Workforce Developments

Federal funding and workforce programs: Thinking outside the box to discover new opportunities

By guest blogger Erica Bouris

In many ways, this is an incredible time to be a workforce development professional. The system has more money flowing in than it has in a long time. You can't go to a workforce conference without hearing the chatter of "our ARRA green jobs program" or our "ARRA ex-offender work readiness program and countless other variations. This is great. For the wonderful folks who finally have resources to pilot their innovative programs and scale up proven programs, and for the millions of Americans who are out of work, these programs are an absolute lifeline.

So it may seem a strange time to encourage you to think about leveraging your workforce program expertise to reach other federal funding streams, but that is the goal of today's post. 

Historically, Department of Labor grants, allocations through the Workforce Investment Act , and occasional supplements from the Department of Education (particularly for vocational and technical programs) have formed the core of federal funding for workforce programs. Yet a confluence of factors has contributed to the emergence of workforce activities in a whole host of federal funding streams in recent years. Just in the past few months, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, Department of State, and the Department of Health and Human Services have issued RFPs that include substantial workforce program elements. These aren't workforce programs per se, but they have clearly identified, fundable activities that are workforce activities. This means that there is opportunity for you to partner with other agencies and bring together a compelling group of organizations poised to meet the multiple goals of the RFP.

For example, last week, the Department of Energy issued an RFP through its established Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP). This is the program that helps provide weatherization and energy efficiency services to low-income households. This particular RFP however, takes the customary WAP funding request and does it one better; it is now the Weatherization Innovation Pilot Program. DOE wants innovation, and what kind of innovation do they want? Well, among other things, they are hoping that non-traditional applicants (including CBOs and educational institutions) get in the game and they are further hoping that proposed programs are "consistent with the President's goal of creating a green workforce."

Another example comes by way of the National Science Foundation (NSF). As a nation, we have identified the need for a well-trained STEM workforce and the NSF – best known for funding major research initiatives – is also invested in preparing individuals to enter a broad spectrum of STEM jobs. One piece of the career ladder is the so-called Professional Science Masters program and NSF funded several initiatives to further develop and pilot employer-responsive programs designed to meet critical workforce shortages. And the grantees were also supposed to incorporate outreach and job support services for a diverse population... sound familiar?

Finally, have you ever thought about how great it would be to bring your strong workforce programs abroad? How about testing them in a place like Algeria, where youth unemployment stands over 40%? While you may not have the capacity (nor the mission) to reach quite that far, could your curriculum and youth job training materials have been included in a some of the multi-agency partnerships that have won grants for job training, entrepreneurship, and youth work readiness programs funded through the U.S. Department of State Middle East Partnership Initiative programs in recent years?

Current economic and social challenges - from global recession to the rise of the green economy – have encouraged a broad spectrum of federal agencies to be invested in the workforce component of their mission. This is an opportunity for workforce professionals to think innovatively about how to leverage your expertise in designing and building workforce programs to advance diverse social goals such as environmental sustainability, positive global engagement, and more.

Some practical advice if you this idea has got you thinking:

• Try to piecemeal your expertise and assets. Do you have a proven curriculum for training people in specific sectors? Deep reach into a particular community? Unique tools that help people map their career pathway or explore the "fit" of potential jobs? Thinking this way will help you identify the various workforce components you can bring to the table to support a broader initiative.
• On the flip side, think big picture and learn to articulate this to non-workforce professionals. As a workforce professional, what are the big social challenges you address? You help with economic development by enabling citizens to participate fully in the economy. You convene stakeholders to make sure that people, the private sector, and the community develop together in a supportive way. What else?
• Be prepared to spend some time figuring out who the players are for these alternate federal funding streams and work on building relationships. Remember that these federal funding opportunities generally have a 30 day turnaround so if you want to be included as a partner providing the workforce piece of a broader program, the lead agency responding to the RFP has to know who you are and importantly, what you can bring to the table.
• Performance metrics, standards for program evaluation; these are all very different across different federal funding streams. Pay close attention to the preferred performance metrics of the RFP and be prepared to adjust the way you structure and evaluate your program in order to be better aligned with these alternate metrics.

Erica Bouris, Ph.D. is the Principal of B Square Impact, an agency that helps non-profits and educational institutions develop, implement, evaluate, and fund the next generation of innovative programs tackling today's most critical workforce, education, economic, and community needs.

