Five Skies Training and Consulting

Through our experience, we have found that ongoing support and mentorship is essential to improve the outcomes of our clients, especially when helping them enter a new career pathway. A core element of our programming is providing tools for our participants to overcome barriers in healthy ways but we understand that often barriers will come up that may limit their success. We provide assistance to remove as many barriers as possible to help increase the rates of success we see and help our graduates become self-sufficient and progress in a productive career.

Unfortunately we have also learned that many State and Federal grants have limitations that prevent funds being used in a manner that would specifically address the most common barriers faced by members of the underserved communities we focus on providing assistance to. To ensure we are able to provide the support that our graduates need, we often seek outside resources to assist with funding our programming and the majority of our activities are contractor supported.

The funds we receive for our services enable us to provide mentoring services to our graduates essentially round-the-clock. They are able to reach out to us for advice/guidance whenever they encounter a challenge that they are unsure of how to address and do not have any other resource available to provide culturally as well as industry responsive feedback or advice. 

We provide work boots and other PPE or work gear/attire that may be required by a newly hired graduate that the contractor may not provide but would be essential for safe/comfortable working conditions. 

Transportation can be challenging when someone has been unemployed or needs to travel for a new job and may not have gas money, or reliable transportation so we assist with fuel expenses or minor car repairs such as tires or brakes, etc to make sure that when they get that offer of employment, they can say yes without hesitation and mean it.

Lodging assistance is also something we may provide for a limited period when someone needs to relocate for a position.

Of course, the funds also allow us to maintain our database and program services offered to contractors and other partners as well as the trainings we provide to our underserved communities, which in turn expand the number of people that are work ready and willing/able to go to work.

We develop new programming and update our curriculum frequently so that process often requires additional resources to support. Our efforts to ensure that our clients are work-ready will also sometimes include initial drug screening prior to someone attending a training or going out to a job site when requested and while that does not take the place of employer drug testing, it does provide an additional degree of assurance that when one of our graduates says they can pass a drug screen, they are able to say so without crossing their fingers.

Funding supports our recruitment and outreach efforts as well as staff and pretty much all our activities relating to the services we provide to training participants, job seekers, employers and subscribers. We do not have external funding for the primary fact that grant restrictions ultimately set people up to fail, not succeed. If you train someone to identify their barriers but do not give them a way to remove the barrier, you’ve not really made any improvement to their situation.