CM in the PM

Since you've all been on the edges of your seats waiting to hear what I do in the p.m...

Every afternoon, I'm at the St. Joseph Center administrative building where I fulfill the Culinary Training Program (CTP) part of my "program assistant" responsibilities. CTP aims to put unemployed and under-employed ($22,000/year) individuals, many of whom have barriers to employment, to work in entry-level positions in the food-service industry. The culinary part of the class is taught by the executive chef at Bread and Roses, but in keeping with St. Joe's emphasis on self-sufficiency throughout all its programs, the class also includes life skills workshops -- study skills, financial literacy, job interview strategies, etc.

I help the program manager of CTP, who is the sweetest lady I've met in L.A. (and also my second supervisor), with recruitment of new students, interviewing applicants, and searching for new culinary job leads. If time allows, I'll also be helping her with résumé and job search workshops. But probably my most important role in CTP is as a case manager. I case manage within the Family Source Center (enter supervisor number three), which is a case management contract for LA residents. So, the CTP students who live in Los Angeles proper become my case management clients.

In one-on-one meetings, I help clients identify their goals -- with respect to education, employment, finances, benefits and legal issues, to name a few -- as well as barriers keeping them from reaching those goals. My objective as a case manager ("CM," shorthand) is to help clients manage these goals and overcome barriers, all within the context of self-sufficiency. I really admire St. Joseph's emphasis on self-sufficiency and empowerment within all its case management contracts, rather than encouraging a case management culture of hand-outs. Since my clients are all CTP students, my case management load definitely has a bias toward employment (and employment in the culinary industry in particular), but the obstacles these struggling individuals face make for a challenging and diverse caseload. Right now I am case managing about 15 clients, and when the next class starts on Monday, I'll add four more!

The learning curve on the case management part of my job is definitely steeper than the café management. Beyond mastering all the social services available for referrals and gaining an intimate knowledge of the detailed forms we use, I have a ways to go in honing my case manager intuition. Being a case manager demands a lot of reading between the lines and listening with a critical ear that I'm not especially experienced with. The closest experience I can draw on is conducting medical histories with SHARE (Study to Help the AIDS Research Effort) in D.C., where I learned -- over time and with great failure at first -- to focus first on the person and second on the forms.

Bread and Roses and CTP are connected institutionally in a number of ways (not least by the fact that both share the executive chef and the JV), but the two aspects of my program assistant position are quite independent of one another. Each carries significant responsibility, and each is demanding in its own, distinct ways. Hopefully I will be able to find the balance that allows me to devote great energy to both endeavors without burning out by 1 p.m. every day.