Friendship House - Help support job training
Transcript
[Music] hey how's it going as Keith Towson from the CTO advisor and I'm interviewing Rob Montgomery CEO president of Frisia Palin's house from PR Peoria Illinois so Rob Peoria Illinois where exactly is that I know where Chicago is at guys were here in Chicago it's about two and a half hours southwest of here okay guy 55 on your way to st. Louis right when you hit normal just go straight West and you'll run into Peoria so why are we interviewing someone from a not for profit Rob came to my house a few months ago after he took over there speaking the CEO whole of this nonprofit that's doing really great things and we have a special ask but we'll get into that in a second soon as we found out what the Peoria I'm sorry the friendship friendship house in Peoria does I'm a big fan of pure because the not too far from there is the Illinois basketball championships are already in the area so it's the original March Madness okay so Rob first off what why should we care about what's going on in Peoria I mean it's just another town Chicago big city booming economy caterpillars there the everything's hunky-dory right no everything is not Peoria is much like many small towns in across the United States actually it's not a small town it's about a about a hundred thousand people in there a little bit more but the the main employer there has been caterpillar for probably over 50 years now and caterpillar just like any other large manufacturer has figured out how to make more with less people and as a result the people at the bottom in this in the community are suffering because those jobs that they could walk out of high school and go into a factory and make a pretty decent wage those are now upscale jobs and so you can't just walk out of high school and go into pee or into Caterpillar and start working now you got to work and make minimum wage and so a lot of people to come to our Center we're actually located in the poorest community in Peoria and most of the people who come to our Center are actually working class people really yeah but minimum wage doesn't help you make ends meet so what we do is we fill in those gaps we believe that our poorest people should live a good quality of life and what does a good quality of life mean it means you know where your next meal is gonna come from you know where you're gonna sleep tonight and you know that if you get hurt so you're gonna be taken care of so we try to meet those needs and then our another tenant is education so we meet those needs and the only one we can't meet as a housing because we don't we're just not a housing facility so we have a program it's a wraparound program because our idea is that we want to give people a hand up okay a hand out although people a lot of people come to our organization are looking for a handout and so we do give them that handout but we enroll them into we give everybody the opportunity to roll into our a wraparound program will we give them different services and those services include anything from enrolling their kids into our after-school program where we help all of our kids a hundred percent of our kids are either reading at or above grade level that's awesome so help me out at you show me this antiquated machine so this is a key ally book is a great brand from HP now HP e or HP compute a really decent laptop but this thing is about seven years old okay so it's probably about seven to five I'm breaking my back as you know what when when I administered IT the CEO would probably get the slowest machine possible so I'm sure your staff has much nicer machine on that no we all have these we're walking around with these sometimes they shut down on them sometimes we have to shut them down so we can get back onto the internet we get kicked off the internet frequently it's they're slow and they don't have a whole lot of memory so so that I can I can feel your pain on it so I guess the question is how how are you guys effectively serving the community if the tools you have aren't really up to snuff don't you guys get donations can't you just buy the machines out the donations you get that would be awesome if we got more than what we needed but the the lion's share of the money that we collect from the community goes back into the community okay we pay salad salaries is probably our highest our biggest line-item but those salary goes into paying our program managers and program managers provide direct services to the community that's where all of our money goes so even if somebody was to say say okay I'm gonna write a check for $10,000 for 10 new net laptops you got to choose between buying 10 new net laptops and putting literally putting food on the tests somebody salary who that person actually sits down and we do a lot of coaching and a lot of directing so when somebody comes into our organization we believe that Oakes Chinese proverb teach a man give a man a fish you feed him for a day teach a man to fish you feet you can feed him for a lifetime so when people come through our doors we don't just give them stuff we teach them things so to effectively do this and this is where we're gonna get to the ask which is we're reaching out to the community or specifically you're reaching out to the community to ask for what new laptops we need about 10 of them so staff of how big is the staff we have friendship we have 8 8 staff members and then 2 interns that come in and do work for us and primarily they work on computers so more than anybody those interns need to be on our computers because they enter data into our database it's like regular for pay organizations interns do the most work I wouldn't say the most administrator so how does so help me out how does new computers translate into helping people with job skills so one of the things that we're in a new millennium okay so we do have a GED class and that's all done online so we help people take tests okay we help them prepare for the test the GED tests and that's all done online so if they're consistently getting kicked off line then it's frustrating to the person that we're trying to serve to help them to learn the system so that they can go and pass the test same thing with workforce development we teach people certain skills basic skills computer skills on a computer so they can walk into an office and become an office manager or an administrative assistant or get somewhere end up on the bottom level and work their way up but they need those computer skills and if we don't have good systems or good equipment then we can't really teach them in computer so you guys don't have computers that work you can't teach exactly exactly so if somebody wanted to donate to you guys how could they reach out to you get in touch they can call me I have my cart sitting here somewhere I've only been been there for six weeks so I don't have my number memorized and you are living on the roof for a while to bring attention on the room oh my goodness I'm living on a roof to raise a half a million dollars for a friendship house okay our number is three zero nine six seven one five two zero zero our web site is simply friendship dot house wow that's pretty cool and we're on Facebook as well as Peoria Friendship House of Christian service all right so you've heard the plea from Rob I've known Rob for years this is a great great opportunity to serve if you're an American fellow Americans if you're a European for feral Westerners if you're a Chinese person and you're in China you're helping the West catch up to you guys as our president said you guys are much further ahead of us we can use them yeah well that's it for this ad abound CT visor chat without a CTO talking to for a not-for-profit CEO Rob we really appreciate having you on appreciate the good work you guys are doing to Peoria and hope that we can help you get a machine that's not seven years old I get some work done thank you top the guys next CTO visor
