Philadelphia Library Offers Jobs to the Formerly Homeless

Hoping to keep a Philadelphia library’s bathrooms clean and free of loiterers, a nonprofit group is employing formerly homeless people as bathroom attendants, reports the Associated Press.

The Free Library of Philadelphia hired Project HOME, an advocacy group for homeless people, to deal with a steady stream of homeless people using the bathrooms to bathe—and sometimes causing problems.

Project HOME’s workers, equipped with ID badges and two-way radios, are paid $7.50 an hour to watch over the bathrooms, pick up trash, hand out pamphlets to homeless people, and monitor the patrons’ behavior.

The formerly homeless employees are doing an especially good job of helping the homeless patrons at the library, said Ed Speedling, a community liaison at Project HOME. “They have a lot of empathy for them.”