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PRESS RELEASE Contact: Carmon Cunningham (617) 728-4446 ccunningham@jff.org      REINVENTING WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT   JFF Draws National Implications from Ambitious Boston Project   November 12, 2004    In December 2003, 12 months after an acrimonious strike pit the union representing the men and women who clean Boston’s office buildings against the companies that manage many of those buildings, a non-profit arm of the union and seven employers entered into an innovative partnership. They agreed to begin developing career ladders for the people who clean the city’s office buildings every night. The plan? To help the management firms develop skilled custodians, supervisors, painters, electricians, and groundskeepers by providing the part-time cleaning staff with easily accessible skill training, career coaching, and English language instruction. This labor-management partnership is one of the early products of SkillWorks: Partners for a Productive Workforce, an ambitious effort on the part of philanthropy, government, community organizations, unions, and employers to change how workforce development is done in Boston. In Reinventing Workforce Development: Lessons from Boston’s Community Approach, Jerry Rubin and Geri Scott of Jobs for the Future describe the start-up of this unprecedented initiative, focusing on its implications for workforce development throughout the nation. In fact, SkillWorks, originally known as the Boston Workforce Development Initiative, has quickly attracted national interest. Its goal—a goal shared by all communities that recognize the need for new approaches to workforce development—is to create a system that: Helps low-skill, low-income residents move to family-sustaining jobs; and Helps employers find and retain skilled employees. “SkillWorks is systems change, an effort to substantially improve Boston’s workforce development system,” explains Rubin, who is vice president of JFF’s Building Economic Opportunity Group. “To achieve that goal, the initiative is investing in on-the-ground workforce services, capacity building for community organizations, and public policy advocacy on a statewide level.” SkillWorks is fundamentally about two things: growing high-quality workforce services that enable employers to advance low-skilled, low-income residents to family self-sufficiency and institutionalizing those practices within the workforce development system to gain significant scale and long-term sustainability. Toward both ends, SkillWorks invests in program models that seek to change the practices of employers and service providers and in statewide public policy advocacy to imbed the initiative’s principles in public policy and the workforce system. “SkillWorks has set ambitious goals,” says Scott, “and it shows that it is possible to move quickly beyond demonstrating a model to improving systems and changing public policy.” JFF helped design SkillWorks and now oversees the implementation of this five-year project as a consultant to the Funders Group, comprised of eight foundations, the City of Boston, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.