Outreach - Center for Community Resources

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION
Since 1988, Outreach (formerly EOTC) has made helping families thrive our highest priority by promoting a mission of family stability and economic self-sufficiency. Outreach serves a broad population, many from disparate and often-times difficult circumstances, who all share one trait in common: Hope for brighter tomorrows. Outreach's strength is the ability to form trusting relationships with vulnerable individuals and families, provide holistic programming, and help participants navigate and connect to additional services. It is through offering resources for life skills, literacy, employment training, parenting, early childhood education, youth mentoring, behavioral health supports, wrap-around case management and more, Outreach builds strong families and strong communities.
Helping individuals and families move toward family stability and economic self-sufficiency is Outreach's daily challenge and our distinctive strength. Outreach serves people intent on making life-changing choices.

A DETAILED HISTORY OF OUTREACH
The Employment Opportunity & Training Center of Northeastern Pennsylvania (EOTC), now doing business as Outreach – Center for Community Resources (Outreach) is a private, nonprofit organization, whose mission is to move individuals and families toward stability and economic self-sufficiency. As the local state-designated Family Center, Outreach serves more than 5,000 people in Lackawanna County per year.

Outreach opened its doors in 1988 as EOTC to help women join the workforce. The organization grew quickly to include all job seekers, and to provide parenting and early childhood development programs, which the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania replicated in organizations across the state. EOTC was selected as one of seven nationwide to establish a transitional jobs program to prepare and assist job seekers with large barriers to employment obtain and maintain living-wage, secure work. In 2011, EOTC moved into the Seventh Avenue Center in the city of Scranton, after the agency completed a $1.2 million renovation of an abandoned warehouse. In June 2018, EOTC changed its name and look to better reflect its relationship with the Lackawanna County community.

Today, Outreach provides a variety of evidence-based programs, such as the home-visiting Parents as Teachers, Safecare Augmented, Early Head Start, and Toddler Playgroup; the Incredible Years® parenting program; family reunification and supervised visitation; prison reentry, life skills programming, and GED courses; and workforce development, which recently expanded to the L.E.A.D. (Lead, Educate, and Develop) Center. L.E.A.D. Center staff have created an “employment pipeline” with area businesses who have agreed to consider hiring participants who have completed Outreach workforce soft skills training. Outreach also works with women and veterans in alternative Treatment Court programming, and expanded in 2019 to serving juveniles adjudicated as adults in the justice system.

Recognized locally, regionally, and nationally, Outreach received the 2019 Nonprofit of the Year award from the Greater Scranton Area Chamber of Commerce.