State unemployment systems going broke

As the Great Recession wears on and states have had to pay out ever more unemployment benefits to struggling citizens, flaws in the unemployment system have been laid bare. Twenty million Americans collected benefits last year. 

And twenty-six state unemployment trust funds have gone broke in the process. They've borrowed money from the feds to stay afloat. But worse, some have started whittling away at benefits to try and stop the flow of red ink.  

Is your state in trouble? This map from Pro Publica shows the current state of unemployment revenues, or read more detail on their terrific Unemployment Insurance Tracker page. 

The National Council of State Legislatures recently held a webinar on State Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund Solvency to help states find strategies to address the problem. You can watch a recording of the webinar here (free registration required). 

Yes, economists are saying they see hints that we've turned the corner on the recession. However, unemployment is still at record levels in many states and regions, and states are still struggling to stay afloat. They'll continue to need help for their citizens in greatest need for a long time to come. 

Required reading

Transitional Jobs: Background, Program Models, and Evaluation Evidence
Dan Bloom
MDRC
February 2010

The budget for the U.S. Department of Labor for Fiscal Year 2010 includes a total of $45 million to support and study transitional jobs. This paper describes the origins of the transitional jobs models that are operating today, reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of this approach and other subsidized employment models, and offers some suggestions regarding the next steps for program design and research. The paper was produced for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by MDRC as part of the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ project, which includes two random assignment evaluations of transitional jobs programs.

The United Regions of America
Stephen C. Fehr
Stateline
April 22, 2010 

The Obama administration wants to change the way politicians fight for jobs by encouraging regions - instead of individual states and cities - to compete for economic development projects.

Accomplishing this sea change in economic thinking will be difficult. The current system of states and cities battling for companies, often outbidding each other with ever-higher tax breaks, is pretty ingrained. President Obama's hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee, former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, was one of the best practitioners; Virginia topped Forbes magazine's "best states for business" every year of his term. 

Want to recommend some required reading to your colleagues? Add a link below or drop me a line.

Take a lunch break with shipyard workers

Last night I saw a couple of amazing films about shipyard workers at Maine's Bath Iron Works. These aren't traditional, narrative movies, though. They're genuine works of art that explore workplaces and the people in them from a unique perspective. Artist Sharon Lockhart spent a year filming in Bath in 2007 to develop an intimate understanding of the workers and their job that comes through in the film.

The first of the two films is Lunch Break. It consists of one long tracking shot down the IAMAW Local 6 Assembly Hall at the shipyard. The movement is slowed to a contemplative pace, but the hum and click of machines is in real time. Along the sides of the hall, shipyard workers are taking their lunch break: eating, reading, chatting, sleeping.

For 80 minutes we feel the narrow constriction of the space, hear the relentless sound of the machines. The action moves so slowly that we can focus on the details of the pipes, gauges, stickers on lockers, hard hats, flannel shirts and jeans. A man climbing down a ladder is a study in the dramatic tension embedded in simple human movement.

To get a sense of it, watch the first six minutes of Lunch Break:

(Click here if you don't see the embedded video above.)

The second of Lockhart's films, Exit (40 minutes), shows the workers leaving the Bath shipyard five days in a row. The whistle blows, and we watch waves of workers leave, lunch coolers in hand.

Click for more information about the films or the artist.

Your local library: the new employment one-stop?

Marketplace radio had a great piece yesterday on how public libraries have become a popular place to search for work, especially for low-income job seekers. Overall, use of libraries and their free services is up since the Great Recession began. As the Boston Globe puts it, "But historically, nothing boosts the profile of a public library like a nice, dreadful recession." 

As the recession has worn on, libraries have had to cope with a surge in people using the library for job searches. It's had serious ramifications for library staff and resources. From the Marketplace story:

With at least 15 million Americans out of work, libraries across the country have seen their own transformations: An Illinois library installed a new reference desk beneath a sign saying "Your Job Search Starts Here." In North Carolina, public librarians from nearly every county came together to share ideas on helping the unemployed. And some big city libraries are renovating entire floors to make more space for job-hunters.

This isn't the only role libraries have played in helping job seekers. In early 2009, the Indiana Department of Workforce Development partnered with the state library to hold sessions at the libraries to help laid-off residents sign up for unemployment benefits.

