Optimistic Journey is a community-based agency located in the heart of South Florida. We use local, state, national, and private funding to provide a comprehensive range of services for ex-offenders. Our services will focus on Transitional Living and community outreach programs. The continuum of services for ex-offenders offered by the agency includes transitional living, community outreach services designed to keep individuals off the streets, and re-offending. Which provides prevention, intervention, and crisis intervention to those who are prone to recidivism.

Almost half of the new jobs created in the United States in the past several years have been in small businesses and self-employment. The emerging global and national new economy demands unique, creative, and constantly- evolving solutions that meet specific customers’ needs. That is the very real world in which our participants must identify a market niche for themselves and in which they must learn to navigate, if they are to be successful in the work-force.

It is our intent to model our project around the same new economy values. The self-employment and micro-enterprises created by project participants will each be designed to fill the unique specific needs and to remove the specific barriers identified for each and every project participant. We strongly believe that the tangle of problems that has left individual on TANF rolls or otherwise in poverty are best addressed by individualized and well-coordinated training, supports and planning rather than a by a cookie-cutter one-job-fits all approach. Personal barriers to employment, job retention and greater self-sufficiency