SOME News

SOME Newsletter, Spring 2008 (pdf, 715KB)

SOME eNewsletter, April 2008

Past issues of SOME news can be found in the archives.

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Award-Winning Author Highlights SOME CET

David Shipler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book Arab and Jew, has a recently-released book entitled "The Working Poor" which includes nine pages on SOME's Center for Employment Training (CET). In the passages, Mr. Shipler interviews numerous adult students in CET's job training programs, as well as the staff at CET. In one moving story, Mr. Shipler profiles a woman who attended our clerical training program at CET and now has a job running Xerox machines which is lifting her out of poverty. "I am so rich because-not only material things-because I know who I am, I know where I'm going now." Shipler also says of another student, "Peaches was fairly typical of those who enrolled at CET, off Pennsylvania Avenue about three miles from the White House. Many were so ruined that they had to learn the basics of arriving on time, speaking to people, answering the phone, accomplishing a task, believing in themselves. To make this happen, the trainers had to find the light within each person and turn it on. Then, after four to eight months of instructions, everyone had to be matched with a decent job."

The book "makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology-hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, healthcare and education." In his introduction, Shipler says, "When the poor or the nearly poor are asked to define poverty, however, they talk not only about what's in their wallet but what's in the mind or the heart. 'Hopelessness,'" said a fifteen-year-old girl in New Hampshire. "Not hopelessness-helplessness," said a man in Los Angeles, "Why should I get up?"

This thought-provoking book highlights the many challenges facing our nation's poor by giving us a glimpse into their daily lives. The portraits of the students who attended SOME's CET offer hope that those who have struggled in the past can get training and counseling and be placed into jobs that pay a living wage and benefits. But just as important, Mr. Shipler's book shows how CET's model of intensive hands-on training and consistent encouragement and support gives people hope, builds their sense of self-worth and shows them that they can succeed.