VIDEO: Keeping The Unemployment Numbers Down

VERNON, Ala.(WCBI)—The City Of Vernon is working to make sure the Unemployment Rate in Alabama continues to drop.

Evonda Butts has been unemployed for almost a year, now.

“The last job I worked was at the red cross here in Vernon,”said Evonda Butts.

She say she is passionate about helping others and hopes the Vernon Job Fair will help her get back to what she loves.

“Anything that’s dealing with people. So, what I’m looking for right now, if I can get a job working with people, helping, and assisting people in some kind of way or dealing with customers in the store, I don’t mind doing that,”said Butts.

Friday’s fair featured 25 different employers. Carrie Stanford says the job fair is not only a benefit for the applicants but the businesses as well.

“I’ve talked with all the vendors and they say that they all had people come up apply for jobs. Some of them were actually hired,”said Stanford.

Stanford says getting the fair up and running, was a difficult task made easy thanks to a little help.

“It was just a combined effort all the chamber members coming together. Everybody had a little piece they were doing. The Fayette Career Center was amazing and let us come in. They do job fairs all the time. They came in and they just helped up ,showed us what we needed to do,”said Stanford.

Butts now volunteers at a local thrift store. She says she is thankful to the chamber for lending the community a helping hand.

“I feel it gave me a good opportunity to find out stuff, as far as work is concerned because there are some things I wasn’t familiar with. It gave me an opportunity to learn some of the companies and what they do, what they offer. There were a lot of companies that I talked to that I didn’t know were here in Vernon,”said Butts.

With the unemployment rate on the decline, Stanford says it will have a positive chain reaction on the community.

” That means that there’s going to be more spending money more people out in the stores more people going to the ball game. It’s just helps everybody. It puts a smile on people’s faces, it puts money in their pockets,”said Stanford.

The Chamber of Commerce will host it’s next job fair in the spring.