Building up the Workforce Readiness Program at the Five Towns Community Center

The Workforce Readiness Program at the Five Towns Community Center operates with the purpose of preparing local students for future employment opportunities or to help them apply to college. A $5,000 grant from AT&T presented to the Community Center on Aug. 10, as part of the company’s Aspire will help enhance those services.

Veronica Ortiz, a center youth counselor, explained what services are part of the program. “Mock interviews, résumé building, leadership training …” she said. “We also like to do group work, team building and community service.” The Workforce Readiness Program has about 25 regular members, but there are roughly 100 students who come to various events and trainings throughout the year, she added.

Lorenzo Sistrunk, the center’s executive director, said the connection between the Community Center and AT&T was made after learning that Brandon Ray, the regional director of external and legislative affairs for the company is a fraternity brother with Rick Thurmond, the center’s coordinator for AIDS programing. Sistrunk and Ray, both Village of Hempstead residents, began talking.

Sistrunk wanted to build a relationship with AT&T, hoping they could sponsor some events when he said Ray approached him about the grant. “All of a sudden Brandon came to me and said this is what we have available at the initial stages of this, and of course down the road there’s more that can come with it … This is a perfect compliment for what we do,” Sistrunk said.

More than a dozen of the teens in the program were in attendance, as was Town of Hempstead Councilman Bruce Blakeman, who take the opportunity to reminisce about his college years, which he said were spent bouncing around schools before settling in at Arizona State University and deciding to attend law school. After posing with the check and some of the teens, the councilman called the community center, “An anchor in the community.”

AT&T’s Aspire program has contributed $400 million to philanthropic initiatives since it was established in 2008. The goal is to help those programs increase the resources that help students succeed in school and prepare them for the workforce by aiding to improve their learning environments.

A portion of the $5,000 is expected to go to the center’s Halloween fundraisers that regularly include haunted houses and costume contests, Ortiz said. She noted that there is only one computer in the teen center, to which Ray responded, “We need to get you more computers.”

“We’re not the experts,” Ray said, “we want to support the experts, and support the people who support the experts,” he said gesturing to Sistrunk and Blakeman. “This is the trinity that’s going to make it all work.”

A busy man, Ray was then headed to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Long Beach to present another financial contribution.