Investing in Workforce Intermediaries is a collaborative effort of the Annie E. Casey and Ford foundations. In 2004, the sponsoring foundations, working with Jobs for the Future, launched a pilot effort to seed a national support infrastructure for workforce intermediaries. This pilot has two main components: local efforts to generate support for workforce intermediaries; and state efforts to help seed infrastructure in multiple areas within a state. The initiative supports and highlights promising demonstrations in order to inform policies and practices in communities and states and at the national level. It rallies philanthropy, business, and the public sector to make a highly focused, very targeted effort to more effectively address the skills challenges facing our communities and our nation. 

Rationale

The urgency to upgrade the skills of American workers has outstripped the capacity of existing public and private systems. Our communities need a new approach for meeting the skill needs of individuals and employers. They need a 21st-century skill development system that can:

• Cut across narrow categorical financing;
• Provide comprehensive education services throughout a worker’s life;

• Provide rapid skill development and jobs advancement;

• Help workers and employers navigate the complexities of education and training; 

• Create customized, highly responsive services; and
• Creatively blend necessary financing.

In addressing these multiple needs, workforce intermediaries have three ambitious objectives:

• Improve access to good jobs through education and training;

• Turn “bad jobs” into “good jobs” through career ladder programs;and

• Help employers and communities create more good jobs by strengthening business competitiveness and linking workers’ skill improvements to economic development.

Building National Support

While the task of building workforce intermediary capacity and scale happens primarily at the local level, some initiative activities are more effectively organized and delivered nationally. Specifically, the initiative provides peer learning and technical assistance to strengthen local pilot projects, and it explores new, creative financing mechanisms, both public and private, as well as innovative, effective state and federal policy vehicles that can support workforce intermediaries. The pilot includes a national evaluation component, building on existing community-level evaluations, to document for national policymakers the impact of this improved approach to workforce development. 

Local Pilot Projects

Investing in Workforce Intermediaries supports projects in five communities and one state. For each site, a consortium of private and public funders exists or is in formation. These consortia have demonstrated: intermediary capacity on the ground; the civic will to create a workforce system that can support workforce intermediaries; and the deep engagement of major employers in training and advancing lower-skilled employees.

Each initiative site has begun the task of changing how its community meets the skills needs of workers and businesses:

Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare. Baltimore, the home of leading national health care research and patient care institutions, is also a city of extreme economic disparity. Much of the region’s growth has taken place in the suburban Baltimore-Washington, DC area, while many low-income inner-city residents lack the education, skills, and transportation options to connect to good jobs. 

The Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare, Inc. incorporated as a workforce intermediary in 2005 to meet industry demand for over 300 new skilled jobs annually and to help build the pipeline of entry-level health care workers. The alliance, comprised of nine hospitals, five state and federal government agencies, five educational institutions, nine other non-profit agencies, and seven local foundations, has committed over $500,000 to projects that develop customized, employer-based career pathways; provide basic skills courses and occupational training in healthcare careers; and help partnering hospitals to implement career coaching programs.

BACH Web site 

Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative. The San Francisco Bay Area continues to experience strong growth in biosciences, health care, and technology, yet it is also one of the most expensive regions in the nation, making the pressure to help low-wage workers advance in the labor market particularly acute.

The Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative, a public/private partnership formed by thirteen private local foundations, working with California’s Employment Development Department, came together in fall 2004 to increase the economic security of low-income residents by increasing their skills in industry sectors in which they can gain family-sustaining jobs. The collaborative stimulates regional cooperation and planning among workforce boards, nonprofit employment and training providers, community colleges, labor, and employer associations to align investments in bio-technology and healthcare sector-based intermediaries. The San Francisco Foundation manages the collaborative’s philanthropic mutual fund and coordinates co-investment with the Employment Development Department. Foundations participate in the collaborative by providing a grant to the San Francisco Foundation for the mutual fund or by coordinating grants with those made by the collaborative.

Bay Area Web site

Central Texas Workforce Intermediary Initiative. Austin, Texas, has experienced the ups and downs of recent economic cycles as its once booming technology and semiconductor industries are beginning to rebound, and health care is becoming a more important regional industry. Austin, like many other cities that experienced rapid growth in the 1990s, did not see that growth reach its lower-income and minority populations. 

In response to this challenge, a core group of the city workforce board, county government, two workforce intermediaries, Austin Community College, and the Ray Marshall Center, a policy research organization, are collaborating to create cluster-based advancement strategies in health care, construction, and technology. CTWII engages employer groups, community organizations, and philanthropic institutions to support a regional workforce intermediary initiative that will train disadvantaged workers for high-skill jobs offering high wages in industries linked to long-term economic growth and regional vitality. These intermediaries are providing rapid employment support for low-skill workers, remedial education and advancement-oriented skill training, wraparound support services, and career ladder support to workers.

