For the first time since she graduated from high school, Carol Miller didn't have a job.

Carol had moved from her lifelong home in Illinois to the rural community of Frakes in Bell County, Ky. in the summer of 2002. The move placed Carol near her youngest daughter, a Methodist missionary who had come to the area a few years earlier to work at the Henderson Settlement. However, the move also left Carol in an unfamiliar place that didn't seem to offer many job possibilities for a 65-year-old divorced mother of three.

Until the Bell County JobSight introduced her to a world of life-changing opportunities, Carol was beginning to think that her options might have run out.

Carol was worried about the fact that osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis had stolen some of her height and strength, and gnarled both of her hands. Carol knew that many people with similar physical problems might give up looking for work, afraid that those conditions might lead many employers to shy away from hiring them.

Not Carol.

"I figure most people can do anything they set their minds to if they really want to," she said. "I still get people who ask me, 'Why are you working?' But what in the world would I do with myself if I didn't work?"

Carol's positive attitude combined with the inter-agency coordination that fuels the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program's (EKCEP) JobSight network of one-stop workforce centers allowed Carol to transcend the barriers of age and physical limitations and find employment. Carol visited the Bell County JobSight in Pineville in June 2002 and received a series of services that ultimately landed her a job at the Clear Creek Baptist Bible College's Child Care Development Center. Today, she continues to hold that job, working 15 to 20 hours per week with the babies and preschoolers at the center.

The JobSight system works. Carol is living proof.

***

Carol describes herself as a "jack of all trades." Over the years she has held secretarial, retail and sales jobs, and even owned her own limousine service and cooked nightly gourmet meals for two Illinois doctors for 15 years up until the time she moved to Kentucky.

"That was all in my 'other life,'" she joked.

Despite her vast and varied work experience, Carol feared that employers in Bell County might not consider her for jobs due to her age and physical condition. Still, she needed additional income to supplement what she received monthly through Social Security, and the only way to get that income was to find a job in an unfamiliar area.

Her daughter had recently visited the Bell County JobSight in Pineville while attempting to find a new job, and suggested Carol go there to see what help was available. JobSight provides access more than a dozen state and federal workforce programs all under one roof, all for free. One of the programs available through JobSight is Experience Works, which offers training, employment, and community service opportunities for mature workers.

During her first visit to the JobSight in June 2002, Carol was referred to Brenda Moore, an Older Worker specialist for Experience Works and Workforce Investment Act (WIA) case manager. Because of her physical condition, Carol also was referred to the Kentucky Department for Vocational Rehabilitation, which is represented by Shirley Cole and other staff at the JobSight.

Brenda enrolled Carol in Experience Works and WIA programs that opened her up to the full array of job-search services available at the JobSight, as well as the WIA On-the-Job Training (OJT) program. Brenda said she knew Carol's physical conditions represented major hurdles that would have to be overcome in order for her to get a job. From Carol's perspective, it wasn't a matter of if she would get that new job, but only a matter of when, Brenda said.

"She was so willing to find herself a job and work," Brenda said. "She didn't know about using the internet, so we would use computers in the JobSight's Career Resource Center to get online and search America's Job Bank for jobs."

Brenda also helped Carol complete her resume, fill out job applications, and hone her interviewing skills in the high-tech Career Resource Center.

"I guided her job search, showed her how to pick out the right jobs, and helped her fix up her resume, but she did most of the job search on her own," Brenda said. "I was extremely impressed by her drive and determination."

Though her participation in programs at the JobSight got her job search moving forward, Carol still faced a tense wait until she finally got an opportunity to land a job.

"I still had a little money, but you can't spend everything you've got," Carol said. "At that point, I would have taken any job that was offered."

***

After five months of sending out resumes and filling out job applications through the JobSight, one phone call in late November 2002 changed Carol's life. The call came from Jackie Lefevers, director of the Clear Creek Baptist Bible College's Child Care Development Center near Pineville, who asked Carol to interview for an open teachers' aide position.

"I was just ecstatic," Carol said.

During her interview, Carol found out she would need additional training if she were selected for the position. Thinking back to a comment from Brenda, Carol told Jackie that the WIA On-the-Job Training (OJT) program through the JobSight might be able to help pay part of her training wages.

