The Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national foundation committed to helping children and young adults to thrive, recently published a report to provide actionable insights for funders, non-profits, public partners, and others to create meaningful economic opportunities for young people. The report, called Career Pathways to Success, was based on learnings captured from their key investments – one of which was in 10 collaborations across the country called Generation Work (Gen Work) collaborations. Greater Cleveland had one of the Gen Work investments, in which partners integrated two promising practices:
-
- Industry partnerships which align the needs of employers in specific sectors with the skills and talents of young job seekers with low incomes
- Evidence-based positive youth development principles that help young people build the social-emotional skills needed to succeed at work.
At the Casey Foundation’s request, Jill Rizika recently spoke at the Workforce Matters conference about the outcomes of the 10 year commitment of the greater Cleveland Gen Work organizations – currently Towards Employment, Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Cuyahoga Community College, The Centers, and Ohio Guidestone– with Greater Cleveland Works and Cuyahoga County Job and Family Services heavily involved from 2015-2020.
I was excited to hear of the systems change created by this Gen Work Cleveland/Cuyahoga County collaboration, and the results and new behaviors which resulted. According to Jill, here were some of the changes in our own community:
Improved workplaces for young people, due to the involvement of young people and commitment from partner employers
As I’ve often heard, the best solutions come from the people impacted by the solutions. Using the Gen Work -identified quality workplace practices and evidence-based positive youth-development principles, Towards Employment created a pilot WOW (World of Work) Council composed of working young adult graduates. This group advised the organization’s Employer Advisory Board, directly providing guidance to employers regarding the top 5 aspects of a job which were important to them. Not only did the council prioritize these top 5, but they decided to highlight the most important one. Guess what it is? Good supervisors, who listen to their young workers, take their ideas into consideration, show them paths for advancement, and provide coaching and mentorship. The employers listening to this advice would have a real competitive advantage to hiring, due to this improved engagement and practice change; furthermore, they are now actively building workplaces which enable young adults to thrive. This pilot will now be expanded to include graduates of the rest of the Gen Work collaborative organizations, who will create dialogue with a broader employer partner audience.
Applying some of these same youth development principles to the local industry partnership in manufacturing, Gen Work partners worked with employers to raise awareness of some of the inadvertent barriers they had created. Lack of understanding of public transportation schedules and their connection to shift scheduling and the benefits of on-site employer coaching were just some of the issues raised by Gen Work partners, which led to employer practices changes. These conversations and practice changes have made it easier for partner employers to not only hire young adults but to ensure strong retention and access to advancement opportunities.
Better alignment and integration of non-profit services with the public services supporting young adults 16-24 supported across systems.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation not only sought for its practices to be integrated into the provider organizations in the collaborations, but also with their public sector partners, and this became an early priority and focus of the local collaboration. When the collaborative started, two of the biggest public funding buckets which help young adults – called “WIOA” and “TANF” – were run by separate local government agencies. These agencies contracted with providers to deliver similar services to similar community members but had different forms, cycles, program operations and reporting requirements, a bureaucratic challenge at minimum. Early in the process, the Gen Work team worked actively with the public sector partners to identify and resolve challenges with joint procurement and program management prompted by a statewide push to blend WIOA and TANF funding (2020). Recently, Greater Cleveland Works, the public workforce system, saw the opportunity to strengthen the young adult ecosystem by calling for a collaborative response to deliver this blended funding for young adult workforce programming, rather than contracting with individual providers. Given the decade of working together to provide young adults quality workforce services informed by the Gen Work technical assistance and ongoing community of practice, the Gen Work collaborative was well positioned to meet the moment. This has created the opportunity for greater alignment to provide more seamless services with more consistent application of the Gen Work principles of positive youth development, reducing racial disparities, engaging employers around job quality and promoting young adult worker voice throughout
The Annie E. Casey Foundation identified a broader list of lessons and strategies across a wide portfolio of youth work focused on helping young people be more successful in careers; they are neatly summarized here.