Your Feedback is Needed

Thank you for your time and feedback on the future of The Madison Jobs and Housing Partnership

Background

Over the past three years the Madison Jobs and Housing Partnership has quietly been serving the Dane County area by providing training and mentorship to individuals who have made a commitment to a better future. Turning around a life of poor decisions, addictions or criminal activity through encouragement and training in Life Skills and Job Search Skills has been our mission and our success.

This program began with a small grant to The Jericho Project from the

Madison Community Foundation. One hundred percent of the monies have gone into delivering this important training. Trying to be good stewards we have spent nothing ($0.00) on promotion or public relations or even business cards. Emails and self-printed brochures inform organizations, churches and caseworkers about our classes, to which they have referred over 238 students. Our 153 graduates have over a 70% success rate of finding jobs on their own following the training. This is a phenomenal statistic to which we give God the glory.

This puts us in a very strange position.

We have taken referrals from many of the 33 organizations serving the homeless, the county jail system, The Elizabeth House, YWCA and Tellurian. While these are all well funded organizations doing excellent work, they do not offer the training needed to support their client’s job search efforts. The Madison Jobs and Housing Partnership is the only organization offering specific training and support that leads to employment.

The community’s focus is to help the homeless. While this is a noble and important mission, it falls short of helping families out of the cycle of poverty and despair because it doesn’t provide the necessary training and mentoring to find and keep a job.

It takes both jobs and housing to form the foundation upon which to build self-sufficient lives.

This puts the Jobs and Housing Partnership in a strange position. While many government dollars and private donations go into housing; and organizations working with the homeless are visible in our community, the Madison Jobs and Housing Partnership goes unnoticed and unfunded.

We aren’t looking for money.

As a ministry that teaches people how to obtain employment and become self-sufficient what type of role model would we be if we relied upon gifts, grants and donations? It has always been our goal to establish an entity that would generate cash to support our training/mentoring program and provide employment opportunities for our clients

Here is where your counsel is requested.

We do not want to move forward with a plan to develop an income generating business without the feedback and input of other Christians in our community.

We hope that you will take a moment to email us or fill in our on-line survey and share your feelings and advice about this direction.

The purpose of this survey is not to solicit your participation, only to gain your input. If we decide to move forward after reviewing your feedback, we will contact you in a future mailing explaining the business ideas we may offer.

We sincerely want to know if we are doing God’s will by hearing from His people.

Thank you for helping us in this process.

Click here to be taken to a short on-line survey

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225CVUKYVMR

Sincerely yours,

Fred Grossenbach

The Jericho Project

Steve Fine

Madison Jobs and Housing Partnership