The Road Up

A film by Greg Jacobs & Jon Siskel

The Road Up follows four participants in Cara, a Chicago job-training program, as they seek to make the long journey from rock bottom to stable employment. Throughout, they are guided, goaded, and challenged by their impassioned mentor, Mr. Jesse, whose own complicated past drives him to help others find hope in the face of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and trauma. Taken together, their stories create a powerful mosaic of the struggles millions of Americans face every day in a precarious and unforgiving economy, the daunting and often interconnected challenges that prevent so many from getting—and keeping—a job.

Because when all that’s behind you is wreckage, and everything in front is an obstacle, how do you find the road up?

The Story

The Road Up opens in a large conference room at Cara, a highly regarded job-training program in the city’s South Loop. Cara provides services and opportunities for low-income adults who face barriers to employment. Their goal is to place their “students” in jobs they’re expected to hold for at least a year. But first, every Cara participant is required to attend a month-long “boot camp” called Transformations. And that’s where Mr. Jesse comes in.

Equal parts preacher, teacher, comedian, and coach, Jesse Teverbaugh developed and runs the Transformations class.  Jesse treats every four-week session like a boxer entering the ring, exhausting himself in an effort to spark hope in the hearts of his students, a sense of possibility that most have long since lost.

For some, he becomes a surrogate father, building them up, but also calling them out.

While profoundly sensitive to the pain and trauma they’ve endured, he has little patience for excuses. It’s a “tough love” approach—emphasis on “love”—firmly grounded in the reality of the jobs he’s preparing them for. He knows they have no safety net, no room for error; one misstep—showing up late for work, mouthing off to a supervisor—can get them fired, reigniting a cycle that might land them back in a shelter, a trap house, or a prison cell.

Jesse’s classroom lessons are reflected in the lives of the film’s four main subjects—Kristen, Clarence, Alisa, and Tamala—whose journeys, both during and after Transformations, are woven throughout. By capturing the emotion and complexity of their struggles, we hope The Road Up will spur audiences to question their own assumptions about the population Cara serves, and what can and should be done to support them.

The Issue

Even before COVID-19, a staggering number of American workers were trapped in a kind of economic purgatory, unable to get—or keep—a job that could help them escape poverty. Now, the pandemic has left millions more unemployed, exposing the precariousness of the workforce, and magnifying the urgency of job training as an issue.

But what can be done? On the one hand, these challenges are the result of huge, systemic forces: racial segregation, mass incarceration, epidemics of addiction, technological change, inequality, and a frayed social safety net. On the other hand, none of these problems will be solved by tomorrow morning, and we all have to get through the day.

Like the issue itself, Cara exists right at the intersection of the personal and the structural. For the population it serves, the obstacles are so varied and hard to overcome that the formula most traditional job training programs follow—acquire some skills, find a job, and everything else will fall into place—simply doesn’t work. Often, it’s easier to return to the familiar chaos of life in the streets, or succumb to the omnipresent beast of addiction, than to adjust to the constraints and stresses of the workplace.

That’s why Cara’s model is so timely and compelling. It essentially flips the script on the traditional formula, making the case that the first step on the road up isn’t finding employment, it’s finding hope, connection, and community. What some dismiss as “soft skills,” Cara calls “harder skills”: conflict resolution, impulse control, even the ability to express love and accept it in return. To Cara, these are the essential skills that give their students the resilience they need to persist, and ultimately to thrive. By explicitly and emphatically stressing the “love” in “tough love,” Cara’s model pointedly critiques how we approach the entire issue of job training in America, essentially asking the question, “what if we’ve had it wrong all along?”

The Filmmakers

Co-Directors: Greg Jacobs & Jon Siskel

Producer: Rachel Pikelny

Rachel Pikelny is an award-winning filmmaker and producer recently named to DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” list. While serving as the Director of Production at SJP, Rachel produced The Road Up, No Small Matter, Unexpected Justice, and several other projects, including her own directorial debut, Grace, a short film about a Chicago-area breast cancer survivor and the battle that begins when everyone else thinks the war is already won. The founder of Nyla Pictures, Rachel was previously affiliated with Chicago’s Kartemquin Films.

Co-Producer: Amy Ostrander

Amy Ostrander was Director of Story Development and a segment producer for Towers Productions.  She held positions with Columbia/Tri-Star Pictures in New York CIty.  An attorney, she was previously with Bell, Boyd and Lloyd in Chicago and now represents victims of domestic violence through the Pro Bono Network of Oak Park.

Director of Photography: Stephan Mazurek

Chicago-based cinematographer Stephan Mazurek has served as director of photography on several SJP projects, including Head On for Discovery, Louder Than a Bomb, and The Road Up. As a cameraman, he has worked on a variety of films, including Love Is a Verb, Love Gilda, The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien, and No Small Matter, as well as shows and documentaries for PBS, ESPN, National Geographic Channel, History, and A&E. An accomplished playwright, theater director, and production designer, Stephan’s work has been seen on stages around the world, including the Public Theatre, the Goodman Theatre, and Steppenwolf.

Editor: John Farbrother

John Farbrother has edited several SJP documentaries, including Louder Than a Bomb, Head On, and No Small Matter. John recently co-edited the Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated PBS Frontline documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. The film received the 2017 Critics’ Choice Award for Best Political Documentary, was nominated for a Peabody Award, and was selected by the National Board of Review as one the Top Five Documentaries of 2017. Most recently, John edited Finding Yingying, which won the 2020 Documentary Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Voice at South By Southwest.

Original Score: Joshua Abrams

Joshua Abrams is a composer, bassist, and improviser. Since the mid-1990s, he has been a key figure in Chicago’s creative music communities and an international touring musician with artists across genres, including his own project, Natural Information Society. Abrams has scored numerous documentaries, including The Trials of Muhammad Ali, and several films with Steve James, including the Academy Award-nominated Abacus: Small Enough to Jail; Life Itself; The Interrupters; and the acclaimed series America to Me.

Engagement Director: Tanya Ward

Tanya Ward is an engagement and social media marketing professional, with more than 15 years in grassroots and traditional marketing engagement, and 8+ years in social media content marketing. She is a founding member of the Englewood Arts Collective, which was formed to help produce artists, events, and interactions that reflect the Englewood community of Chicago in a positive way. Under the persona of FoxBrownFox, she serves the film/theater/arts community as a connector, publicist, and media consultant.

About Cara

Cara’s mission is to unlock the power and purpose within our communities and ourselves to create real and lasting success. Through their personal and professional development and access to employment opportunities, Cara serves as a leader in poverty alleviation in Chicago and beyond. Since 1991, more than 6,500 people have been placed into more than 10,000 jobs and started on their path to self-sufficiency.

Learn more at www.carachicago.org.