50/50 Club Goes More Than Halfway to Help People Get Jobs : Employment: The organization matches agencies that operate employment services for the disadvantaged with firms that have openings.
Today, Colleen Fauhl looks like any other Pacific Volt Information Systems employee. She makes $330 a week and has an apartment of her own--a big improvement over her situation last year, when she faced the prospect of living on the street.
Her $700 savings exhausted searching for a job and tired of working at fast-food outlets and convenience stores, Fauhl was short on hope. That is, until she came to the 50/50 Club at the Santa Ana YWCA, a unique association of companies and nonprofit employment services.
The club found her a computer-related position at Pacific Volt in Anaheim, ending a year of frustration since her discharge from the Marine Corps in 1989.
“I was never on the streets,” said Fauhl, who was a Marine for eight years. “If I had to stay out there, I’d lose it. . . . I don’t ever want to get to the point where this will ever happen again.”
The 50/50 Club, which has its quarters in the YWCA, matches representatives from 75 agencies that operate employment services for disadvantaged people with an almost equal number of companies that advertise job openings in the club directory.
The members-only club is the creation of John Janda, a job recruiter for the Department of Labor and a 10-year veteran of the job development business. He came up with the idea three years ago at meetings of the Personnel Industrial Relations Assn., a Southern California professional group for human-resource specialists.
Janda noticed that private employment agencies were there trying to get jobs for their clients. He said he asked himself: Wouldn’t it be nice if we substituted nonprofit agency job developers?
The 50/50 Club--named after Janda’s goal of having an equal number of companies and nonprofit employment agencies working together--began in January, 1988, when, he said, he invited virtually every professional acquaintance listed in his directory to breakfast.
“We’re now 4 years old and larger than ever,” Janda said. “I suspect that Don Stokes,” an Orange County job recruiter, “has probably placed a couple hundred people himself. He really swears by the contacts he’s made in 50/50.”
Participating businesses include Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Canon, the Anaheim Marriott and several major manufacturers and restaurant chains.
Annual membership costs $30, plus an $8-a-month breakfast meeting fee. In exchange, members get monthly meeting notices, a job directory with more than 70 entries and a job hot line telephone number. Any social service agency that provides employment and does not charge prospective employers for its services is qualified to join.
Janda said hiring people through the club can have financial benefits for companies, such as tax credits and training salary rebates from the government. In addition, face-to-face meetings between job counselors and company representatives help allay employers’ fears about hiring disabled or underprivileged people.
“When they see what an employee can do, their fears simply evaporate,” Janda said. “We represent the client, but we serve the company, and we have to do a good job both ways.”
Employment agencies and companies often start networking outside the once-a-month 50/50 Club breakfast meetings, sizing up one another’s needs and trying to give disadvantaged people a chance to break the cycle of poverty.
Fauhl was a prime example. She had joined the Marines in 1981 to escape family problems in New Jersey. After eight years of service, she left the corps and moved to California in July, 1989, and began looking for a job.
“There was nothing to go home to,” she said.
Hotel bills soon claimed all her savings. After unfulfilling stints in sales and fast-food jobs, she found herself living at the Santa Ana YWCA in May, 1990. In mid-July, Karyn Smith, a 50/50 Club counselor, learned of Fauhl’s computer skills, love of art and military experience as a generator electrician. Fauhl was on the brink of having to leave the Y.
When she went for a job interview at Pacific Volt, Smith had already toured the facility with Patrick O’Neal, a company representative, and she knew what kind of employees were needed at the firm, which designs and helps publish telephone books.
“It dovetailed into what Pacific Volt does,” said Smith, who has found jobs for about 15 women through the 50/50 club in 18 months.
Fauhl took tests and was hired by Pacific Volt in August, 1990, as a technical editor responsible for the accuracy of ads that run in Yellow Pages. She received her first raise in February.
After years of living in Marine barracks, boardinghouses and the YWCA, Fauhl had the money to move into her own apartment in Anaheim on April 1. The former corporal now wants to pursue a career in art design and plans to take some college classes.
