Gloria Cheng is sitting in a back room at Chrysalis, a homeless organization off L.A.’s Skid Row. She has a resume pulled up on the computer screen in front of her.
She turns to Dennis, 51, next to her.
“So what type of job specifically are you looking for?” Cheng asked.
Right now, he works a few jobs, mostly as a security guard. You might’ve seen him at the America’s Got Talent auditions in Pasadena or at Rams or Trojan football games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
He’d like a steady gig. He likes driving, he said.
For the last couple of weeks, Cheng, 19, has been coming to Chrysalis to help with job-training services — editing resumes and doing practice interviews.
She’s participating in a new homeless initiative of the USC Joint Educational Project, which aims to connect USC’s student body with volunteer opportunities with homeless populations. It’s part of USC’s greater commitment to reducing and alleviating homelessness in Los Angeles County, where roughly 58,000 people experience homelessness on a given night, according to LAHSA.
“Chrysalis seemed like a very unique program to me because it specifically targeted job retention … which seems like a sustainable long-term solution for a problem that sometimes seems like it has no solution,” said Cheng, a sophomore majoring in health and human sciences.
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