Helping the Homeless Prepare for the Working World : Services: Showers, washers and lockers add up to Shwashlock, a facility giving the destitute a place to clean up before they go on job interviews.

There is a small but significant hurdle that stands between many homeless people and the jobs that would help them get off the street.

Don Paschal, who was formerly homeless, puts it this way: “Let’s face it--who’s going to hire someone who smells?”

In Santa Monica, a possible solution arrived last week. It is called Shwashlock.

The new facility at 505 W. Olympic Blvd. consists of several trailers on a downtown lot. It contains shower facilities for men and women, 100 lockers and token-operated laundry facilities. Soon, when a job-hunting classroom is added, it will be a one-stop center to prepare Santa Monica’s homeless for work or job hunting.

People using it this week said Shwashlock (which stands for showers, washers and lockers) is helping them get back on their feet.

“You have a locker, you stay clean. It just gave me the incentive to go start looking for work,” Darrell Towler, 35, said as he waited in the laundry trailer for his clothes to finish drying.

Another Shwashlock user, Clark Mankin, 44, stopped off to shower before a computer class. He said the facility is cleaner and more secure than other public showers in Santa Monica. “Just being here, it’s another resource,” he said.

Shwashlock was a long time coming, and it arrived by a curious route. Artist and community activist Bruria Finkel, 60, suggested the idea in 1990 on the city’s Public Electronic Network, the popular city computer system and electronic bulletin board.

“I woke up one morning and said, ‘What would I need if I were a homeless person?’ ” Finkel said.

Everyone who read the idea “gobbled it up,” she said. Community members supported it and homeless people, many of whom access the network from terminals at the Santa Monica Public Library, sent messages saying how much it would help.

Paschal, 38, who was homeless at the time, was the one who suggested adding the job bank component.

In his messages, Paschal said he told the community that sometimes he would sneak into restrooms in restaurants to clean up for his part-time job.

“You tend to become very creative trying to keep clean,” he said.

In response to such messages, network user Michele Wittig and other users formed an action group and petitioned the city for money to start Shwashlock.

Coincidentally, the city was relocating residents from a trailer park on city-owned land next to the Lincoln Boulevard off-ramp of the Santa Monica Freeway, and that is where Shwashlock was placed.

The location is accessible to homeless people and downtown services, and “will fill a need not provided for by the existing network of services,” said Julie Rusk, Santa Monica human services manager. It will cost $60,000 a year to operate, she said. As of Tuesday, about 15 people a day were using Shwashlock.

In the next three or four months, a classroom trailer equipped with donated computers will open. There, people will be able to do computerized job searches and prepare their resumes.

Roger Severson, 62, knows the plight of the homeless looking for jobs all too well. “Either (possible employers) take advantage of you or there’s nothing. (Work) is hard to get, even if you’re motivated,” he said.

On Tuesday morning, Severson, who lives in a car that does not run but gives him a secure place to sleep, said that after getting cleaned up at Shwashlock he planned to job hunt through Exec-U-Solutions, the only organization in the city that connects homeless people with jobs.

The 6-month-old service has received 200 resumes from homeless people and has helped about 30 of them find work, according to co-director Jennifer Taylor. Typical jobs are in restaurants, retail stores and as baby-sitters and day laborers, she said.

“Sometimes there are hurdles--appropriate dress, interview skills, shelter,” Taylor said. “We work on the basics.

“I’m very excited to work with Shwashlock,” she added. “They’re bringing our clients one step closer to finding jobs. You can’t go to an interview with all your belongings.”

Severson said he hoped to find a clerical job where he could use his typing skills and good speaking voice. He used to be a construction worker, he said, but now “I just can’t do physical stuff.”