Off to Job Corps

UGM helps people with a wide variety of needs—everything from stretching the food budget through an occasional meal  to our long-term residential recovery programs. Twenty-year-old Vitaliy Silver didn’t have an addiction to drugs or alcohol; he was just lost.

Adopted from Russia at age 11 into a big family, Vitaliy struggled to find direction. Seeing that he needed something they couldn't provide, his parents sent him across the country to a program for troubled kids. The program turned out not to be a good fit, which is what led him to the Mission. “I started doing drugs because I didn’t like where I was and the house I was in and the people there, so the owner of the house brought me here.”

Shortly after his arrival, Vitaliy learned about the Job Corps—a government-run program that teaches a trade to kids in need and helps them find a job - and decided that's what he wanted to do. UGM’s Social Services Manager Dean Whisler worked alongside him to help get him into the program. Even though Dean had never helped anyone get into the Job Corps before, he could see that Vitaliy would be a good fit: “The bottom line is, he is an incredible worker. He is very shy and very humble.” With landscape design as his goal, Vitaliy will move to Astoria, OR and join the Tongue Point Job Corps.

Reflecting on who he has become since coming to the Mission and deciding to join the Job Corps, he now appreciates what he has and where he is going. He has mended the relationship with his parents and understands how lucky he truly is. “I was adopted into a big, rich family, but I never really took the time to look at what I had. Then I got here and was like, whoa, I had a lot of things that a lot of people don’t even think about having. I got closer to God and started praying every day and so then I got humbled.”

~Elisabeth Roginski, UGM staff writer intern