The first women started lining up outside the Women’s Bean Project building about 7 a.m. Wednesday. The instructions were clear. The doors open at 8 a.m. and close at 8:30. This is a once-a-year pre-hiring orientation, and punctuality is a job necessity. About half of this group will be selected for a follow-up job tryout, and only half of them will be hired. Work starts Monday at 8 a.m.
Some women will be late and find the doors locked. More won’t show up at all. They missed the bus or couldn’t find a babysitter or missed the message. Starting over is scary. What if I don’t succeed, the women ask themselves, and what if I do?
Two hundred fifty job applicants have been invited to this orientation. Ninety-three get through the door in time. Among them is Faheemah Kariem, who arrives at 7:05 and sits across the street in Curtis Park until she sees the line forming. She’s wearing her work shirt from McDonald’s, where she has a part-time job. “I didn’t want to be late,” she says. “I heard about this program from a lady I was incarcerated with. She was telling me there was a lot of opportunity here, and I don’t want to close the door to a better situation.”
The women who line up are mothers, felons, recovering addicts, victims of domestic violence. Often, they are all of these combined. They want the job, sure. The Women’s Bean Project, founded in 1989, does $2 million a year in sales of food products and handmade jewelry. More than 450 stores in 40 states carry the bean soup, chili, dip and other mixes, including brownies and cookies. Everything is assembled and packaged by the women the nonprofit hires.
But the women aren’t lining up just for a job. That, after all, pays $7.75 an hour, carries no health benefits, includes random drug testing and is temporary, usually six to nine months. They’re here because that job comes with training, structure, support, mentoring and help finding work when the program ends.
“This is a place where we hope you’re ready to come because you’re ready for a different life,” Bean Project executive director Tamra Ryan tells the women as the orientation begins.
The women stand and introduce themselves. They say: “I’ve been a drug addict for 14 years. . . . I buried my dad a drug addict, and I’ll do whatever it takes not to have my kids bury me a drug addict.” “I made a really poor choice, and now I have a felony. . . . I’m hoping to prove to my family that what I did doesn’t define me, but what I do now does.” “I actually have tons of job skills, but I made an unfortunate choice in my life, and I lost it. I’m finding I don’t fit anywhere anymore.”
Only 20 women will be offered jobs — the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It kills executive director Ryan that she cannot hire more “because for most of the women who come here, we are the end of the road.”
Women will quit. Others will be hired to replace them. Sixty percent will graduate from the program, and of them, roughly three in four will move into other jobs. It’s easy, sitting in this room, listening to the women, to come away overwhelmed by the need. So, it’s not by accident that at the end of the orientation, former graduates speak to the women. But it is only because there is extra time that program director Bob McDonald asks a 26-year-old woman named Rhian to speak.
Rhian went through the program in 2008 and now works at the Bean Project as the shipping and receiving coordinator. She tells the women she’s a single mom and a four- time convicted felon. “No one here is going to judge you based on your past,” she says. “Everyone here has made mistakes. . . . But you have to be willing to do the work.”
Rhian tells them she’s in school now, working on her bachelor’s degree in human services. “And,” she says, smiling, “I’m currently waiting to find out when I will be closing on my first house.”
And the women, afraid and hopeful and desperate and longing and frustrated and, perhaps, finally ready, break into cheers and applause.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
