Realistic Employment Workshops: How to Start an RE Workshop in Your Home Area

If you have not already read carefully our original hub describing this subject, "Realistic Employment Workshops, with Ongoing Support for Career Success: Introduction," please do so now before going any further, as we here presume that you do at least know that background information.

At this point, then, we assume that you have read that introductory outline and rationale of our RE workshop program and you want to know more about it for one of two reasons:
(a) you have a current unresolved employment challenge in your own life, or the life of a loved one, and/or
(b) you want to explore the idea of starting and operating your own local RE workshop, because you want to work with others in your home base area who face unresolved employment issues.

Please note these important disclaimers:
(a) We are not an employment agency, and we do not get anyone a job. Our vision and mission is to provide an organizing framework for local workshops that allow people to participate in continuing analytic discussion of employment issues, basic general education, and networking with others.

(b) The RE Workshops are not a franchising or licensing situation. We freely offer information about our program ideas in hopes that some individuals will find it useful enough to benefit (by solving whatever employment issue they face) and some will continue working alongside others who face similar issues (realizing that successful employment requires a continue life-time of networking and education).

We see no reason why we should not make the details of our work freely available on HubPages to interested Hubbers all over the world.

How to start a RE Workshop in your area? First, someone must decide they want to do it, then start thinking whom to invite from your home area (or other defined territory), and how to invite them, then work with any interested person to set up a tentative weekly meeting time.

Qualifications for leaders? We currently have in almost every state (and every country) a surprising number of unemployed teachers, counselors, and others with group management skills who are well qualified to start and lead a Realistic Employment Workshop with Ongoing Support for Career Success. As time goes by, we will encourage competent leaders to seek further professional training, gain relevant professional credentials, and thus make for themselves a rewarding career out of this work.

Where to hold your weekly meeting? You can hold these meetings in your home, or in the meeting room of your condominium, apartment building, college, church, public library, community center, restaurant, virtually anyplace with chairs surrounded by four walls.

What to talk about at the weekly meeting? Distribute copies of the basic HubPage article that introduces the concepts and go through it for newcomers. Then ask each person to describe their compelling issue and any progress since the previous meeting. Encourage general discussion of these issues and how the workshop meetings can help each one deal with his issues and otherwise effectively network with each other and the local community.

What long-range development of materials? The local leader will gradually accumulate a wide variety of books and other materials related to employment issues, and through training and study he/she will gradually become more and more knowledgeable in leading the discussions and guiding the ongoing studies.

To the inevitable question, "What does it cost?" we naively answer, "What is it worth to you?" (Don't be like the cynic described by Oscar Wilde as one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing ["Lady Windermere's Fan," Act 3, 1892].)

Why no charge? Because
(a) we want to make our help available as widely as possible,
(b) the range of value depends on many undiscernable individual factors,
(c) the ability to pay often depends on having a job that you do not currently have, and
(d) good business management prefers a steady stream of small sums from satisfied people continuing to use the product or service, rather than an erratic, unpredictable series of lump sums that give a "feast or famine" effect.

Let me put it this way: If 200 people use the RE Workshops to solve a pressing employment issue and get ongoing support for career success, and only 100 of them pay to their local leader (or to us) $20 a week, and the leaders send us half of their amount (keeping the other half locally for their own income and local expense), that would underwrite our whole program with $10/week x 100 = $1,000/week, and give its managers a small income.

If 2,000 people similarly use the RE Workshops, and only 1,000 of them pay their local leader the same $20/week, and the leaders send us half, that would provide $10,000/week to underwrite the program for higher quality service and materials, and give its managers a good income.

If 20,000 people -- well, you get the point; no need to get carried away with it here.

This approach surely is naive, but Max believes if this continuing program through HubPages does genuinely help two people, then one of them (on the average) will contribute a reasonable amount to the program without needing to be asked directly to do so. If Max is wrong, and they do not, then he says he will not be any poorer than he was when it started, and he will at least have the rush of knowing he did someone some good. (Of course, no one should pay if the workshop program does them absolutely no good whatsoever!)

Unsuccessful employment has become a world-wide problem today (see any issue of the "New York Times"), so it is with great anticipation that we initiate this two-way street of mutual participation. Just as we aspire to offer helpful information and advice to anyone anywhere with an employment challenge, so we also want and need to hear suggestions and concepts from you, our readers, wherever in the world you might live.

Copyright (c) Dec. 2011 by The Max Havlick School, a project of New World Community Enterprises, Inc., Villa Park, IL 60181-1938. You may contact Max through HubPagers or find there his life profile and some recent writings.