By Ally Hardebeck
A woman wearing cropped, bleached hair and a pink hoodie rises out of her seat. Her long, sparkly silver and green nails grab the microphone. Melvin Wilson asks for her name and Carla (first names only in this group) begins to read:
Higher Purpose
Your misery is your ministry.
Your pain is your purpose.
Your suffering is your service.
Your mess becomes your message.
Your test becomes your testimony.
God allows us to hurt to heal because you cannot heal what you cannot feel.
So don’t let the pain of your past punish your present and paralyze your progress and purpose.
Wilson thanks her. He asks how the fifth verse applies to her life. “Everything I’ve gone through is for me to learn from and use to teach others,” Carla says. “I can help them to learn from my experiences.”
Each Tuesday, a group gathers in the basement of Zion Baptist Church in Oliver. Participants begin to fill in the sections of red pleather chairs. They greet familiar faces with a hug or a wave; this is clearly no group of strangers. A slideshow plays on the TVs at the front of the room, displaying the names of “4 new hires.” Promptly at 9 am, Wilson steps up to one of the colorful microphones. His call to order, prayer, and welcome lay out expectations for the morning: be all in. “If you can’t be off your phone for two hours, you’re probably not ready to be working for eight.”
Wilson’s introduction kicks off Turnaround Tuesday, a weekly program sponsored by Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD). The program’s stated mission goes beyond employment, aiming to not only help returning and unemployed citizens gain meaningful job, but also to facilitate community leadership. The case managers, life coaches, community organizers, pastors, and other support staff emphasize the total transformation of mind, body, and soul. The structure of Turnaround Tuesday reflects this focus. Each session builds on a topic; on April 2, discussion centers around decision-making. After Wilson, one of the co-directors of Turnaround Tuesday, finishes speaking, participants break up into pairs to talk about the question of the week: “You are a parent of 3. Schools are closing 3 hours early. You are at work. What do you do?” Transformation of the soul begins with the spiritual vitamin. Denise steps up to the microphone to read two quotes from scripture. She connects the verses to her own experiences, telling the group a story about when she had to choose between two potential jobs. Indecision, she says, is a form of decision.
This is more than a resume workshop. Suddenly, participants launch into the mind section of the program, as staff members and group members role play. The manager of a car wash opens the scene. Customers love his work, although his boss, the owner, is clearly struggling to operate the business. The paycheck is not enough, particularly for the manager’s girlfriend. He reminds her that he has a long-term vision of ultimately taking over the business himself, which would put them in a better financial situation in the long run. After a mysterious absence reveals to the owner how integral the manager is to his business, he offers to sell. His decision pays off.
In this way, Turnaround Tuesday applies strategies to real-world situations, whether in the career or personal sphere. This week, a timely example comes to the table as Cheryl Finney, Chief Strategy Officer, unrolls a newspaper and reveals the headline: Pugh Steps Aside. “Speaking of decisions,” Finney says as she breaks down a seven step model for decision making, citing examples from the role play and the recent political scandal. Breakout groups form to discuss the day’s teachings, applying them to other hypothetical scenarios.
Turnaround Tuesday cannot end without transforming the body. Pastor Marshall Prentice, the spiritual leader of Zion Baptist for over three decades, has swapped his three-piece suit for athletic attire as a workout video begins to play. The pastor leads the group in “Walk at Home” by Leslie Sansone. Sansone’s megawatt smile, her slightly teased hair, and her tank top with “WALK” emblazoned across the chest in rhinestones appear on screen as Pastor Prentice leads the group in the exercises. The enthusiasm is palpable, so much so, that even a man that had been sitting in a wheelchair stands up to rock to the music, which is vaguely reminiscent of the 1980s. The morning ends as it began: in prayer.
About half of TAT participants have a criminal background. Finding housing, securing employment, and mending social connections can be complicated upon returning home. On the application for public housing, the Housing Authority of Baltimore City notes that the results of a background check are grounds for denial of housing assistance. More than two thirds of employers will conduct a background check on a potential new hire, according to a 2012 survey by the Society of Human Resource Management.
Baltimore is no stranger to the challenges of re-entry, but not every Marylander is affected equally. According to a 2004 Urban Institute Report, over half of all Maryland prisoners return to Baltimore City upon release. Of those returning citizens, thirty percent come home to the same six communities. All six of these communities have rates of single motherhood and welfare receipt above the city average. This concentration of poverty can compound the challenges of gaining a livable wage job.
