Entre Les Murs

Impact Day

My company sends all of its employees out into the community once a year to do charitable works, something they call "Impact Day".  I went up to Harlem where I helped people in a homeless shelter with their résumés.  They gave us a tour of the facility afterwards.  I don't know what I was expecting ("Smelly men on cots?" my guide suggested), but I was very impressed with it.  They had all kinds of programs to help people move out, and the place seemed to be clean, well-maintained and efficient, if a little austere.  It's a family shelter, so only people with children are allowed.  They have 76 full-time staff to run a building with 140 units and over 300 clients.  There are classrooms and daycare for several age groups, a computer lab, subtance abuse counseling, and lots of case workers.  Interestingly, it's run by a charity, Volunteers of America, rather than the state.


The clients - earnest, engaging and energetic though they were - are not quite so impressive.  I worked with a couple of women from another of VOA's shelters.  I really did quite like them, but I felt that I wasn't getting through.  The trouble was mostly mine, in that I couldn't quite accept just how far back to the beginning I needed to go.  They understood that they needed a résumé to get a job - but they were pretty vague about what they wanted to do, and were challenged by the simplest exercise to help them answer that question.  So it was foolish of me to be asking them to decide whether they wanted to arrange their experience chronologically or by function.  I guess I'm just not very agile in certain social ways.

posted 6.6.08