Long Island Breakfast Club helps the unemployed

Elise Negrin is divorced, 56, and, for the past 19 months, out of work. With more than 25 years of experience, she is perplexed that almost nobody calls her back, even for an interview. Her unemployment benefits run out before the end of the year, and she'll soon run out of money.

"It's extremely frustrating," said Negrin, whose home office in Bethpage is plastered with job applications and post-it notes with contacts and phone numbers. She once made six figures as general manager at a car-finance company, but says she's more flexible now with the current job market.

But she just turned down the only offer she's received, when she found out the part-time job offered only 12 hours a week at $9 an hour. "I can't live on it," she said. Now, if low-paying jobs are her only option, she mused, "can I pay $11,000 in property taxes on a $10-an-hour job?"

Poor comfort that it is, Negrin knows she is just one in an army of unemployed, many of them like her: single, middle-age and burning through the money they've socked away for retirement.

She is a volunteer with the Long Island Breakfast Club, which offers speakers, job-hunting tips and inspiration at monthly meetings for the unemployed. Club members are "all older people [who had been] working for a long time," said club vice president and co-founder Stephanie Carlino, 61, of Wantagh, unemployed since losing her fundraising job more than a year ago. 

Who would expect it?
Most, Carlino said, never anticipated being out of work. "In your mind, you never believe you're not going to find a job," she said.

Frank LaRosa, 53, of Valley Steam, worked for nearly 30 years as an information technology professional, but was downsized 19 months ago after 11 years with a large corporation. "It's been a very difficult 19 months," he said. He's hoping for a job offer to come through later this month, even though the salary could be half of what he was paid at his last job. But with two of his three children in college and bills to pay, LaRosa said, he'll be happy to get it.

Some members have found jobs, even if many are temporary, or at much lower pay or benefits than their old jobs.

As of August, the latest unemployment rate for Long Island was 7 percent, down from its February high of 7.9 percent - still considerably higher than before the recession began more than two years ago. Nearly half the nation's 14.6 million jobless have been out of work for longer than six months. That includes nearly 41,000 on Long Island, from January 2008 to July 2010, according to the state Department of Labor.

The Breakfast Club's most recent meeting at a Williston Park restaurant drew a crowd of about 40 to discuss the topic, "Do What You Love!" Negrin is trying to do that by starting a little business, to "follow my passion. I'm a parrot lady, selling bird food and supplies."

She occasionally entertains at pirate parties or Hawaiian luaus with her three parrots. The fledging startup doesn't come close to paying the bills, though. She stopped paying her mortgage more than a year ago so she could qualify for a loan modification, and is now without health-insurance coverage.

For Breakfast Club founder and president Valentina Janek, 58, the club is a mission. "Our cause is for the middle-income, midlife people who are underserved," she said.

Janek includes herself in that category. She went through a number of layoffs from managerial and marketing jobs in recent years, most recently in 2009, and now is promoting herself as a career and motivational coach.

"I go on interviews, they embrace me, they like me, but they say, 'You'll be bored, you're a dynamo!' " she said. "Well, this dynamo wants the job!"

Jobless 'two years, two months'
So does Breakfast Club member Stephen Murphy, 58, of Massapequa, who belongs to "a lot of networking clubs" for the unemployed and says he doesn't see many people snaring jobs. He's been out of work for "two years, two months" and, after a divorce in which his house was sold, he and his twin teenage sons are living in a basement rental. His unemployment benefits recently ran out.

Murphy, who is living on money saved from sales work over three decades, said, "I was told by Social Services, when I can't pay for housing for my kids and myself, we'll be characterized as homeless."

He is getting gloomy about a climate he compares to his father's stories of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The prospect of a home foreclosure is no longer a distant abstraction for many of the club's long-term unemployed: Immaculate "Macky" Digilio, 55, of Baldwin, a laid-off property manager, said, "The thing that sickens me the most is I might lose my home after 33 years." To earn money, she recently hosted a sales party for a jewelry company for a percentage of the proceeds.

For Paulette Clarke, 60, of Queens Village, who uses her volunteer work with the Breakfast Club as one of her few social outings, her greatest fear, as her savings run out, is "not being able to maintain my living environment," she said. "I sent so many resumés out; I'm not partial about what job I get as long as it's an honest living, something to help me keep the roof over my head." Currently, she's doing temp work.

For Negrin, relief may mean a complete change. If she can't get a job on Long Island, she'll consider moving to Florida, where she'd get an apartment for $800 a month and a $12-an-hour job. She said, "That's my Plan B."

Meet, eat and seek
The Long Island Breakfast Club, a nonprofit group with the slogan "We Meet, We Eat and We Seek," was started in 2006 by unemployed men and women for support, networking and job leads, advocacy and employment counseling. Optional membership fee is $50 a year. Monthly breakfast meetings with speakers are $20 for members, $30 for nonmembers. Dates, locations and agendas at libreakfastclub.org. Next on its schedule is a resource builders networking event at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Westbury Manor (registration required, e-mail vjanek@optonline.net). Free admission.