In the wake of the unrest following Freddie Gray’s death, it became clear that Baltimore was facing significant challenges. As national news outlets swarmed the city, picking through the city’s shortcomings with a journalistic fine tooth comb, community leaders in BUILD brainstormed ways to address these issues. Terrell Williams, co-director of Turnaround Tuesday opposite Wilson, recalls sitting in a meeting and glancing outside. “There’s 30 people selling drugs up and down Lanvale Avenue. Why do people stay on those corners? Pastor Prentice said, let’s go find out. We got clipboards, we took names, and we talked to people because everybody knows the pastor,” Williams says. “We realized quickly that for most people, they weren’t there because they wanted to be there. They were there because employers had decided that because they made a mistake, they could no longer work for them.” Four weeks of listening to Oliver residents, and ultimately, the beginning of Turnaround Tuesday, followed.
On Tuesdays, TAT staff spend their mornings at Zion Baptist in East Baltimore and afternoons at Macedonia Baptist in the West. On Wednesdays, the Resource Day staff help with resume edits, interview prep, and everything in between. But the transformative philosophy of Turnaround Tuesday extends far beyond the logistics of job applications. After years of incarceration, many participants lack a sense of agency. Turnaround Tuesday helps them develop a feeling of personal ownership that translates to success inside and outside of the workplace.
William Glover-Bey’s story demonstrates this transformation. As the second oldest of twelve kids in his childhood home, Glover-Bey found himself playing the role of the protector. He says this unknowingly prepared him for street life. Selling and using drugs started at age 13, and Glover-Bey would eventually get shot four times on three separate occasions and spend fifteen years incarcerated. During a seven and half year stint in prison, he decided to let go of his previous lifestyle, a change that would require getting clean and finding a job. A friend eventually connected him to Turnaround Tuesday. Although skeptical at first (“My mind said it was just job readiness and I already have that experience”), Glover-Bey began the program in January 2015. By March, Johns Hopkins Hospital hired him as a floor tech. He then trained as a community health worker, and today William works with senior citizens to identify their needs and challenges.
Turnaround Tuesday encourages participants to find the balance between owning their story without letting their past, whether it includes a criminal record or not, define them. Kiel Quinn, a life coach with Turnaround Tuesday, explains this dynamic. “At Turnaround Tuesday, we’re talking with people who have never really gone through the hiring process, so it’s really about bringing out their inner power,” Quinn says. “Making them recognize, ‘you’re a whole person,’ just because you’ve been incarcerated or you’ve never worked or never had a mom or dad or whatever their stories are, you still have your inner person, who has passions, who has wants, who is strong.”
Although incarceration can be an impediment to securing a job, Turnaround Tuesday argues that these negative experiences can be assets. “We have a discipline that incarceration gives us that the average person doesn’t have,” Glover-Bey says. “You wake up when they tell you to wake up, you eat when they tell you to eat. Some of us get jobs in there and we work 12 hours, six times a week.” Although Turnaround Tuesday connected him to employment more than four years ago, he frequently returns to Zion Baptist in order to share his story. “I need to help people that were in jail understand that you have an advantage if you plug in, let go of street thinking, and bring in society thinking.”
The leaders of Turnaround Tuesday recognize that they too must be “all in” if they expect the same of participants. Terry, a former participant who now works as a youth community organizer for TAT, notes that this sets the program apart. “They had a service they could provide instead of saying ‘I’m doing you a favor.’ That was something different,” he says. “Terrell shares a part of himself that most directors of any organization won’t share. You won’t know anything about them except their first name and last name. At Turnaround Tuesday, there’s no big I and little you and entitlement.”
Another key difference between Turnaround Tuesday and other programs lies in the ability to build social capital. TAT nurtures relationships with a variety of employers throughout the city, including Johns Hopkins, Blueprint Robotics, and Parkway Theatre. Because staff hold program participants to a high standard (“be all in”), institutions trust that Turnaround Tuesday hires will be a reliable bet. In addition, staff members advocate for participants throughout the hiring process. A week before Glover-Bey was scheduled to start his new job at Johns Hopkins, he received a voicemail telling him not to show up to orientation. Immediately Wilson contacted the appropriate people and resolved the issue. Without having someone like Wilson in his corner, Glover-Bey could have lost the opportunity altogether.
Turnaround Tuesday is working. In the past two years, the overall retention rate for participants has been 72%. For those placed in TAT’s anchor institutions, the rate climbs to 85%. While the statistics show that the program is a workforce development powerhouse, Williams maintains that one of Turnaround Tuesday’s most important goals remains helping people find their own Higher Purpose.
“We hope Turnaround Tuesday is an avenue for a way of seeing life differently and seeing your place in life differently. How can you really reinvent yourself to be the person that whatever higher power you believe in, or don’t believe in, really put you here to be? What is your purpose and how do you really find it? Because the end is not the end until you’re gone. You can always work to be better.”