This at a time when library budgets are being slashed. Another round of short-sighted cuts that hurt the people who need these services the most. If you haven't been in a library recently, you might not be aware just what a crucial role they play keeping Americans connected in the social media age. This recent report from the Gates Foundation is a real eye-opener. 

You can read the Marketplace story on job seekers and libraries reported by Zachary Barr, or listen to the full show here:

Marketplace_Library_Job_Seekers

Now I'm curious - have any workforce boards, One-Stops or nonprofits partnered with their local libraries to serve job seekers? If you know of any examples, please add comments below.

Do you have any ideas for how the workforce system can work with libraries to help job seekers? 

Have you used the library to look for a job?

Tracking layoffs in higher education

It's been heartbreaking to watch how higher education has been decimated during the Great Recession. The budgets of many colleges and universities had already been cut to the bone during the good times, especially teaching schools and community colleges that don't attract a lot of public or private research dollars.

Here in the US, education and training has served as a pathway to the middle class for people from all walks of life. It's part of what makes us unique - no matter what your parents and grandparents did for a living, you can get an education and within a generation make an enormous leap in economic status.  

It's stunningly short-sighted and bad public policy to try to solve our economic problems by laying off teachers, overloading classes and cutting budgets for books and computers. Don't worry, the wealthy and advantaged will still be able to buy an education to maintain their status. It's everyone else who will lose the opportunity. Perhaps worse, we could end up with a system where the elites get classes with live instructors while those who can't pay as much get online-only classes taught from India or China.

Think that isn't possible? Some professors have already outsourced grading to Asia. 

To track layoffs and other cuts, the Chronicle of Higher Education has launched the Campus Cuts blog. Search for your favorite educational institution on the site. They cover everything from major research institutions to teaching schools to community colleges.

This is just one of many online resources to track Great Recession layoffs, like this one for cutbacks in the news industry. This amazing map tracks the progression of net job gains and losses in major metro since 2004.  

If you don't like what you see, the time to speak up for education is now.

Pre-school graduation photo by Gideon Tsang.

Required reading

Hilda Solis: Labor's New Sheriff
Esther Kaplan
The Nation
April 12, 2010

President Obama calls Solis part of his economic team, but the truth is she's not part of the daily huddle at the White House with Summers and Geithner and Orszag. She's tapped instead as a lead voice in the "jobs, jobs, jobs" choir, advocating for Obama's latest stimulus package. She has tiptoed into the realm of financial regulation, organizing a joint hearing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the abysmal performance of target date retirement funds during the market crash, and she doles out hundreds of millions of dollars in job training funds, a decent chunk of which she has used to shape policy by channeling it to green industries. But Solis understands that her real influence lies in her power to enforce the nation's labor laws--the primary mission of the DoL. It's a role she embraced with relish at her swearing-in, where she announced with a grin, "To those who have for too long abused workers, put them in harm's way, denied them fair pay, let me be clear: there is a new sheriff in town."

Read more.

I Saw the Crisis Coming. Why Didn't the Fed?
Michael J. Burry
The New York Times
April 3, 2010

Back in 2005 and 2006, I argued as forcefully as I could, in letters to clients of my investment firm, Scion Capital, that the mortgage market would melt down in the second half of 2007, causing substantial damage to the economy. My prediction was based on my research into the residential mortgage market and mortgage-backed securities. After studying the regulatory filings related to those securities, I waited for the lenders to offer the most risky mortgages conceivable to the least qualified buyers. I knew that would mark the beginning of the end of the housing bubble; it would mean that prices had risen — with the expansion of easy mortgage lending — as high as they could go.

Read more.

How Washington Abetted the Bank Job
Susan P. Koniak, George M. Cohen, David A. Dana and Thomas Ross
The New York Times
April 3, 2010

Well, the truth is this: The collapse of Enron back in 2001 revealed that the biggest financial institutions, here and abroad, were busy creating products whose sole purpose was to help companies magically transform their debt into capital or revenue. At the time, there were news reports about Merrill Lynch pretending to buy Nigerian barges from Enron, JPMorgan Chase dressing up its loans to Enron as commodity trades and Citigroup disguising Enron debt as profits from Treasury-bill swaps. 

