As often happens, today’s broad and rapidly growing Jobs for Life movement had a simple beginning (formerly National Jobs Partnership), in 1996 during a casual lunch Raleigh, NC.

Chris Mangum, head of a major contracting company and Reverend Donald L. McCoy, pastor of the Pleasant Hill United Church of Christ, were chatting during lunch when Chris happened to mention, “I’ve got a lot of idle trucks, I just can’t find good drivers.”

Then Pastor McCoy quickly replied, “That’s interesting, in my congregation I have a lot of idle people who just can’t find good jobs.”

At that moment, a movement was born.

Chris and Pastor McCoy went out into their communities, each to find twelve others to make up a partnership of businesses and churches, with the common mission of reaching, mentoring, training and employing their unemployed and under-employed neighbors. Within a few weeks Jobs Partnership of Raleigh was formally launched.

Early on, it was clear that effective leadership was necessary, so a Steering Committee was put together with eight pastors of different denominations and race, together with seven leaders of diverse businesses effectively reflecting and representing the home city of Raleigh. This Steering Committee developed a strategy to successfully move their neighbors from unemployment to financial self-sufficiency, through a process of classroom education with a two-fold curriculum of basic workplace skills and ethics, all the necessary tools to get and keep a job.

Because of this early suucess, cites like Washington, DC; Orlando, FL; Indianapolis, IN; Brenham, TX; Little Rock, AR and Cleveland, OH have replicated what took place in Raleigh by building their own Jobs Partnership organizations.

In the years since its founding the original mission has grown exponentially in energy, purpose and – most important of all – effectiveness.

These past years have been a time of constant assessment, refinement, further trial, feedback, analysis of results, follow through with those helped and continuous evolution of the program - always in search for the best way.

And now renamed and relaunched as Jobs for Life, the movement has developed a powerful, dependable, repeatable system, combining community immersion, neighbor-helping-neighbor, mentoring, instruction, learning, coaching, all proceeding down a permanent path, all rooted in the foundation of faith.

The results are extraordinary and possibly unprecedented. While most broad scale initiatives designed to help the jobless find work and emerge from poverty have a follow-on success rate (those who are still at work after a year) of only about 20%, Studies show that Jobs for Life can show results that are just the opposite. After 1 full year, between 70-80% of those who commit to follow the Jobs for Life way are still employed, with stable, growing lives.