YOU can START OVER j ulie rivenes and how she went ALL IN on a NEW CAREER

Words and Photography by Jill Ockhardt Blaufuss

those who think it's too late to dream

about a new career, that you’re too busy with children, that you’d have to simultaneously work full-time just to pay for it—talk to someone who did all those things and still says, “Jump in feet first and go for it.”

Those are the words of 41-year-old Julie Rivenes who now has her dream job as a social worker at the Salvation Army in downtown Fargo

When Rivenes started college for the second time, you wouldn’t have thought she picked the best time to start over in a new career. She was a full-time optician, a wife and a mother of two young daughters ages 4 and 8, the oldest one newly diagnosed with autism. Rivenes was also providing in-home care to her grandmother-in-law whose health had deteriorated due to dementia. Rivenes regularly interacted with her grandmother-in-law’s hospice workers. “I was in awe of how amazing they were,” Rivenes recalls, “I remember the social worker that came to visit her and how she truly cared about her well-being.” They displayed a capacity for compassion, resilience and helping that Rivenes knew was inside her as well. As that little spark grew, Rivenes knew she wanted something more in a career. At age 31, she made the life-changing decision to go back to college for social work.

Using the tortoise and the hare as an analogy, Rivenes knew she wasn’t the hare anymore. With very little time left over each day to focus on herself, she started with just one class that first semester. Each semester following she pecked away at classes, all while working full time and volunteering at Hospice of the Red River Valley.

It wasn’t until she had been in school for eight years, during her final semester of college in the summer of 2012, that Rivenes got a taste of the type of social work that would speak most to her. Needing to complete a 40 hour per week internship—one that could accommodate her full-time day job—Rivenes found the Gladys Ray Homeless Shelter and Veterans Drop in Fargo where she could fulfill her internship working evenings.

Rivenes is still amazed at what many of the people she met at Gladys Ray had survived: physical abuse, mental abuse and mental illness—on top of what they were able to do to get through each and every day having little to no support on which to fall back. Rivenes explains that some shelters serve either breakfast or lunch or supper—but not all three. A typical day might include braving the elements to make it to one agency to get breakfast, waiting in line to hopefully find work for the day, walking across town to get another meal, and then trying and find shelter for the night. She explains that the shelters are often full, especially so in the wintertime. “If you don’t get into one shelter, you’ll walk to another and hope they have a bed.” Rivenes says you need to be at most shelters by 5 p.m. to get a bed. You and your things need to be out again by 8 a.m. If you’re applying for jobs all day, you might skip a meal because it’s too far to the nearest shelter for lunch. And, she says, it’s hard to apply for jobs if you don’t have an address. “Their bodies and minds take such a beating,” she says, “yet they push through.”

During a point-in-time count conducted in January 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development determined there were 923 homeless people in the FM area. More specifically, 694 households, including families with children, did not have permanent shelter. Until she worked at Gladys Ray, Rivenes says she had no idea there were so many people in our community that were homeless. “I just assumed that homelessness was something that happened in the bigger cities, like Chicago or New York.”