Nonprofit tackles homelessness in Tacoma one job at a time
Sherri Jensen has drawn from her personal experience to guide her in figuring out what she could do in a career and for others.
Jensen, founder and CEO of nonprofit Valeo Vocation in Tacoma, works to place people experiencing homelessness in jobs and helps them find permanent housing.
Valeo has a contract with City of Tacoma as well as with the state Department of Social and Health Services to offer employment services to Basic Food benefit recipients, and as a result, has seen continued growth.
The work to get Valeo up and running started in July 2018, with its first placements starting in September. Since then, Jensen said Valeo has placed 178 individuals on assignment, with around 40 people moving into permanent employment and around 25 moving into permanent housing.
If all of this sounds simple, she’s quick to remind you it’s not.
“It’s not just as easy as, ‘Go get a job,’” Jensen told The News Tribune in a recent interview.
“If you’re experiencing homelessness, if you are in deep poverty, you have a lot of barriers,” she said. “So you need access to income in order to reduce those barriers. So what we offer is the opportunity to get that quick access to income, but our success is their success.
“And that means self-sustainability. That means moving toward a career, living wage, employment, vocational training, permanent housing, it doesn’t stop with the minimum wage job that we offer them immediately.”
Her passion is clear in removing barriers to get people good jobs.
“Sherri is amazing,” said Kelly Blucher, community engagement manager for Goodwill of the Olympics & Rainier Region and whose husband works with Jensen at Valeo.
“She doesn’t take no for an answer. When you start taking about homelessness, you get pushback from some people saying ‘Oh, they don’t want to work,’ and she just says, ‘No way. Everybody deserves hope and a second chance.’”
Coming into her own
Her story is not a typical CEO narrative about rise to power.
“My own personal journey through childhood with parents who struggled with addiction, and then experiencing homelessness myself in my late teens and early 20s, really gave me a passion for wanting to help,” Jensen told The News Tribune.
Her mom and stepdad eventually started a path to sobriety, and as Jensen describes, rented a van and drove to a family homeless shelter in San Jose, California.
“They defied all odds and achieved sobriety, together,” she said.
That experience left an impression and desire for Jensen to see what she could do to help others, but first she learned the world of temp staffing.
“I went into the for-profit industry. I got pretty lucky and found a career doing temporary staffing. And I really connected with the workers. I just soaked in the business model,” she said.
She spent time working for DSHS with its RISE program.
“It was the concept of let’s take folks who are on food stamps and essentially transition them off food stamps by giving them all of this financial support ... wraparound support services,” Jensen said.
It was that experience that helped her decide she wanted to create her own nonprofit staffing agency.
“I started doing my research and found that ... nationally there’s about 70-ish. And I connected with them,” she said. “I connected with Millionaire Club charities in Seattle, and with basically, zero capital, started this agency.”
Valeo received an early boost with funding from a financial tech startup, Qwil, when demands for their services outpaced cash on hand initially.
She says now, “We have great partnerships, City of Tacoma has been incredibly supportive.”
But the work is never done.
“It takes a lot of steps to get to the point where we can move them into full-time employment,” Jensen said.
Valeo works to get clients clothing, driver’s licenses, ID cards.
The agency has a contract with the city “to offer employment to our stability site residents,” Jensen said.
“And these are folks with significant barriers to employment, and we’re with them, we get them hooked up with chemical dependency evaluations and going to treatment,” she said. “And then they’re coming out, and we’re moving them into housing and placing them into a transitional employment pathway program.”
In that work, Valeo has partnered with other nonprofits, “and we place these folks for 20 hours a week, while we’re still working on their barriers, and the City of Tacoma pays the wages,” Jensen said.
“So our challenge right now is in both trying to grow that program to remove some barriers for folks who have really significant barriers, like chemical dependency, but who do want to progress.”
One of its more visible community efforts is with the Hire 253 Job Fair, hosted by Goodwill.
As to how the job fair came to exist, “That is 100 percent Sherri,” Blucher said, “though she will never take the credit for that. She always includes everyone.”
Girard Wood Products of Puyallup has partnered with Valeo for a few months. Plant manager Jonathan Farinha told The News Tribune that the workers provided by Valeo have been “quality hard workers.”
In October, the company had 17 Valeo temp workers at the Puyallup site, “and we just pulled eight new guys to work at our Orting location.”
The work ultimately could become full-tme, he added.
“We have hired four of the guys from Valeo so far and looking to hire some more. They have to complete 120 hours before they are eligible to hire,” Farinha said.
The company and Valeo also put in place a ride-share program to transport the workers to the Puyallup and Orting sites.
“The four guys that we hired are excelling,” he said. “One of them is a key forklift driver for our Hand Nail department. Another is our main operator on our saw system.”
“Another one is operating one of our machines called the Explorer. It took him only about 2 weeks to learn the machine inside and out. The last guy is our main stencil/strapping guy. He makes company logos/stencils that we put on the side of pallets.”
What’s next
One of those who’s benefited from Valeo’s services is Elise, who was at one time living in a tent in Tacoma with her partner, Tre.
Elise was close to coming full term in her pregnancy. She and her partner heard about Valeo from another homeless individual at Nativity House where they got meals.
“Valeo helped us keep our spirits up,” she told The News Tribune in a phone interview. “They told us, `We give you our word. We will not let you have your baby in a tent.”
She was rapid-fire in describing how much aid they’d received. She said in a short period of time they got work through Valeo and, five days before the birth of her son, got their own apartment.
She credited Jensen’s team members Mitch and Andrea Austin for their help.
“That took so much weight off my back,” she said. “They are life savers and are a huge part of our lives.”
Jensen reiterated the work is complicated and hard, especially in a city with spiraling housing costs.
“We need more units, we need more low-income housing. But short of large legislative action, we often need some innovation to target the populations that can climb out of homelessness without requiring all of that,” she said.
She noted Valeo placed three people into permanent housing Nov. 6.
As for the future, she’d like people to work with her nonprofit as mentors.
“We could definitely create a mentorship program, if there was interest,” Jensen said. “I think people who have been through (homelessness) are more receptive, or people are more receptive to working with folks who have also been through stuff.”
She said the biggest challenge now for Valeo is capacity.
And, she added, “We need more staff.”
“My dream is to be able to take a van and go into any encampment or any shelter and put people who want to work to work, doing general labor type stuff, and then progressively move them toward full time,” Jensen said.
All it takes is money, she added, with more funding from the city or county.
For now, she sees herself in the best position to help the most people at this time.
“As the CEO of my own company, I can sit in the same room across from somebody or side by side with somebody and say, ‘Your situation is unique, but I’ve also been through some stuff,’” she said.
“And then I always share a little bit about what I’ve been through, and we can walk together because I was able to make it out. And I want to help them make it out, too.”
Valeo Vocation
Website: valeovocation.org
Facebook: facebook.com/valeovocation.org
This story was originally published November 10, 2019 at 7:00 AM.
