Federal Failures: Homeless Employment And Terrorism
On December 6 th , 2015 I spoke at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in DC about the possible closure of the CCNV Shelter c. 2018 and the need to connect able-bodied homeless people to living-wage jobs. I told them about a federal effort to connect homeless people to employment in 1988. That effort ended with about half of the homeless people who took advantage of the program obtaining employment and half of THAT group remaining employed for at least 13 weeks. All in all, a quarter of the homeless people who sought employment through this program remained employed for at least a quarter of a year. 25% is a failing grade anywhere in the world (except the baseball stadium). No robust effort to get homeless people working has been made by the feds in the last 27 years – when Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were in diapers and I was just months into my eventual six-year tenure as a tractor driver (similar to an airport luggage train but used to haul hospital freight) at Shands Hospit...