A
Service that Will Employ
by
Connie Davis
"Let me tell you," says George Hrbek, the director
of Employment Services of Cuyahoga County, measuring his words carefully,
reflecting his frustration and concern, "we have minimal resources that
enable us to target the single male and female. If you look at the Project Heat population, we have few
resources to work with those people in terms of employment. They don't
qualify."
Unfortunately for all of us, Hrbek doesn't make the rules. If
he did, some outdated bureaucratic procedures and inflexible government
regulations would be liberalized to encompass his vision and humanity. Hrbek
believes that representatives from all areas of society:
the government, academia, organized labor, industry, and individuals need
to sit down together.
"We need to redefine what it means to earn a living; what
it will take to protect the nuclear family and how we're going to have to change
as a society to adapt to the drastic changes in the economy as we head into a
new millennium."
Hrbek has made a career out of working creatively within the
system to effect change. Fifteen
years ago he and Sister Donna Hawk started a food center at St Patrick's Church
on the West Side. At first it served about 150 to 200 families per month.
What started out as a temporary service has now become an
economic necessity for far too many people who would go hungry without it.
Recently, Hrbek was instrumental in re-shaping the huge
bureaucracy at the Department of Human Services. A year ago it was broken up
into five smaller, more-manageable departments.
"I was the head of the whole thing and I helped to
facilitate the re-structuring. Now
I’m head of this one piece of it."
His piece is the Department of Employment
Services, which provides job and training related services to over 10,000 people
receiving various forms of social assistance. He estimates that there are as
many as 70,000 additional people within Cuyahoga County who want to work but who
need employment counseling, retraining programs, and other job-related advice. He simply doesn't have funds available to help them.
The preceding article first appeared
in Issue #5.
It has not been updated.