1 MetLife Foundation Excellence Awards to Honor Innovative Community Colleges
MetLife Foundation and Jobs for the Future will recognize two
community colleges that are integrating exemplary practices promoting
education and career advancement into all educational programs
for traditionally underserved youth and adults. Applications are
due October 1, 2001. The winners of the 2001 MetLife Foundation
Community College Excellence Awards will be leaders in integrating
these practices in all parts and programs of the institution.
Each college will receive a $30,000 award and national recognition
in awards brochures, related publications, and an on-line, "virtual
tour" of its institution.
Dr. Jane Milley and Marty Liebowitz of Jobs for the Future will
present a workshop, "Driving Change in Community Colleges," at
WELFARE TO WORK TO SELF- SUFFICIENCY. This national conference
is sponsored by the Network Consortium, a "one stop" resource
for workforce development professionals. The workshop/presentation
will focus on "Pathways for Advancement to Self- Sufficiency,"
a framework developed by Jobs for the Future to guide change in
community colleges. The session will take place on Sunday, August
19, 2001; the conference runs from August 18 through August 21
at the Reno Hilton, Reno, Nevada.
3Piloting a Tool for Calculating Return on Investment San Francisco Works (SF Works) is pilot-testing a new tool for
helping employers determine the value they receive from investing
in workforce development initiatives. Jobs for the Future worked
with an R&D; team to create the tool for Workforce Innovations
Networks—WINs, a multi-year collaboration with the Center for
Workforce Preparation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the
Center for Workforce Success of the National Association of Manufacturers
to address the workforce development needs of businesses and communities.
In addition to SF Works, the R&D; team included representatives
of the American Society of Employers, Connecticut Business and
Industry Association, Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, Michigan
National Bank, Semiconductor Industry Association, and Smith and
Nephew, as well as the WINs partners.
Making hiring more effective, increasing retention rates, and
improving performance can produce significant business benefits.
However, these workforce development efforts require investment.
This tool is designed to enable employers to determine the return
on investments (ROI) related to hiring and training workers with
fewer skills and less work experience.
For information on the ROI TOOL, contact Jack Mills, jmills@jff.org.
4Effective Learning Environments for 15-24 Year Olds On April 26-27, 2001, representatives of 25 small high schools,
youth development programs, and youth- related policy initiatives
in the New England/East Coast region convened to discuss the characteristics
of powerful learning environments for 15-24 year olds and the
policies required to support such environments. This was the first
of three regional conversations to be convened by Jobs for the
Future, in collaboration with the Forum for Youth Development,
as part of From the Margins to the Mainstream.
Coming of Age in 2001: Position Paper on Effective Learning Environments for 15-24 Year Olds, by Adria Steinberg, was prepared for this
meeting. A primary goal of the Margins initiative is to expand
the visibility and impact of learning environments that are highly
effective with young people who are not well-served by traditional
high schools and who might otherwise spend their "coming of age"
years moving in and out of the seemingly revolving door of postsecondary
education, and in and out of low-wage, dead-end jobs.
Central to the Margins initiative are The Five C's: Essential Supports and Opportunities. Whether one looks at resiliency research
that begins with individuals who have "beaten the odds" and works
backward through what enabled them to do so, or focuses on evaluation
studies that begin with key program features and look at long-term
outcome data, the same basic combination of supports and opportunities
emerges as critical to young people's long-term success.
This combination is reflected in the The Five C's:Caring Relationships;
Culture of Peer Support for Effort; Cognitive Challenge; Community
Membership, Voice, and Contribution; and Connections to the Future.
Jobs for the Future also recently released two related products: Connected Learning Communities: A Toolkit for Reinventing High School and Reinventing High School: Six Journeys of Change.
The Toolkit grows out of JFF's ongoing efforts to develop language,
protocols, templates, and examples to help practitioners with
the challenging task of implementing community-connected learning
on a local basis. Download
the toolkit.
Reinventing High School takes an in-depth look at six schools
that are transforming thinking about secondary schooling. Download
the report.
5Building Bridges to Family-Supporting Jobs How can we help people, especially women, advance from a first
job at the low end of the labor market into "second tier" jobs
that pay better? What combination of supports and opportunities
do low-income women need for advancement in today's labor market?
And how do we structure organizations and public policy to give
women these supports?
Jobs for the Future's experience in the field points to two critical
issues that need to be addressed:
Neither public policy nor state and
local practice adequately supports what we know works best in
moving women into family-supporting employment.
Despite all the innovative activity
in job development, few programs have the capacity to expand
to the scale required.
In the Fall 2001 issue of Women's Policy Journal, Hilary Pennington
and Marlene Seltzer of Jobs for the Future share some insights
on these issues.
Jobs for the Future, in partnership with the John J. Heldrich
Center at Rutgers University, has launched a project to evaluate
how youth programs across the nation are making the transition
from short-term youth programs under the Job Training Partnership
Act to the comprehensive services required by the 1998 Workforce
Investment Act. WIA has dramatically changed the expectations
and priorities of youth programming funded by the U.S. Department
of Labor. This study will address the progress of communities
in implementing the youth provisions of the law.
7Accelerating Advancement: Strategies for the Future
Spanning its diverse programs and projects, Jobs for the Future
is engaged in a long-term effort to develop, expand, and advocate
for effective strategies to accelerate educational and career
advancement for youth and adults with low levels of income and
education. The challenge is to overcome the barriers of scale
and speed in implementing effective programs and policies. Within
the for-profit and non-profit worlds, much has been learned about
how entrepreneurial individuals and organizations can harness
new technologies and proven delivery systems to address educational
and workforce challenges. This experience points to new ways of
thinking about where, how, and when learning best occurs—and
how to build organizations and institutions that can quickly take
advantage of market opportunities as they emerge.
MetLife Foundation Excellence Awards to Honor Innovative Community Colleges
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