Success Stories
Roberto Morejon, Montgomery County Success Story
Five years back, “you wouldn’t know what to think if you saw somebody like me on the street,” former gang member Roberto Morejon recalls. But, with hard work, determination, and support from the workforce development system and from his employer, Mr. Morejon turned his life around. In 2008, Montgomery County’s Workforce Services named him Participant of the Year.
As a juvenile offender, Mr. Morejon was sentenced to boot camp, where he earned his GED. “When they talked to me about my release, they suggested the Montgomery Conservation Corps because they didn’t want me to go back home.
“I didn’t graduate the first time I was in the Corps. I was charged as an adult at 17 for armed robbery. I served seven months in Clarksburg, then rejoined the Corps because I knew they would help me. I needed something good on my resume.”
The second time around, Mr. Morejon graduated as a senior crew leader, but when he tried to get work, “they wouldn’t hire me because I had a record.” A Corps caseworker knew the human resources director at Shapiro & Duncan, a contracting company, so Mr. Morejon applied there.
“Shapiro & Duncan took the risk of hiring me” as a bilingual safety officer. While working, Mr. Morejon took three years of classes to develop and hone his skills. His employer paid for many of the classes, and he used the AmeriCorps scholarship he earned through the Corps. He studied industrial hygiene and occupational safety at the OSHA’s MidAtlanticTraining Institute, where he earned the nationally recognized Advanced Safety Certificate.
“There was lots of times when I thought about giving up,” he says now, but neither the Conservation Corps nor Shapiro & Duncan gave up on him. “Even when I had to go back to jail for 10 days on some outstanding charges, Shapiro & Duncan said I would still have a job afterwards. They supported me during some of the worst times, especially during the whole change of lifestyles [out of the gang]. No matter how much you try to hide it, people find out that you’re an ex-offender. Here, they consider it a thing of the past.”
Shapiro & Duncan recently promoted Mr. Morejon to Safety Director. “I’ve never thought about leaving them, I’ll tell you that. When people like them support you, it’s hard to give up.”
Now married with a young son, Mr. Morejon wants to help future gang members turn their lives around. “If I wasn’t working at Shapiro & Duncan, I’d probably be on the streets. I think that’s one of the issues that a lot of [ex-offenders] have. They don’t have support and they don’t find employment and they go back to what they were doing before.”
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