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Eastern Kentucky Veteran’s Center Resident Jim Smith (left) and Let’s Go 2 Work participant Stephanie Turner (right) compete in a game in the center’s activity area. Let’s Go 2 Work participants have been placed in several areas of the center where they help the staff and interact with the residents.
Let’s Go 2 Work participants and Eastern Kentucky Veteran’s Center residents recently spent some time outside at the veteran’s center. In the front row are (from left) Eddie Bolden, Charles Bowman and Walter Collins. In the back row are (from left) Travis Huffine, Sarah Brooke Morgan, Stephanie Turner, Jim Smith, Camilla Morris, Keith Clemons, Keiona Mitchell, Mable Begley and Ricky Williams. Let’s Go 2 Work participants have been placed in several areas of the center where they help the staff and interact with the residents.
[July 2009]
The summer jobs provided by the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program’s “Let’s Go 2 Work” initiative offer a variety of work tasks to 16 to 24-year-olds. For the local participants working at the Eastern Kentucky Veterans Center in Hazard, the primary task is brightening the days of the resident veterans.
Let’s Go 2 Work youth have been working in six-week placements in several areas of the 120-bed facility, including the laundry, housekeeping, activities, and the kitchen. Their salaries are being paid by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which funds Let’s Go 2 Work.
Neil Napier, recreation director for the center, said that the major benefit the young workers provide for the residents is providing new young faces from the community to meet and interact with. Along with their other duties, the young people talk with the center residents and take them outside to play games or just sit in the sun.
“The residents really like it,” Napier said. “They really do make close bonds.”
Napier called Let’s Go 2 Work “a great program” and said he was happy to partner with the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program, Inc. (EKCEP) and the LKLP Community Action Council, which provides the program in Leslie, Letcher, Knott and Perry counties under contract with EKCEP.
Napier said he tries to rotate the Let’s Go 2 Work participants through different areas of the center so their work experience will be broader and help them learn more skills.
“The extra help with the day-to-day duties at the center frees up staff so they can also have more personal interaction with the residents,” Napier said.
He said he was glad to see that some of the Let’s Go 2 Work participants were so moved by their interactions with the veterans that they have decided to come back and work at the center as volunteers even after their paid six-week work placements end.
For some of the young people working at the center, this is their first job. That was the case for Perry County resident Ricky Joe Williams.
Williams, who works in the center’s kitchen, said he needed a summer job to earn money but thinks he would have had difficulty obtaining one without help from Let’s Go 2 Work.
“It’s a good job,” he said. “They’re hard to find.”
Hazard High School student Sarah Brooke Morgan agreed. She said she needed a summer job to have money for clothes and to help out her family, and Let’s Go 2 Work arranged one—her first job.
Morgan said she enjoys working with the residents and getting to know them personally.
“They appreciate it a lot,” said Morgan. “I love it. And when the six weeks is over I plan on volunteering here.”
By the end of the summer, Let’s Go 2 Work will have provided summer employment opportunities for over 3,000 young eastern Kentuckians. About 525 of those jobs—representing approximately $1 million in wages—will be in the Perry, Knott, Letcher and Leslie county area.
Overall, Let’s Go 2 Work wages will pump $6 million in federal economic stimulus money into eastern Kentucky’s economy.
For more information, visit the Web site at letsgo2work.org.