NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — A company in Brooklyn has been taking on people who might not otherwise get a job and turning their lives around.
Father Jim O'Shea is the man behind Reconnect, which supports training in graphics for T-shirts, launches ideas that people have for businesses, and until recently, ran a successful café and bakery that has moved and will soon reopen.
According to the nonprofit's website, Reconnect was "founded to address a neighborhood need: too many good young men were having too many bad life outcomes. Too much violence, too much under-education, too little opportunity to imagine a different future."
"Good young men that were getting involved quickly into negative behaviors, higher levels of incarceration and death," O'Shea said.
Many of these young men were finding work on the streets.
“They were much more welcoming of these young guys than any businesses in the neighborhood who didn’t want them, often vilified them. But the drug trade, they were happy to have them. And they are happy to hire them, and happy to put them on the corner, and happy to let them get in trouble," O'Shea said.
Most of those employed at the company hail from Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of New York's toughest neighborhoods.
“A neighborhood where you could go one way or another way," said Edwin LaChepelle, who found a new path thanks to Reconnect. “It’s easy to go the wrong way.”
But Reconnect aims to show disconnected youth that there is a different path by teaching them that there are options for the future and creating possibilities through formative employment.
“As opposed to moralizing with people and telling them they shouldn’t do those things, but what can you create that can actual engage somebody?” O'Shea said.
In the past 10 years, Reconnect has hired 290 people and 80% have gone on to other jobs.
O’Shea has been the ringleader of it all and people like Ephraim Hernandez said they owe their lives to him.
“I was running the streets for a while and incarcerated," Hernandez said. “I probably wouldn’t even be on this earth right now, to the honest. I have a bunch of friends that aren’t here, were murdered to gun violence, that kept on running the streets and didn't go the path that I chose.”
So for his work with the community at Reconnect, we recognize Father Jim O’Shea for Multiplying Good, and give him a Jefferson Award for being a Difference Maker.
Click here to nominate a Difference Maker you know for a Jefferson Award.
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