Note: This is part of the series The Cost of Poverty, a look at Syracuse's poverty crisis.

Syracuse, N.Y. -- A little more than a year ago, Marshiela Radcliff learned to

drive. She opened her first bank account. She bought a used minivan.

One thing made all of the others possible: After spending 20 years on public assistance, Radcliff got her first paying job as a certified nursing assistant. At the age of 35, Radcliff earned her first paycheck.

"All this stuff was at my fingertips?" Radcliff said recently, sitting on a couch in the sparsely furnished home she shares with six of her children. "I didn't know. I didn't know I could work... I didn't know I could do that."

Radcliff was a stereotype: She is a single mother with seven children born in the span of a decade. She supported them collecting welfare for 20 years. She spent decades in a system where the message she said she heard was that she couldn't work.

Radcliff's story highlights how small efforts that play matchmaker between open jobs and unemployed people seem to have lasting success. Radcliff finally got a job when someone told her "you can" and charted her way around specific obstacles that had been blocking her path for her entire adult life.

When that happened, doors Radcliff never knew existed were blown open for her and her family.

In Syracuse, nearly 50,000 people, more than a third of the city's population, are considered poor. Some of those people - 16,000 -- are looking for jobs and count as unemployed. Many more have given up and don't count as unemployed.

But as the jobless search for work or give up, employers in the region are trying to fill open jobs in Central New York. This month there are 6,783 open jobs. A job fair in November offered access to 5,000 open positions.

There are jobs, and there are people who need them. So why are so many without work? There is a massive gap in what employers want and the skills that job seekers offer, experts say. For the people without the right education or skills, it's as if those thousands of jobs don't exist.

Radcliff's story is one of how that gap can be bridged. Her journey from welfare to real work holds out promise for people in Syracuse's poorest neighborhoods who sometimes seem walled off from opportunity.

Radcliff dropped out of school at 15, spent a few months in jail for stealing from a discount store. By the time she was 17, she had her own apartment and her own public assistance case. For the next 20 years, she did not work.

Radcliff surrendered to joblessness, she said, because she believed work was out of reach.

Radcliff had her first child at 19. She had six more, including a set of twins, in the next decade. One of their fathers was killed during a fight. Another is in prison. Radcliff has struggled with marijuana use and depression in the past, and received treatment for both.

Her defining failure was none of these burdens, she said. It was the GED that always seemed just beyond her reach. Radcliff said she was never diagnosed with a learning disability. But she inevitably fell behind in the GED math class every time she took it, she said.

So she continued to do mandated work experience, which meant volunteering as a bus monitor, a front desk clerk, a food-pantry helper. She always applied, she said, but never got hired.

"I watched people get hired all around me," Radcliff said. "I thought I'd never go anywhere."

After a lifetime of believing she could not get a job, Radcliff's world changed with a phone call. Her counselor at the work training program she had participated in on and off for 20 years called her about a new opportunity. The counselor's message was four words: You. Can. Do. It.

Unlike before, the new program the counselor was sending Radcliff to offered a path around her missing GED. Instead of building general skills and working on resumes, the program was set up to train people to fill very specific job openings: certified nursing assistants for Loretto. And the GED problem wouldn't be a deal-breaker for Radcliff if she could pass other tests.

Radcliff did. She was hired by Loretto in October 2014. There, she was trained to be a CNA while getting paid by Loretto.

Loretto partnered with Work Train, a nonprofit effort that works with both the unemployed and employers to fill open jobs. Work Train is run by CenterState CEO, but it relies on Onondaga Community College and a vast network of community nonprofits. It is funded with $1 million that has come from both the state and the community.

Loretto came to Work Train looking for help because it had more than 100 CNA jobs it couldn't fill.

Work Train looked at Loretto's requirements and then asked which ones truly mattered, said Dominic Robinson, who heads up the program. What were requirements that they weren't screening for? Were there options to the GED for people like Radcliff and the hundreds of refugees in the community who have training from elsewhere?

Work Train and Loretto came up with a plan to find and train people who normally wouldn't come across the healthcare company's radar. And it succeeded. Work Train has "pre-trained" more than 100 people for Loretto's CNA program. There, it is solving Loretto's workforce problem.

For Radcliff, the job brought self-worth and possibility to a life that revolved around navigating the welfare system - public assistance, job training and WIC appointments. She and her kids hadn't been as far as the East Side of Syracuse. And Cicero, where she works now, might as well have been India.

"It's sad that life has so much to offer and you can't reach it," Radcliff said of her past.

She used to wait for a check every month. Now, she gets paid every Friday. She saves a few dollars for each of her kids. "It's called an allowance," she said.

Her son, Zayvon, is 11. They don't run out of food at the end of the month now that his mother is working, he said as he ate a snack.

At a little more than $11 an hour, Radcliff still lives on a thin margin. The family still gets $300 in rent assistance and $161 in food stamps to help out.

Now, she wonders what else she might do for herself and her kids. Maybe, she said, she'll become an LPN.

And, as she stands next to her minivan in the driveway of the house she rents, Radcliff dreams out loud about living in a community she'd never seen a year ago: It would be so nice to live in Mattydale or Cicero where the schools are good and the streets are quiet, she says.

Marnie Eisenstadt writes about life and culture in Central New York. Contact her anytime: email | twitter | 315-470-2246.

