Hi All,

As we approach the last two weeks of our Republic crowdfunding campaign, I wanted to share a general company update. 

As our world faces unprecedented challenges during this time of crisis, our team is committed to providing life-saving job opportunities to our community of formerly incarcerated job seekers. Despite the uncertainty, our commitment and effort remains strong.

A few quick updates on where we stand:

• While our largest staffing client, Uber, has temporarily shuttered its Jump bicycle factory in Sacramento, CA, where we had placed many of our workers, much to their credit, they’ve extended paying wages to our team. In addition to a much-needed lifeline to these men and women, we too continue earning fees on this as well.
• With tens of millions of US workers laid-off or furloughed, few companies are doing much new hiring. That’s particularly true for the sorts of jobs upon which we focus: warehouse and shipping, construction, manufacturing, food service, etc. These jobs require large numbers of people working together. We are focusing our sales and marketing efforts on the relatively few companies who are actively seeking help to address the increased workforce demands they’re facing through this crisis. *PLEASE NOTE: While you may read of companies actively hiring, many of them have entered into partnerships with other employers that have laid off workers, to fill their ranks.
• We will be announcing a partnership with Root & Rebound (https://www.rootandrebound.org/) a great California-based non-profit that provides legal assistance to the formerly incarcerated, in areas including fair-chance hiring, expungement, advocacy, etc.). We will be setting up dedicated 800 numbers for job seekers who have questions regarding employment, unemployment benefits and healthcare, and will be referring them to local community organizations for support, as well. Like all of us, many job seekers just need someone to talk to. Additionally, we’ll be hosting webinars, podcasts and Facebook forums.
• We will also be announcing a partnership with Prison Fellowship (https://www.prisonfellowship.org/) a faith-based organization that operates within hundreds of jails and prisons throughout the United States. They are eager to refer the many released men and women with whom they’ve worked, who are seeking employment.
• And finally, we’ll be announcing a partnership with C-Tech (https://ctechprograms.com/) --a company that provides technical career training. Again, we’ll be charged with facilitating employment for their graduates.

While we certainly did not anticipate the Coronavirus, we were concerned about an overheated economy, so we pared our expenses dramatically in the beginning of the year. Our leaner company is operating well, and we have ample runway (we believe) to weather this storm and emerge more strongly than ever when the dust settles. We’re seeing lots of great available talent and believe there will be other valuable assets for us to pick up inexpensively.

We’re ending our crowdfunding campaign on April 29, 2020. To date, we’ve raised nearly $150,000, and consider the campaign a great success. But with additional support, there’s so much more we could do to help the population we serve—the formerly incarcerated. Many of our people were working productively when the virus hit and were let go. So many great people struggled to build a new life, only to have events conspire against them.

We don’t want to lose these great people, and others like them. Please, please consider adding to your investment so we can extend our reach. And please share the campaign within your social network (you can copy-and-paste the short message below, if you’d like).

Most of all, please stay safe and stay healthy. We can get through this together!

Best,

Richard Bronson,

Founder/CEO of 70 Million Jobs

.@70MillionJobs. is the first national, for-profit employment platform for people w/criminal records. They just launched a crowdfund campaign at Republic.co/70-Million-Jobs. I'm an investor. Learn more about their work, and consider investing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKNiRY8cxHk&t=1s