RIVIERA BEACH, Fla. — Inside Badcock Home and Furniture in West Palm Beach, General Manager Diane Ervin knows what it takes to run a store.
“We’ve been around 115 years,” she said. “I’ve been at my location for 30 and you get a lot of sense of the community.”
She said it’s important to hire directly from the community.
“We do everything from credit, collections, sales, delivery, customer service,” Ervin said.
So, Wednesday Ervin will be one of the employers at a job fair in Riviera Beach focusing on those in need of a second chance, meeting candidates like Kawana Brown.
“It was very, very, very hard,” Brown said. “About 8 days ago I was released from federal prison in Miami.”
She spent the last 7 years behind bars for aggravated identity theft and wire fraud.
“They don’t even give you a card to refer you to a job site or nothing,” Brown said.
Now she’s eager to start her next chapter.
“To get the call that Bishop Masters was giving us an opportunity, felons only, I was super excited about it, she said.”
The job fair for ex-felons is being held Wednesday from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at the New Macedonia Multi-Purpose facility at 748 W. 9th Street in Riviera Beach.
“I have changed drastically, and I feel like that I should, and I deserve to have a second chance,” Brown said.
