Local VOA program helping those who are in recovery find employment

Over the past year, 146 people, who are in recovery, were placed in jobs in this region, and 65 percent of the placements remained employed for six months or longer thanks in part to a program through a not-for-profit organization.

Volunteers of America® Mid-States President/CEO Jennifer Hancock was the keynote speaker during the Southern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce monthly membership luncheon Tuesday, which was held at The Corbin Center.

The Recovery Reintegration Program is Volunteers of America (VOA) Mid-States^® (VOA) program headquartered in Corbin and funded by the Department of Labor that is designed to work with people in recovery to help them return to the workforce. The program offers job placement, training and follow-up in addition to career counseling, mentoring and financial assistance.

The program is headquartered inside Corbin City Hall thanks to the city and Mayor Suzie Razmus allowing them to use the office space. Program supervisors also work out of London.

“It is really neat because it supports Kentuckians, who have been sidelined from work because of a substance abuse disorder. It gives them customized supports whether it is resume writing, linkage to an employer willing to hire second chance candidates, if they need training or credentialing, work boots, uniforms, whatever those barriers are Catherine (Hays) and her team address those in a very customized way, and have had phenomenal success,” VOA Mid States^® President/CEO Jennifer Hancock told members of the Southern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce during its monthly membership luncheon Tuesday.

“They have already exceeded the benchmarks and the metrics that the Department of Labor has set out for this project … This is one of those areas where we see a lot of opportunity for continued expansion.”

Hancock was the keynote speaker during the luncheon, which was held Tuesday at The Corbin Center.

Senate President Robert Stivers, who attended Tuesday’s chamber luncheon, asked where these people would have been without this service.

“They would probably be floundering out there looking on their own for employers willing to accept a second chance candidate,” Hancock replied. “They are getting lost out there because they struggle on their own to find a meaningful wage job in a productive field.”

Hays noted that about half of the participants are male and about half are female.

The Recovery Reintegration Program opened in March 2022. There are 143 employer partners as part of the program, and 119 clients have been trained and educated.

Hancock noted that the VOA team works to carefully vet job seeking candidates and to make sure that the job candidates and the employers are good matches.

Counties eligible for this program include: Bell, Clay, Jackson, Knox, Laurel, Leslie, McCreary and Whitley.

VOA was established in 1896, and is one of the region’s oldest, largest and most diverse not-for-profit organizations. When it was founded, the common understanding of “volunteer” was someone who dedicated their life to helping others.

Today, its team is made-up of nearly 600 paid and trained professionals, which operates nearly 50 distinct human service programs in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Clark and Floyd Counties in Indiana.

(VOA) Mid-States^® is governed by a voluntary 30-member board of directors, Hancock, and 12 executive team members. In addition to employing nearly 600 staff members it also engages approximately 1,400 volunteers each year.

Hancock also spoke about a future project that the group is hoping to do, which is the VOA Corbin Scholar House on Eastern Kentucky University’s Corbin Campus.

The facility would help with student housing and supportive care services for single parents with children. Families that have been impacted by the opioid epidemic would be given the highest priority for entry into the program.

There is a similar Scholar House program already in place on EKU’s main campus in Richmond.

Hancock said that the idea for the program came about when 1 Clay County took a field trip to Whitley County last summer. Southern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Bruce Carpenter helped organize the trip, which went in part to the industrial park and the EKU Corbin Campus.

During the trip, an EKU official, who is also part of the 1 Clay County board of directors, noted that there were 28 acres of undeveloped land at the Corbin campus, and he asked her to think about what could be done in a partnership with EKU and VOA.

Later that same day, Razmus, who hadn’t heard the earlier conversation, suggested that VOA needed to think about doing a project on the EKU Corbin Campus, such as transitional housing.

“We are going to manifest this together,” Hancock told the crowd. “We can bring this project to life.”

There is already a planning group for the project, which recently took a trip to northern Kentucky to look at a similar program.

Hancock said she thinks that the child care portion of the program could be expanded to help the community at large, who are in need of child care.

“I think this could be a generational transformational project for this entire region,” she added.

The City of Corbin has already pledged $100,000 from opioid settlement funds for pre-development work on the project.