New program helping the homeless find work one job at a time

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Felix Eddins lives under a bridge, but he says that won’t be his permanent address.

“I’ve got plenty of hope,” said the 37-year-old who hopes to someday become a mechanical engineer.

Eddins is among 14 homeless or formerly homeless men participating in the Rev. David Goines’ job-training program called Chattanooga Community WORKSource.

It’s a tax-exempt program that Goines started this year to help the dozens of men he met while teaching Bible study for the past two years at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen. Among those who came to the Community Kitchen for a hot meal or shower were former landscapers, mechanics, military cooks and machine operators, he said.

Yet all were out of work.

“Everyone I talked with had a talent, but it laid dormant,” said Goines, a 55-year-old father of two and grandfather of five.

Mental health and drug addictions afflict some men, but some don’t work because they have no transportation, he said.

Others have had jobs, but quit after not getting the pay promised, said Goines. The men are hauled off to work all day and promised a fee, but when the day ends, they get next to nothing and there isn’t much they can do about it, he said.

So Goines, an associate pastor at Battlefield Ministry Community Church, got his congregation to purchase a van to transport the men. He also got bus passes and 25 donated bicycles that he allows people to check out to ride to work.

To ensure the men get paid wages, Goines bids for jobs as Chattanooga Community WORKSource, then pays homeless men $8 an hour if he gets the contract. Any extra money is used for gasoline and expenses, he said.

“I just found some individuals who had talent but weren’t given opportunity to use it,” said Goines.

WORKSource participants are referred to Goines through a case manager at the Community Kitchen. The only requirement is that participants are willing to work, have valid identification and sign a statement saying they are clean of illegal drugs, said Goines. He said he’s willing to help men get their identification if they want to work.

In the past three months, the minister said he has helped more than a dozen men get jobs washing windows, painting houses, doing jackhammer concrete demolition and repairing bicycles.

Any assistance that people experiencing homelessness can receive toward employment is helpful, said Mary Simmons, executive director of the Chattanooga Homeless Coalition.

“Increasing their income assists them in obtaining permanent housing,” she said.

Forty-year-old Bobby Cates and 60-year-old Henry Stewart are among six men who had been homeless but found housing after working with Goines. Cates and Stewart put their paychecks together and rented an apartment.

Stewart enjoyed the freedom so much, he fried a hamburger at 2 a.m. just because he could.

“It’s so nice. You don’t have people telling you what to do and to go to bed,” said Stewart, who owned a landscaping business in the 1970s and ’80s.

Cates said the job program has helped him so much that, instead of just thinking of survival, he plans to get married. After becoming homeless in 2009, he has slept on the streets and used his backpack for a pillow, he said.

“It feels good because I’m getting my life straightened out, going back to church now,” he said. “I’ve got a future and I appreciate Dave getting me a job.”

Eddins gets sad because he feels alone while living under a bridge, but having a job helps him believe things will get better, he said while painting the trim on a house.

“In the work program, you get back to what you’re used to doing, that’s working,” he said.

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