Ron Patterson used to set aside a few hours every day just to get to work. He had to take two different busses.

“The first bus gets me downtown and the bus that gets me to work, I have to wait for 40 minutes for it to even come. And then it’s about a 45-minute ride to work,” he said.

The Central New York Regional Transportation Authority bus service, also known as Centro, is reliable for the areas it services, the East Syracuse resident said, but buses often either don’t go to workplaces like Patterson’s, or they stop running by the time he gets off work.

Patterson works in housekeeping at Global Building Service, Inc., a national janitorial services company, in Brittonfield, East Syracuse. Before December 2015, he used to pay $200 a month to get someone to pick him up after work because no bus could drop him home.

Then in December of 2015, he met Deborah Hundley, the president and executive director of Providence Services of Syracuse, a small nonprofit that provides transportation to residents in Syracuse to help them journey to and from their workplace.

“We try to overcome transportation barriers for low-income residents in the city of Syracuse and enable them to get jobs,” Hundley said. “Lack of transportation is a major impediment for being able to get a job. People can take Centro one way but there’s no way to get home, so they can’t take the job.”

Providence Services of Syracuse realized this gap existed and took it upon itself to fill it. On April 2, it launched the Shuttle to Work program, catering to commuters in the Syracuse, east Syracuse and the Liverpool area.

The Shuttle to Work program provides a shuttle that works as a “modified van-pool” program that serves six passengers. Providence Services’ pilot program, Ride to Work, lasted a year and a half until 2016, and helped 23 people get to their jobs, according to the website.

Hundley was getting ready to retire four years ago when she encountered the gap between employees and workplaces.

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“We had a member of our board who said “Oh, there are jobs but they can’t get to them.” That was kind of the ‘Aha!’ moment.”

The “Aha!” moment spurred the nonprofit to start research on the transportation problem and devise some solutions. Their solution instantly satisfied the needs of their passengers like Patterson, who was suddenly paying much less to get to and from work.

“They would pick me up at 11 o’clock from work and bring me home,” Patterson said. “The cost was $42 a month.”

Thanks to the smaller cost of commuting, Patterson could now afford to make car payments, and he now drives a 2003 Infiniti I35. That car stabilized Patterson’s livelihood. He now has reliable transportation.

“In the past, I have lost jobs because of that, because there was no service like that,” he said.

Jobs like Patterson’s that work through shifts in odd hours and don’t have bus service are mainly in East Syracuse, Hundley said, speaking of hotels, restaurant work, nurse shifts, warehouses and grocery stores that stock at night.

“It’s just the way working is in America, it’s multiple shifts,” she said.

The way these jobs are structured — shifts begin and end at a time that transportation stops running — poses major problems to the people who work them.

Now, Providence Services of Syracuse is just waiting for the passengers to hop inside their modified van. It’s one way to keep jobs like Patterson’s safe, who stressed that efforts like these need urgent funding.

“Without that service, I don’t know what I would have done,” he said. “They can’t help everybody because they need more funding. For everyone they do help, there’s someone they can’t help. It’s so vital for them to receive funding.”

So far, Providence Services of Syracuse has relied on a series of foundation grants from the Central New York Community Fund, the Dorothy and Marshall M. Reisman Foundation, the M&T Charitable Foundation, the Workforce Development Institute and private donors.

“We’ve only been around for four years, and it takes a while for us to be recognized,” she said.

“It’s taken some time to develop a model that works for the Syracuse area and also to convince people that this is worthwhile to get people from unemployment to employment.”

Published on April 5, 2017 at 9:23 pm

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