Maria’s Success Story | Hermiston, OR
Maria Estela walked into the Hermiston office of Oregon Human Development Corporation (OHDC) with two immediate needs: she needed a place to live and find a full-time job! She struggled in Salt Lake City to find stable employment and one of her distant relatives had said that there was work in agriculture in this part of Oregon. However, when she got here she discovered that it wasn’t so easy to find a full-time job and she had no place to call home. She alternated each week between sleeping in her car and staying with the few people she knew in Hermiston. But, that couldn’t continue as she never felt completely safe in her car and she didn’t want to overstay her welcome with her friends. When she first came to OHDC she was working thru one of the many agriculture temp agencies picking onions during harvest, she was getting paid $10.00 per hour with no benefits, but that was during the harvest, during the off-harvest season jobs were scarce. With the cold weather on its way, she was in desperate need of finding a stable job and home.
Maria was homeless and OHDC was able to assist her with move-in costs and her first month of rent on a studio apartment through the Emergency Housing Assistance (EHA) Program. With a safe place to live, OHDC was able to help Maria focus on her main goal of obtaining full-time employment. Aside from the EHA program, Maria was dual enrolled in the National Farmworker Jobs Program (NFJP) and through those programs’ as-assessments OHDC was able to work out with Maria a pathway towards stable, year-round, self-sustaining employment. She was enrolled in a Job Readiness class where she was able to learn the basics of a job interview, how to job search, and how to obtain a job. Maria was also enrolled into computer based English acquisition courses (Rosetta Stone) to improve her English language skills. She spent hours each day progressing through the levels of competency until she reached a level that she was able to then put to practice, which she did in the Interviewing Class. |
OHDC used its relationship with one of the largest employers in the area and negotiated a subsidized training position for Maria. Maria started this OJT (On-the-Job) training with Lamb Weston and went from earing $10.00 an hour and sporadic hours with no benefits to a full-time position earning $15.46 an hour with full benefits! For the next six months Maria continued to use the Rosetta stone language course in her spare time as OHDC invested in her remote access to the software so she could continue her progress on improving her English. Maria plans to keep improving her English as she has her sights set on advancing upward with this company. Through a blending of two critical programs Emergency Housing Assistance and the National Farmworker Jobs Program OHDC was able to first stabilize Maria’s housing situation so she can then focus on the next goal of moving toward self-sufficiency.
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