Following the interview, Jackie got in touch with Brenda, who gave her information necessary to start Carol on an OJT agreement as an assistant teacher. Through the OJT program, the child care center was reimbursed 50 percent of Carol's training wages for 150 hours. If Carol performed successfully during that training period, the center would then hire her.

"We would only spend half the money we would have normally spent training a new employee," Jackie said. "This opportunity was very appealing to us because we operate on a very slim budget and are constantly looking for ways to stretch our limited resources."

Carol was formally brought on as an employee of the child care center once her training ended. In Carol, the center got not only a new employee, but also a mentor for the 15 other staff members working there, Jackie said.

"She had has a big effect on our employees because she's the grandmother figure to the staff," she said. "I see a lot of love and a lot of experience in what she does because she has been both a mother and a grandmother. That experience helps her relate well with the children, as well as communicate with their parents."

That experience guides the way she handles her responsibilities at the center, which include preparing lesson plans and activities, as well as helping clean up after snacks, washing dishes and changing the diapers of the youngest of the center's 62 children.

"She's very willing to do whatever you ask her to do," Jackie adds.

Carol's love and experience shines through the most when she works with the center's "waddlers," who are between 16 months and two years old. Some of the youngsters even call her "mammaw," and others call her by her name. All of them can tell they're dealing with someone special, Jackie said.

"Her favorite thing is to read to the children," Jackie said. "She knows all their favorite books, and even knows which child likes which books. She's very thoughtful to the kids, and they can sense that in her."

***

Carol's getting a job at the child care center pleased Brenda Moore. Now Carol's story has gotten national attention from the primary JobSight partner agency that helped her get where she is today.

On Feb. 10, staff members from the Washington, D.C. national headquarters of Experience Works came to the center to photograph Carol as part of a feature story on her that will appear in the agency's upcoming annual report. That report will be published in mid-March, and will include photos of Carol interacting with several of the center's children. The photos will run beside a written piece Brenda submitted last year that details Carol's job search, the help she received through the Bell County JobSight, and her hiring at the center.

According to Brenda, Carol's inclusion in the report represents the first time a Kentucky Experience Works participant has been featured in the national, nonprofit organization's annual report since the agency was established in 1965.

That attention will go a long way toward showing older people in the area that they can become employed, and that the JobSight is the place they should visit to begin their job searches.

"I think it also shows them that they can overcome the main barrier of age, and that disabled older people can also have hope of becoming employed through this system," Brenda said.

Jackie agrees, adding the JobSight services that produced results for Carol-particularly the OJT program-can produce benefits for area employers and encourage them to hire older, experienced workers.

"I say that the system works, and it was a benefit to our organization in the fact that it financially helped us since we run at a big deficit each year," Jackie said. "As for Carol, personal appearances sometimes are misleading. When you look at her, you see that she does have arthritis and you might think she's really limited in what she can do.

"But these programs allow employers to look past those appearances to give these people a chance to show what they really are," she adds.

On the day the national journalists visited, Carol didn't have much time to ponder the significance of the national attention she'll soon get. Several children ran around her in the "waddler room" as a photographer clicked pictures of other children taking turns sitting in her lap and having their favorite books read to them.

Carol said she hopes that getting her story out in public might help others find new jobs, even if age or physical problems had convinced them they cannot.

"I'd like more people to know about the JobSight and the programs there, and I think other people should get involved," she said. "You never know who you're going to meet who is going to help you do something you think you can't do. There are good people everywhere in this world, and the JobSight has its share of them."

Once the photographic excitement died down, Carol found a nearby rocking chair and put little Johnathan Marcus in her lap for an afternoon story. With his head perched on his hand in deep concentration, Johnathan listened intently as Carol read about his favorite subject-motorcycles. Johnathan obviously didn't see Carol as someone limited by age or physical problems. He saw someone who loves her job, and who passes that love to him as she does that job. To Carol, that's what it's all about.

"I love working with the kids," Carol said. "It's about contact with people, and that's as important as the money."

One visit to the Bell County JobSight allowed Carol's story to have a successful ending, Brenda said.

"If not for the JobSight, I would have never even met Carol Miller. She wouldn't have been referred to us if we weren't a partner there, and she could have fallen right through the cracks if we hadn't gotten hold of her and taken her through the services we have," Brenda said. "The system definitely works."