This went well beyond Enron. Our banks had gone into the business of creating "products" to help companies, cities and whole countries hide their true financial condition. Consider the recent revelations about how Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan helped Greece hide its debt. Now we discover that our banks not only were raking in huge profits helping others hide debt, they also drank their own Kool-Aid. As a chief executive of Citibank said in 2007 about financing dangerously leveraged deals, "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance."

Read more.

The next jobs bill: targeting those in greatest need

In the Great Recession, unemployment has not hit all demographic groups equally. Youth, African-Americans and Latinos are all experiencing higher rates of unemployment than older, white Americans. Workers with less education have higher unemployment than those with more. Men have been hit harder than women. Different parts of the country have experienced wildly varying rates of job losses. 

In its recent State of Black America report, the National Urban League argues that the next jobs bill should more precisely target those groups experiencing the greatest unemployment. Read the report here or watch a webcast from its release. From the report: 

With black unemployment numbers nearly double that of whites, the National Urban League's State of Black America report shows that the ravages of the recession are impacting minorities much worse than the rest of the nation. The solution to this crisis is getting jobs to people in these communities and the Urban League is encouraging the nation's leaders to act swiftly and support a $168 billion plan it has to generate jobs to make sure no one is left behind or left out of economic recovery efforts.

Their six-point Plan for Putting Americans Back to Work includes proposals to fund direct job creation, create "green empowerment zones" in areas where at least 50 percent of the population has an unemployment rate higher than the state average, and investing $500 million in housing counseling agencies nationwide to help delinquent borrowers secure more affordable mortgages.  

After the release of the NUL's report, several African-American leaders discussed the issue on CNN. Watch below. 

If you can't see the embedded video, click here to watch it on PolicyLink's Equity Blog. 

Readers, what do you think? Should the next jobs bill target those in greatest need? What is the best way to do that? 

Does the iPad match your values?

High tech gadgets are like any other gadgets out there, like your olive stuffer or your digital angle gauge. 

What, you don't have either of those? Probably because you don't have a use for them. They might look great and do cool things, but like any tools, they're only right for certain tasks.  

Same with the iPad. Only I'm guessing there are a lot of things the iPad does that you do like to do: Read newspapers, magazines and books. Check email. Keep your calendar. Play games. Watch videos. Listen to music. Do the social networking thing. 

If you're thinking about buying an iPad, first check out the many, many reviews available to figure out if it does what you want, within your price range. Then take a moment to ask whether it fits your values. 

All technology has values embedded in it. They're often implicit rather than explicit, which makes them difficult to see. Think about the values embedded in the Hummer compared to those embedded in the Honda Civic.  

From the reviews I've read of the iPad (no, I haven't tried one out), and what I know of Apple's other products, here are the embedded values I see: 

1. Commercialization of knowledge, rather than open sharing. These days, you have to give Apple your credit card number just to get iTunes to work on your new i-gadget, even to download content someone else is giving away free. 
2. Trashing the old rather than reusing and recycling. Why did Apple decide to create this big, new product when they could have just made deals with content providers to make their products look beautiful on your existing iPhone, iPod or iMac?  
3. My way or the highway. If you do everything exactly the way Apple tells you to, your i-gadget will work great. If you want to do things a little differently, you're in for a battle.  
4. Vertical integration. Think what we can do when we integrate the means of production with our highly concentrated mainstream media ownership! 
5. Everything starts with an "i." Yeah, dude, it's all about you. 

As with any technology - software or hardware - don't get taken in by the buzz or the pretty flashing lights. Start with what you need to do, and determine if it will help you do it. Then see if the embedded values match your own. 

Do you plan to buy an iPad? Why or why not? 

What values are embedded in the technology you use? Comment below!

Double-sided wrench image in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

Being president is even harder than you realized

A friend shared this slideshow with me because so much of it takes place in workplaces. Like most people, she doesn't entirely understand workforce development, but she knows workplace humor when she sees it. It's from New York Magazine, and it begins like this: 

A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things 

From time to time, everyone is forced to experience the ritual of the apartment tour. As your friend or relative leads you through their home for the first time, politeness dictates that you pretend to be impressed by the things you're being shown, however unexciting they are, whether it's a bathroom sink or an allegedly fantastic view of the building across the street. Well, President Obama does that all the time, except instead of apartments, he's being led through factories, laboratories, and workshops. 

Read more, or jump straight to the slideshow.