Central Texas Web site

New York City Sectors Initiative. In spite of its diverse economy and workforce, New York City has lagged behind other major cities in effectively tapping available federal workforce resources and meeting the workforce needs of its citizens and businesses. 

In this context, the New York City Workforce Development Funders Group, a partnership among the city’s Department of Small Business Services, 13 local foundations, and several corporate philanthropies, has created the New York City Workforce Innovation Fund to support the New York City Sectors Initiative. The Sectors Initiative seeds the formation of new intermediaries and awards multiyear implementation grants to intermediaries in the health care, biotechnology, and aviation services sectors. In 2005, the Workforce Innovation Fund awarded three-year grants totaling $2.4 million to two intermediaries that will lead a collaboration of firms and training providers to train 288 unemployed and underemployed workers to be lab technicians, medical assistants, surgical technicians, EMTs, and paramedics. It also awarded a $35,000 start-up grant to form a new intermediary in the aviation field.

New York Web site

Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania continues to experience strong manufacturing growth and accompanying skilled-labor shortages. Strength in manufacturing and growth in other industries such as health care led Governor Edward Rendell to pursue innovative workforce strategies that support regional intermediary capacity that aligns workforce development with economic development capacity. 

The Department of Labor and Industry, the Pennsylvania Workforce Investment Board, and the Keystone Research Center have partnered to fund industry-based workforce intermediaries throughout the state. The Rendell Administration created the Incumbent Worker Training Fund, with $5 million to organize the development of industry-based intermediaries and $15 million for workforce intermediary-led incumbent worker training. The fund aligns the state’s WIA discretionary funds, funds from the Department of Commerce and Economic Development, several demonstration grants, and a state appropriation to award grants to over 40 regional industry-based intermediaries in manufacturing, life sciences and health care, financial and business services, construction, logistics and transportation, public transit, utilities, and information management in 2006, the rollout year. The initiative also supports the Pennsylvania Sector Academy and ongoing peer learning networks to strengthen workforce intermediary capacity outside of state government.

Pennsylvania Web site

Pennsylvania Sector Academy:

Pennsylvania Sector Academy Information and Application

Building an Industry Partnership Tool

Planning Guidelines for Building and Sustaining Industry Partnerships

The Pennsylvania Sector Academy: Overview

SkillWorks. Boston’s vibrant economy is bolstered by strong industries such as health care, education, financial services, and bioscience/medical devices. Yet, even as the economy slowed in the late 1990s, many employers found themselves having great difficulty filling skilled positions and began experimenting with innovative public/private partnerships to meet their skill needs. Boston also has a history of philanthropic collaboration and program innovation. 

In that context, SkillWorks: Partners for a Productive Workforce, a public/private funders' collaborative, was created to address the gap between the needs of employers for more skilled workers and of workers for more accessible jobs that pay a family-supporting wage. SkillWorks will invest $13 million over five years in advocacy for the public policies and systemic infrastructure needed to support quality programming leading to long-term economic benefits for low-income, unemployed, and underemployed individuals in the Boston area. The initiative also seeks to strengthen the capacity of workforce intermediaries to provide employment and training services in the current climate of complex funding streams and policies. The five-year initiative targets the health care, public health, hospitality, facilities maintenance, and automotive repair sectors in which vacancies that can lead to career advancement exist. 

Boston Web site

SkillWorks Public Policy Resources:

Text of the Massachusetts Economic Stimulus Act of 2006

Overview of the Economic Stimulus Act of 2006

Overview of the SkillWorks Policy Advocacy Approach   

Outcomes

Investing in Workforce Intermediaries projects have begun to improve the lives of hundreds of lower-skilled employees. In Boston, for example, SkillWorks provided pre-employment training, job upgrading training, career management, and income enhancement services to several hundred workers and more than twenty employers in its first year of operation. These numbers will climb to more than 3,000 over the next four years.

Investing in and supporting workforce intermediaries in key metropolitan areas and states will provide important lessons about how workforce systems can better upgrade the skills and incomes of the poor. By supporting and highlighting promising demonstrations, the initiative also will inform policies and practices nationally.

Investments in local and state efforts to support workforce intermediaries have had a successful catalytic effect. Four of the projects have created funding consortia that include 34 local and regional foundations, committing nearly $20 million in new dollars to support workforce intermediaries. These consortia have also attracted investments from local and state governments–equaling more than $13 million–that have joined in unique public/private investment partnerships. More than a dozen major employers have invested almost $3 million to date, a figure that is expected to grow rapidly as pilot projects become operational in key industries.

Funders

Annie E. Casey Foundation

Ford Foundation

For more information, contact:

Maria Flynn at JFF, mflynn@jff.org, 617.728.4446

Publication References

• Funder Collaboratives: A Philanthropic Strategy for Supporting Workforce Intermediaries
• Building New Labor Market Institutions: State Policies that Support Workforce Intermediaries