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The AECF Jobs Initiative: An Experiment in Intentional System Change
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is committed to helping disadvantaged kids achieve better results. Through its experience with various initiatives, the Foundation concluded that kids do better when their families do better, and their families generally do better when the parents have access to good jobs and are economically successful. Therefore, AECF sought ways to help disadvantaged families improve their connections to quality employment with advancement opportunities.
A Work in Progress: The Case for Intentional Systems Change 2
The result was the Jobs Initiative, a multi-city, eight-year effort to identify improved workforce development approaches and to attempt to take those enhanced practices “to scale.” Beginning in 1995, AECF funded local organizations in six cities to serve as intermediaries, to mobilize local institutions and other stakeholders, and to identify mechanisms to improve workforce development services for disadvantaged job seekers. AECF believed, and the early Jobs Initiative experience seemed to confirm, that such intermediaries would be crucial in achieving a necessary balance in responding to the needs of both job seekers/workers and employers. AECF also encouraged the individual sites to experiment with both sector-focused projects, and projects that could respond to the unique skills and interests of individual job seekers (i.e., individual placement projects) by engaging with employers across many sectors.
Although each Jobs Initiative site was encouraged to design discrete “jobs projects” to test out more promising practices, the goal of the Jobs Initiative was far more ambitious. Once a site had identified a superior practice or approach that improved key employment and earnings outcomes for disadvantaged workers, its mandate was to find ways to promote the adoption of the better practices system-wide. That is, the ultimate test of the effectiveness of the Jobs Initiative sites was whether they could foster system change — large-scale improvements not only to job training and workforce development agencies and programs, but more broadly to “the multiple systems, public and private, that affect the creation of and access to decent jobs; for example, business, education, training, human services, welfare, transportation and economic development.”1
The balance of this monograph examines the experience of trying to promote intentional workforce development system improvements in four of the Jobs Initiative sites: Seattle, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Philadelphia. As will be seen, across these four case studies there is considerable variation in the nature of the system changes being sought and the strategies used to accomplish them. In Seattle, the Jobs Initiative intermediary has expended substantial effort pursuing changes in the community college system. In Milwaukee, the site has concentrated on creating labor-management partnerships to improve employer practices and worker productivity across industrial sectors. In St. Louis, the local stakeholders have sought to create an integrated, multi-service training center for working families and individuals that can serve as a model for other providers throughout the region. And finally, in Philadelphia the Jobs Initiative effort has sought to foster improved use of outcomes data to promote greater accountability and improved workforce development policies and practices throughout the region and state.
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