Bonjour Maine! Nous sommes avec vous; nouveaux arrivants en Maine qui cherchent de l’emploi.
The Peer Workforce Navigator Project (PWN) is a coalition focused on helping people access good jobs and develop economic stability. PWN holds three walk-in clinics for workers across the state. At the clinics, navigators meet with people who need help with unemployment and other public benefits, resumes, job applications, job training, and referrals to legal assistance. PWN Members of the coalition are Prosperity Maine, Maine Equal Justice, the AFL-CIO, Gateway Community Services, Food and Medicine, and Wabanaki Public Health & Wellness.
Portland: Fridays, 9:30 a.m. – 1 p.m., Prosperity Maine, 175 Lancaster St., 2nd Floor
Lewiston: First and third Wednesdays, 10 a.m. – 12 noon, Gateway Community Services, 124 Canal St.
Bangor: First Wednesdays, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., The Together Place, 2 Second St.
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Moi, c’est Sylvie Mouton. Je suis peer navigateur. Les nouveaux arrivants du Maine viennent à la clinique. C’est comme le point de contact. Voir page … pour des infos en plusieurs langues.
My name is Sylvie Mouton. I am a navigator in Portland where we hold a clinic every Friday. Newcomers to Maine come to the clinic. They come for help on how to apply for employment, and we help people according to their professional experience. We help those who have already worked in this country and are looking for another job, and those who have just arrived. The people who come to us are eager to work and take care of themselves. There is a lot of need for our services, and there are days when we can’t get to all 60, 70, or 100 people who line up.
We have collaborations with different companies, different organizations.
Being a navigator or an interpreter is very satisfying. We work with people in French, Lingala, Portuguese, and Swahili. The greatest need is for people to learn English, but that takes time, so we show people how to use their phone to switch applications and emails into different languages.
I love people, and I like to help people. When I arrived here in the U.S., I was lucky because the language was not a problem for me. But I understood the journey that people have taken to get here, and what people need to do in order to get a job. To help effectively, you have to know what the problems are that people have been through. If you don’t know where people are from, if you haven’t experienced the same problem, it’s hard to communicate. There are some people who have gone through trauma. They have come on foot, crossed countries looking for peace. [Along the way] they saw people die, they fled war.
Our clinic has grown by word of mouth. When I arrived in the U.S., I went to New York and it was hard to fit in. There weren’t these resources, like what we have here. We guide people, and that’s really important. For me, it’s the relationship, the connection you make, so the people trust you.
My name is Kate Fahey. I’m the project director for the Peer Workforce Navigator project, which has been in operation for about two years. We are a three-year pilot project funded through the Maine Department of Labor. Currently our funding runs to the end of June 2025. To continue being effective, we need sustained funding.
The genesis of these clinics was in response to the Abbott Laboratory layoffs when we saw something like 200 people come into the Prosperity Maine office, looking for help. That was at the end of January 2023. Abbott works often through contracting with temporary employers. There’s a cyclical pattern. Different temporary employment agencies help to staff the production lines at Abbott Laboratories. There was a big layoff that occurred in 2021. And then the layoff in 2023. Anecdotally, I would say, from what we’ve seen, that 95% – if not more – of the individuals impacted by the abrupt 2023 layoff were members of the immigrant community. … Over the course of three weeks, four weeks, there were about a thousand people that ended up getting laid off. So it was a really, really big layoff. We wanted to be as proactive as possible to make sure that community members who were impacted knew about various resources – like unemployment insurance, different public benefits, different workforce development resources – so they had what they needed to maintain economic security during a time of real uncertainty. We invited people to come to Prosperity Maine to get information about a rapid response session that was going to be led by the Maine Department of Labor [in response to the 2023 layoffs].
We have a multilingual staff that can accommodate a number of different languages. So we have team members who can speak Arabic, French, Lingala, Portuguese, Somali, Swahili. And some Spanish. But that leaves some gaps. … So Language Partners has been a great resource for us because they typically hire locally and are able to really understand the dialects and prioritize the needs of our community here in Maine.
There are so many people we work with who just got their work permit, who are still pretty new to the country, but also have been waiting months for that work permit to come in, and really need that work permit to be the golden ticket that they’ve been waiting for. But it can be very challenging to find good quality employment and employers that have opportunities for folks with various levels of English proficiency.
People are coming in with so much incredible experience that this state and our community need desperately, and really the biggest barrier for a lot of folks is English. Unfortunately, the English resources are over capacity. There’s really long waitlists at a lot of the places that offer English language learning and opportunities. So I think finding a way for employers to … create inclusive work spaces, opportunities [and ways to] offer spaces for the continued learning of English is important. We see these incredible and passionate and hard-working individuals who are so ready and eager to get into meaningful work, [but English] is just a barrier.
