By Sue Guinn Legg
Johnson City Press

The First Tennessee Human Resource Agency's new Senior Community Service Employment Program has helped more than 80 of the area's older workers re-enter the work force at service agencies around the region.

The jobs provide needed income and allow participants to gain needed job skills, beef up their resumes and lend some much-needed assistance to the agencies.

Now with federal stimulus funds available to provide the same assistance to 33 others, the program is once again recruiting low-income wage earners age 55 and older who could use the help.

The program helps seniors, many of them who have been hit hard by the local factory closings and other pitfalls of the current economy, enter or re-enter the work force by giving them on-the-job training, resume writing and interview skills, SCSEP Program Director Holly Hudson explained.

Working 20 hours a week at the new $7.50 an hour minimum wage, participants gain income and earn experience while continuing their search for employment in the private sector.

"It's a win-win opportunity for the participants and their communities," Hudson said, with participants helping service organizations in seven area counties extend their reach and capabilities while honing their own employment skills and gaining self-confidence and a restored sense of self-worth.

Launched more than 40 years ago as part of the Johnson administration's "War on Poverty," SCSEP became a national initiative in 1973 with adoption of the Older Americans Act. Funded and administered by the U.S. Department of Labor, Hudson said the program had been had been working successfully in Northeast Tennessee for some time when the Labor Department asked the FTHRA to take over its administration here in late July.

With the new assignment, Hudson said, came the federal stimulus dollars that are now allowing the program to expand. She noted a similar Labor Department block grant from the total $19.5 million in federal recovery funding approved for Tennessee seniors and families has also been allocated to help similar program operated by the Upper East Tennessee Human Development Agency put even more older workers back to work.

A lot of the participants, Hudson said, are people who never worked and in their older years have suddenly found themselves in need. They're grandparents who are going back to work to raise their grandchildren, seniors without enough income to pay for their medications and, in increasing numbers, people who have spent their entire lives at work in area factories that have simply closed their doors and went away.

"What we're seeing no are a lot of people who worked in factories 30 or 40 years. They never had to prepare a resume. They have no job search skills and they don't know how to package their job skills in a way that will appeal to an employer. The job market is a totally different world than it was 10 years ago, much less 30 or 40 years. And it's a terrible challenge for them," Hudson said.

But with employment through the SCSEP and the job and job-search training that comes with it, she said, "In a manner of weeks they regain that confidence."

She described seeing that transformation as "one of the most gratifying rewards I've had in all many years of social work."

For Mary "Lucy" Madeoy, a 57-year-old typist and keyboard operator who spent more than 30 years at work in government offices in three states, it was a disability that left her with less income than she needed to meet her living expenses, to enjoy the things she has always enjoyed and to put away a little money for her future.

Now back at work as a job search and resume-building assistant at the Northeast Tennessee Career Center on Wesley Street, she feels quite blessed.

"These are raining positions and it's wonderful to get the job training they give you. It sets you up for a lot of different jobs," Madeoy said. "I can't work full time but it's wonderful to have something to supplement my disability and to help me get through. It really helps a lot."

"It doesn't last forever and you have to look for work outside the program but I consider myself blessed to be a part of it."

To qualify for the program, Hudson said, interested workers must be at least 55 with an income that falls within the specified low-income level. She encouraged anyone in need of employment who meets those criteria to contact her for more information at 461-7844.