WORKFORCE PREPAREDNESS

Workforce skills are increasingly important in a globally competitive market. Since JFF’s founding over 25 years ago, this has been a central concern of our work. In this Newswire, you can read about JFF’s partnership in two multiyear initiatives that respond to this challenge through education and business partnerships that strengthen local and state economies and enable low-skilled adults to advance into family-sustaining careers:

• JFF manages grantmaking for the National Fund for Workforce Solutions. We also coordinate assistance to National Fund partners across the country and oversee an evaluation that identifies best practices. More than 80 local workforce partnerships in the National Fund, serving over 18,000 people, are addressing the crisis in workforce preparedness. $30 million from National Fund investors has leveraged $104 million in pledged local support for workforce partnerships.
• Jobs to Careers helps low-skilled, low-wage workers move into family-sustaining careers in health care through work-based learning and by bringing together those with a stake in maintaining a highly trained workforce. As the National Program Office for Jobs to Careers, JFF helps 17 local partnerships of employers, educational institutions, and other organizations create advancement opportunities for frontline workers. You will also read about one JFF leader who inspires me: Maria Flynn, vice president for our body of work focused on advancing low-skilled adults to family-sustaining careers.

—Marlene B. Seltzer, President and CEO, Jobs for the Future

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COLLEGE READY

SPREADING EARLY COLLEGE: A JFF WEBINAR FOR CREATING OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL STUDENTS

On January 12, at 3 p.m. EST, JFF will offer a webinar on why and how to expand early college designs across states and school districts. Presenters will include Superintendent Ed Blaha of the Hidalgo, Texas, school district: 95 percent of its 2010 high school graduates earned free, transferable college credit last year, even though Hidalgo is one of the nation’s most economically depressed areas. Also presenting will be Alma Garcia of the Texas High School Project. And JFF’s Joel Vargas and Nancy Hoffman, coauthors of A Policymaker’s Guide to Early College Designs, will share ways that districts and states can create stories like Hidalgo’s.

BACK ON TRACK SERVICES: SCHOOL DESIGN ASSISTANCE TO STATES, INTERMEDIARIES, AND DISTRICTS

JFF offers states, districts, and intermediaries a comprehensive range of well-tested services to help reengage youth who are off track from graduating or have dropped out altogether. We offer Back on Track services in four areas: planning; school implementation; instructional and leadership professional development; and Counseling to Careers training and system building.

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COLLEGE SUCCESS

JFF’S CAPACITY-BUILDING SERVICES FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES

Grantees of the U.S. Department of Labor’s new Community College and Career Training
Grant Program may be interested in the services JFF can provide to consortia of
community colleges. We offer a comprehensive range of well-tested products and services
to innovate, redesign, and grow education and training programs serving dislocated
workers and adult students.

NORTH CAROLINA COMMUNITY COLLEGES WILL EXPAND BREAKING THROUGH: WALMART FOUNDATION INVESTS IN CAREER PATHWAYS FOR ADULTS

JFF is expanding its successful Breaking Through initiative in North Carolina thanks to a
$1.9 million grant from The Walmart Foundation. Breaking Through helps 35 community
colleges nationwide prepare low-skilled adults to succeed in occupational and technical
degree programs. With this new funding, JFF will assist in developing occupational and
technical pathways for adult students at six North Carolina colleges, as well as improve the counseling capacity of these colleges and their youth-serving community partners.

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CAREER ADVANCEMENT

SSTAR EXCELS: A WORK-BASED LEARNING APPROACH TO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

SSTAR Excels captures how cutting-edge professional development can boost patient care. SSTAR, a behavioral and mental health agency with facilities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, has faced challenges in supporting staff aspirations and meeting client needs, despite a reputation for high-quality programs and services. Through Jobs to Careers, SSTAR has increased its number of certified addiction counselors, enabling more patients to be treated. Costs went down, revenue and quality rose, and SSTAR both attracted new talent and improved its record of retaining valued employees.

CAREER ADVANCEMENT FOR FRONTLINE WORKERS: HITACHI FOUNDATION HIGHLIGHTS HEALTH CARE EMPLOYERS AND SUPERVISORS

SSTAR is also featured in The Hitachi Foundation’s multimedia series, Employer Perspectives, which spotlights health care enterprises that have realized business benefits by rethinking traditional approaches to recruiting, training, and advancing workers. Among the highlighted health care providers are several involved in Jobs to Careers. They exemplify how to engage supervisors in training employees: SSTAR, the Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare, and a group of assisted living facilities in Portland, Oregon.

UNIONS AS PARTNERS: EXPANDING THE ROLE OF ORGANIZED LABOR IN WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

Union involvement can be integral to strategies for reemploying the American workforce. Drawing on the experience of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, Unions As Partners highlights workforce partnerships in which organized labor has played a significant role. As the public workforce system and organized labor seek ways to collaborate more effectively, this brief demonstrates why such a role should be encouraged both within and beyond traditionally unionized industries. It also suggests how policymakers and practitioners can support an expansion of that role for unions.

NATIONAL FUND PROJECTS RECEIVE FEDERAL INNOVATION FUNDING

Ten communities will receive a total of $5.5 million to expand innovative approaches to job training and career support. The awards represent step one in implementing a grant to the National Fund and JFF from the federal government’s Social Innovation Fund. The SIF supports ideas for using innovation and evidence to tackle social challenges in new ways.

CREATING GREEN PATHWAYS: RESOURCES FOR ADVANCING LOWER-SKILLED ADULTS

When JFF organized the Green Career Pathways conference in September, we took the green message to heart. To conserve paper, we posted conference materials on the Web rather than print thousands of sheets of paper for the 100+ representatives of public, private, and philanthropic organizations who assembled at this two-day meeting. Background papers, presentations, and other resources are now available on the Web site of the National Fund.

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POLICY SOLUTIONS

COMMUNITY COLLEGE GRADUATION RATES: HOW WE MEASURE SUCCESS

In December, Massasoit Community College President Charles Wall and JFF Senior Vice President Richard Kazis talked about why fixing the way we measure success is critical to addressing the low graduation rates in community colleges. As guests on WGBH-Radio’s Callie Crossley Show, they argued for multiple measures of success—including the completion of one-year credentials and transfers to a four-year college, rather than just graduation rates. Kazis spoke of the importance of good data for accountability and for continuous improvement.

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PROFILE

MARIA K. FLYNN

At the center of Breaking Through, Jobs to Careers, and the National Fund for Workforce Solutions is Maria K. Flynn, who leads JFF’s Building Economic Opportunity Group. In the three years since Maria arrived here from the U.S. Department of Labor, we have sharpened our strategies for advancing low-skilled workers, greatly expanded our work in this area, and focused tightly on JFF’s overall goal of doubling the numbers of low-income youth and adults who attain postsecondary credentials.

This work comes naturally to Maria: “I come from a household where my father worked in workforce development most of his career, and my mother worked in career and technical education. So I’ve been around this whole issue of preparing young people and adults to succeed in the labor market since I was a kid in New Jersey.”

After college, Maria went right to work at the U.S. Department of Labor, where she served for 16 years in many different capacities. Most recently, she administered the Office of Policy Development and Research in the Employment and Training Administration.

“I decided to come to JFF because I respected its approach to programs and policies,” says Maria. “JFF is always ready to challenge the status quo and push for changes in systems that are really going to make a difference. I think that’s what sets us apart.”

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Jobs for the Future develops, implements, and promotes new education and workforce strategies that help communities, states, and the nation compete in a global economy. In 200 communities in 41 states, JFF improves the pathways leading from high school to college to family-sustaining careers.

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