquarters on Branch Avenue to find out more about how he and
his staff are stepping up to the challenge.
Since Stepping Up got underway last year, how has the
program been doing?
The program is doing incredibly well. We really got the
program underway last January 2008. And so in the past year,
it’s grown quite a bit. A lot of people have gone on to
higher education. Some people have gotten jobs at hospitals
we work with – Women & Infants and Rhode Island
Hospitals. We’ve gotten community people, which is one of
our main focuses. We want to work with the community and get them
entry-level jobs at the hospitals, and we’ve been very successful
at that.
It’s really starting to take off. We’ve got a wait list
now. Not only do we help community people get jobs in health
care, but we also provide career advisors, job shadowing,
mentoring, tutoring, core skills training which we call the
Stepping Up Career Advancement Academy – and cover a whole range
of topics like leadership, decision making, problem solving, and
all those qualities you need to succeed on the job, and things you
probably don’t learn while you’re at work.
We also help people get their GEDs. We help them with
ESL. We provide computer literacy courses, medical
terminology, and clerical terminology.
For a participant of the program – whether it is a
community member or a current employee of a hospital – how do you
think life has changed for him or her?
We’ve seen people who really had no direction, or were
floundering in dead-end jobs. As a matter of fact, in our
community program, I would say about 80% came in to the program
unemployed and have since gotten jobs. So, those are some
pretty dramatic changes. Now, not only do they have jobs,
but we’re also helping them advance in higher growth, higher
demand positions. For example, a lot of our participants want to
be nurses, or rad techs (radiology technicians), or therapists, or
med techs – those kind of occupations – so it’s not just getting
in and getting a job as a dishwasher, it’s about moving up and
getting into some really good paying jobs.
What is the makeup of your current
constituency?
It’s about 99% female, once in a while we get a token male!
It is mostly immigrants, and quite a large percentage of people of
color.
And how do they find out about
you?We’re really blessed with great partners like Dorcas Place
and the Genesis Center. They do the bulk of the outreach for
us throughout the community, they put ads in the newspapers, and
they send out fliers and distribute them throughout the Providence
area. That’s usually how we recruit. They come in
through the Dorcas Place and Genesis Center Career Exploration
Classes and we select our participants from the students of those
classes.
Are there criteria for them to join?
We work with mostly low-income individuals. Our grants
require us to focus on South Providence residents. Those
grants come from the Casey Foundation through Making Connections
Providence and they have outlined a focus area in Providence,
which is really an underserved population so we focus a lot of our
attention there. And we try to gather as many clients and
neighborhoods as we can.
The US Senate yesterday just passed President Obama’s
American Recovery and Reinvestment plan, a plan that Mayor
Cicilline supports and strongly believes will allow for the
immediate creation of jobs. As a local organization whose
main focus is developing and building our city’s health care
workforce, the largest workforce in our state, what can you do, or
are doing to put people to work even in these tough financial
times?
We’re doing everything we can. Like I said, we partner
with Women & Infants and Rhode Island Hospitals, and are also
expanding into Miriam and Bradley Hospitals, and looking over the
next year or two to expand to hospitals throughout the
state. So that’s one way we’re looking to expand our
programs and address the crisis that exists now.
The other thing is that we’re trying to position ourselves to
see how much of that workforce development money we can get.
We are a workforce development and career ladders program after
all, so we want to get involved in as much of that as we possibly
can. We end up working with a lot of organizations instead
of duplicating what’s already out there. We’re collaborating
with others so that we can refer people to other organizations and
they can do the same with us.
Are you finding that because of high unemployment
rates more people are looking to you to help them sharpen their
skills now so that they’re prepared to take on better jobs in the
future?
We see some of those. But for many people, they have
families to support. So it’s an immediate need and they need
to get their feet in the door and get something right away.
And so what we’re finding out is that with this particular group
of people, they’re interested in getting jobs first and then train
for higher paying and higher skilled jobs once they’ve become
employed. And then we have others who don’t have such an
immediate need who are looking to gain the skills that are needed
for the jobs that they want. So they have a little more time
and a little more flexibility to pursue their education first.
What did you do before you became director of the
program?
I’ve done a lot of things. I feel like I’ve lived
several lifetimes! Before this I was in affordable housing for
about 20 years. I worked in Cranston, Smith Hill, and most
recently I was the director of the Lincoln Housing
Authority.
Why do you like this job?
Well because I was a former music teacher and what I love
about this is that I’m able to use some of the skills that I
learned as a teacher, combine it with my previous work in
workforce development, as well as work I did at Memorial Hospital
in Pawtucket. It’s a perfect marriage of all of those
experiences. It allows me to work in health care, in
workforce development, and use some of my teaching skills – all of
which I love. I wished the job had come along 30 years ago!
What should people know when they come to you for
assistance?
Some people come to us and think we’re a placement service
and we’re really not. We’ve got a great staff
– Alaina Johnson, Darcy Holoweski,
Katherine Gendreau, and Naveed Irshad
(not in picture) –
who all work very hard to prepare people and provide them with
job-readiness skills. But some people look to us and need a
job immediately, and it doesn’t work that way. We have to
provide them with the skills first. We can’t guarantee
placement.
The other thing is that we don’t take people directly into
the program unless they already work for the hospitals. We
work with entry-level people at the hospitals and help them move
their careers up. If they are people coming in from the
community, we refer them first to Dorcas and Genesis to get them
into their Career Exploration Program, and that’s where we get our
participants.
We work with those who are performing, who are motivated,
have an interest in health care, and can show promise.
What’s in store for the future of Stepping
Up?
I foresee Stepping Up having satellite offices throughout the
state and working at all the hospitals in Rhode Island. We
couldn’t do this without our partners and funders, and without
that, we wouldn’t have been able to make great strides in the last
year. For that, we’re very grateful.
Mayor David N.
Cicilline yesterday announced an aggressive program to
systematically repair potholes in the capital city. The City
has intensified its efforts by adding Parks Department vehicles to
the fleet of Department of Public Works (DPW) trucks so that there
will be, effective today, eight fulltime crews filling potholes
throughout the city. The trucks are equipped with a new high
performance patch material that has proven effective in repairing
potholes, even in wet conditions. 
Michael Colapietro found
something unexpected in Rhode Island when he started searching for
a place to move his software company. 
