Montrose, SD

I’m sure the woman from Montrose who called me last night isn’t alone. She’s older and still in her own home, but incapable of handling certain house-related jobs–specifically cleaning leaves out of her eaves. Or, it may be cleaning her walks in the winter, mowing lawn in the summer, or fixing a leaking faucet anytime of the year. She would like to have a way that people with needs can match up those with skills. She’s willing to pay people for their services, but doesn’t know how to find them.

 What’s great is that developing a community job pool was one of our initial objectives during our strategic planning meeting.  But when we began writing our implementation steps, we decided to leave it out for now for security reasons. Our concern? How would we build in security to protect children who might answer a job pool request and then be exploited or harmed?

I’d like to know, is any other community trying to match up skills with needs? If so, could you provide some tips on how to establish such a program and keep it safe? How could you manage it? Who would manage it? Where could you publish a skill-to-need list (paper, blog, web site, posters…) Thanks for any input someone might have. Perhaps we need to put it back into our objective list. Martha, I also remember that you provided us with a web site to check out on this topic. I’ll find it and take a look! Thanks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under 01. Poverty: Knowledge and Awareness, 02. Poverty: Skills and Mobilizing, 09. Community: Knowledge and Awareness, 10. Community: Skills and Mobilizing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.