Jacksonville Sunrise Rotary Club works on ‘Sunrise To Success’ project:
The Jacksonville Sunrise Rotary Club has been working quietly to turn lives around in their community. Working with a grant from the Rotary District 6460 Clubs Grants program, the local morning Rotary Club has been working to get local homeless persons on their feet and into paying employment.
The “Sunrise To Success” project provides resources for individuals staying at the New Directions homeless shelter in Jacksonville. The intent is to assist homeless individuals as they seek to overcome barriers to employment so that they will ultimately be able to live independently as productive citizens. The grant helps to provide for numerous items and documents needed to gain meaningful employment. Among the items funded through the program are: birth certificates, work clothing, lunch boxes, food for lunches and gas cards. The project aims to benefit at least 50 persons on an ongoing basis and will continue until the funds are exhausted.
Many of the people staying at New Directions do not have any documentary identification, so the project helps fund obtaining copies of their original birth certificates, enabling them to get state identification cards. Thus far, the project has obtained birth certificates for homeless New Directions guests from five states: Illinois, Texas, Iowa, Missouri and California.
Most residents don’t have access to transportation, so the project supplies bus passes via West Central Mass Transit District. “The number of different items needed for employment in various firms in the area is quite large, so we provide these items on a case by case basis,” says Sunrise Rotary project coordinator Sarah Robinson. This project will remain operational until the end of the Rotary fiscal year, on June 30, or until the last of the funds run out.
