Friday Interview: A Faith-Based Approach to Work

Ever since the Great Recession, North Carolina leaders have talked about the need to get more jobs for people in this state. Daniel Alexander, regional director for the group Jobs for Life, spoke to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society earlier this year on the theme “Getting to the Root of the Work Problem: The Essential Nature of a Local Faith-Led Approach.” Alexander shared themes from that presentation with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

Kokai: First of all, tell us: What is Jobs for Life?

Alexander: Sure. Jobs for Life is a nonprofit organization that is actually an international organization based right here in Raleigh, N.C. And the mission statement of Jobs for Life is to engage and equip the local church to address the impacts of joblessness through the dignity of work. So our role is to engage and equip the church. We want to build a platform of churches around the country, and now the world, who are engaging their local communities around this issue of work.

Kokai: So Jobs for Life, based on that description, is very involved in this whole idea of trying to make sure people have jobs and adequate work.

Alexander: Exactly. We believe that work is a key part of how we’re made, who we are created to be. Without work, you have lots of other impacts of society —divorce, suicide and depression, crime, recidivism, etc. All, we believe, are tied up in different ways with this issue of work. So it runs much deeper than just finding a job or a paycheck for people. There’s deep-rooted issues of how we’re made and where we’re headed as a community.

Kokai: The title of your presentation basically says the root of the work problem is based on this local faith-led approach. Why is that true?

Alexander: Well, we believe that the way that you’re going to get out of poverty, a lot of people would argue, is through work — is through a job. But the way people find jobs is not through a national approach. It’s local. It’s through people they know, usually.

Most of us have found a job through a network, through a relationship, through somebody that we have encountered and how they’ve introduced us to that work sphere, or that job in particular. So we believe that the solution is rebuilding relationships.

Poverty is defined a lot of times, for example, in a book called When Helping Hurts — which we use a lot of and we partner with nationally — and they define poverty as a series of broken relationships. We believe that’s a really profound statement: broken relationships between God, others, self, and creation.

So to address this issue of poverty, we’re going to have to re-mend these relationships. In order to re-mend the relationships, they have to be face to face with local community, because the local community knows the needs of the people in that community. They understand where people are headed and the issues they’ve experienced in the past. So that’s the importance of local.

Now we believe the church is set up very well for this. We believe they’re actually called to this — that’s part of the mandate upon the church — 350,000 churches by last count in this country, over 400 of them in Wake County alone. So as we think about the role the church can play, it can have a profound impact on a local community.

And when you do the study, churches are often seen as that place where they hand out food and clothing and housing, and we ask the question: What if the church was about work? What if the church was a place where people can find community, can understand their own identity, can understand what they’re good at and where they’re headed, define connections to that workplace, and to understand what it really means to keep work?

We call it Jobs for Life because we want people to have work for life. We don’t want to just place people into a job. We want them to be able to retain that job, or if that job is outsourced or downsized, we want them to be able to find, on their own, a new job. So we need to help them have the skills and talents to be able to make that happen. So character and community and understanding that they are responsible for their own future, and what we can give them is relationships and community to help lift them up out of the positions they find themselves in.

Kokai: I want to circle back to a point you made earlier that was very interesting. I think when many of us hear the word “poverty,” you think poor people who don’t have enough money. You focused a lot, though, on not the money piece, but relationships. And why do you think that that’s an important way to focus — not just on the attention of a poor person [who] needs some money, but a person in poverty needs to have improved, better, solid relationships?

Alexander: Right. We believe that the material poor is one way to look at it. And usually, there [are] deeper issues within that community or within that certain person, which is why we want to focus on the root of the work problem. Poverty goes much deeper than that.

When you get into a conversation with somebody who is material-poor, usually you have to peel back a lot of layers. Oftentimes, especially when you’re talking about generational poverty, you have layers upon layers of issues that need to surface in order to address and move forward. Whether it’s spiritual, emotional, relational, networks, etc., when there’s a lack in any of those areas, you see a fragmentation of people’s lives. And in order to rebuild so that people can flourish, in the long term, you’re going to have to address those deeper issues.

Kokai: How would a Jobs for Life program work? I mean, someone is in poverty. How does Jobs for Life address that situation?

Alexander: Great. We want to equip the church to do it. So we want to build — we believe that we’ve been given the opportunity to be a nonprofit that can come alongside the church. We don’t want to take that responsibility or opportunity from people to sit with people, as they are searching for a job or coming out of an extreme circumstance. So what we want to do is provide that platform for the church.

And Jobs for Life started here in Raleigh, like I mentioned, in 1995, out of a conversation between a pastor and a business leader. And they got together and said, “What can we do?” Because the business leader needed good people to work in his workplace, and the pastor needed to help the people in his church find work. So they came together.

We want to build that model for the country and the world. So ultimately, we have packaged it up. We have a curriculum, we have training, we have staff that come alongside of people, whether it’s in Raleigh, N.C., Anchorage, Alaska, South Africa, Russia, Costa Rica, Albuquerque, Chicago. There [are] places that are leading Jobs for Life classes.

And at its core, it’s an eight-week class that meets twice a week. That’s really the beginning platform for these relationships to be built. We want that to be the launching place for people to get to know others, to share experiences, to share networks, ultimately, so people can also thrive and find work for life.

Kokai: It sounds as if even though it has this brand name, Jobs for Life, the actual people who would be involved, who are in poverty, would be dealing with their local church, rather than this national or international group.

Alexander: Correct. If you go to our website, you’ll see stories upon stories of where this is taking place and stories about how the churches and faith-based organizations, nonprofits, are using it. Whether it’s a rescue mission, Salvation Army, prisoner re-entry program, etc. We would like to see them partnering with the church, and the church takes it, and they call it the Jobs for Life class, but really it’s theirs.

So we want to be as open-handed with that as possible. That’s how we’re going to leverage and sustain when we’re talking about 22 million unemployed people in this country and underemployed people — 47 million people in poverty. You need to build a framework where this can be easily built and the church can take the piece and use it as a launching point to dig deeper in their own community.

Kokai: You mentioned the website, as we wrap up, but what is the best way for people to find more information, especially if they’d like their church to be involved with Jobs for Life?

Alexander: Great. Yes, it’s www.jobsforlife.org. On that website we have the locations of where it’s happening currently, so you can always reach out to people within your own community or you can reach out to us at the international office right here in Raleigh, and we’re happy to connect you with local people.