Osborne Village Resource Centre Manitoba Incorporated
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Mission Statement
Who We Are The Osborne Village Resource Centre is a non-profit pre-employment resource centre that is dedicated to assisting clients on their journey to finding meaningful employment. We assist clients who are unemployed, under-employed and/or those making a career change. Our Vision To be a leader in providing exceptional support to Manitobans seeking employment. Our Mission To provide an inclusive and safe space that empowers job seekers to find employment by offering one-on-one job search services, workshops, career counselling, computer training and access to technology. We Believe Our clients feel empowered when they take personal ownership of their job search. Our clients will have the greatest chance for success with a targeted job search that starts with a clear understanding of who they are, their value within the workplace, and a clear idea of what work will be most meaningful to them. Career development is essential to an individual’s success in navigating an ever-changing labour market. Our clients become more energized and prepared by identifying their skills and recognizing their unique abilities. Once clients realize the value of finding a job that is a “good fit” for their skills, abilities, and personality, they will maintain employment for long periods of time. Career development is essential to an individual’s success in navigating an ever-changing job market.
About This Cause
There are many reasons that the services provided by the Osborne Village Resource Centre are necessary and valuable in a transitioning employment landscape. The modern working world is increasingly impersonal, computerized, and focused on casual, term, part-time and contract employment. Many workers will face multiple career changes in their lifetime, not just job changes. A considerable number of our clients are working, but cannot get adequate hours for a livable wage and are overwhelmed by the stresses of needing to hold down anywhere from two to four part time positions with conflicting demands to get a single full time wage. This issue is becoming increasingly apparent in the service, child care and health care industries. Workers affected by layoffs and mergers find themselves bewildered by the changes in job search techniques, tools and the shift to entrepreneurial culture in the workplace. Recent graduates do not have the knowledge or the resources to know how to job search effectively due to budget cutbacks at educational institutions combined with resume development strategies that are ten years out of date. Clients receiving financial assistance often have many barriers to re-entering the workplace, including access to and understanding of technology, lack of empowerment to make informed decisions about what work they would be suitable for, systemic resistance to change that can be generational or cultural, overcoming the stigma of an absence from the workforce due to incarceration, illness or parenthood, and so on. These clients in particular feel a lot of societal pressure to take work and get off the system at any cost, and we have found this mentality results in clients who end up in work poorly suited to their interests and abilities, which they can't maintain in the long run. When necessary we work with, and refer clients to, other community agencies. If the essential needs of food, shelter, safety, and physical and mental health cannot be met at this time, looking for work is difficult, as the client is not focused on their future but on the immediate crisis situation. Referrals to shelters, counselling agencies, food banks, clothing exchanges and so on are a core part of our process. If a client has no dress clothes, no amount of education will help them feel confident at the interview. If a client doesn't know where they will sleep tonight, they are not focused on finding fulfilling work. All employment agencies work as the hub of a wheel in close conjunction with other social service agencies, but the unique challenges of being in the core area result in our sometimes needing to deal with the critical survival issues first and the finding a job parts later. Our increasing numbers of clients year after year and our high success rates speak to our effectiveness in helping potential employees bridge the gap between inadequate or inappropriate work and a fulfilling career. We are not a structured program, and given our high percentage of underemployed and misemployed clients, we feel this is a critical component to our success. Every client's needs are different, and not every client may need everything we provide. We encourage participation in the initial action planning workshop, but after that, we encourage clients to make their own decisions about what the next step is. We have found that this mentality empowers clients who might not otherwise feel that they have any power left due to social or cultural barriers, and this small act of choice can lead to the confidence to make much larger, life-altering decisions. Our open-ended programming allows us to react more responsively to shifts and changes in the needs of our client base. We have shortened workshops to allow us to present them more frequently, and in the past fiscal year, developed all new workshops to provide basic service orientation for new clients who don't know what we do, and share core career counseling tools in a group setting to give clients a jumpstart on the career transition process. We have also developed and delivered on-site custom employability content to address the needs of specific communities, such as social assistance recipients, post-secondary students needing to change their resume to reflect their new career, and persons nearing the end of incarceration and returning to the work force. We believe these services would not be possible if we had a more structured program that did not allow our staff resources to be rescheduled and refocus to respond to changes in the recruitment process and cycle. Our flexibility means we can work closely with employers and engage in dialog that allows us to find out what they really need and incorporate that into our core programming. Research and networking with employers has resulted in direct changes to the way OVRC provides services such as cover letters and resumes, and what we teach clients to include in those fundamental work search documents. At OVRC, while we understand that the job search is solitary in nature (nobody else can look for your job for you), we believe it does not need to be done in isolation, and connecting to a community of supportive and caring professionals can make all the difference in the world, particularly when a job seeker is frustrated or struggling. We work to give our clients not just a job, but the tools they need to re-evaluate their work and their lives to ensure they are doing work that is fulfilling and best uses the unique skill set they have to contribute. Most importantly, we want to give them the knowledge and the confidence to feel empowered to course correct and search for work effectively on their own in the future.