VIDEO: Winston County Senior Employment Program

WINSTON COUNTY, Miss.(WCBI)—It feels good to be needed; to feel useful.

That’s why one Winston County group is training older residents and helping them land jobs.

Jerome Moncrief spends hours tending to Dean Park in Winston County. He is a senior, with a learning disability.

Elmetra Patterson works with the Friends of Dean Park. She says adopting the Senior Employment Program makes sense because it helps people like Jerome.

” We were approached by a senior agency, that’s funded by the federal government, to become a host agency for their program. That means that we would take on two or three of their participants and train them for particular employment,”said Patterson.

Friends of Dean Park teaches outdoor skills. Jerome says he gained a wealth of knowledge training with them.

“I learn how to plant flowers, learn how to water, learn how to feed, I learned how to do everything that they showed me how to do,”said program participant Jerome Moncrief.

The Senior Employment Program is funded to train seniors for four years.

Patterson says the program teaches valuable physical skills and helps workers look for a job.

” One of the benefits of the program for the seniors is that they have a job developer and a job counselor. The agency hires them and they come here and they work with the trainees. They help them do resumes and they have to go to W.I.N. and apply for jobs every pay period there. They have to turn in two job searches,”said Patterson.

To qualify for the program participants must be 55 years or older, meet federal income guidelines and must be unemployed.

Jerome’s brother, Richard Moncrief, is the President of the Friends of Dean Park Inc. He says adopting this program has made the community closer.

“It makes us feel good. It brings the seniors, the young, the middle age all together and it makes the community become that village that builds up each other,”said Richard Moncrief.

As for Jerome, the most important lesson had nothing to do with skills.

” I learned how to have respect for people. Respect will take you along way when you have respect for others.

This program is sponsored by the Mississippi Department of Employment Security.