Changing Policy, Changing Lives (from Leverage Points Issue 79)

Jobs for the Future is a national nonprofit that engages in research, policy development, advocacy, and consulting in the areas of education reform and workforce development. President and CEO Marlene Seltzer will lead a panel discussion on their work at the upcoming Pegasus Conference. She recently spoke with Leverage Points editor Vicky Schubert about their approach to large systems change.

LP: Give us a little background on Jobs for the Future (JFF).

MS: We were co-founded in 1983 by Arthur White and Hilary Pennington. Arthur was a partner in a very successful marketing firm who had a passion around those who were being left behind by the economy. His vision was to create a nonprofit that would help states reinvent and transform their workforce development and education systems to be more responsive to changes in the economy. Hilary was a recent business school graduate from Yale, working for a management consulting company, who had a desire and passion to make a difference in the world. They built JFF together. And I came on in 1995 and have worked to grow the organization along with Hilary and Arthur since that time. Our work has evolved over time to focus more specifically on the growing population of those who are being left behind. If you look at high-school graduation and post-secondary completion rates for kids and adults, you know we have a problem in this economy.

We pursue innovative models of workforce development and education to accelerate the learning and advancement of entry-level workers and youth. And we focus on understanding how you would scale these models up in communities and states. This has taken us deeply into the question of how systems reform affects individual lives.

LP: Is your emphasis on research, advocacy, or consulting?

MS: Actually, it is the integration of all three. Much of our success has come from the quality of the research that we’ve done to understand these systems and deepen our knowledge about what kinds of interventions work on the ground. By giving visibility to both the issues and real solutions to address those issues, JFF has become a go-to organization for states and funders who care about these problems and want to fix them. As a result, we’ve expanded our partnerships with other national groups, as well as those at the state level, and with key institutions and stakeholders within communities. We are also increasingly active not just in analyzing policy, but as advocates of the kinds of policies and legislation that are necessary to support and grow programs that really work.

LP: Partnering is central to the work you do. What have you learned about the key ingredients of high-quality partnerships?

MS: We need partnerships in order to get the work done at the level of scale and transformation that we’d like to see. We try to have certain ingredients in place whenever we take on an initiative with outside partners:

• Core beliefs and personalities that mesh. We do our work through initiatives that last from three to seven years; we very rarely take on short-term contracting work. In long-term partnerships like these, you have to have a set of core beliefs that are aligned and personalities that match.

• Aligned goals. When your goals are not totally aligned with those of your partner, you are not as likely to make the impact you’re reaching for.

• Complementary core competencies. For example, we’ve had long-standing partnerships with the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce. Clearly they bring a constituency and a set of skills that are very different from ours. But the combination of the two can really move the work.

• A broad spectrum of stakeholders. We always look to include community representatives, state policy makers, legislators, and the business community.

Businesses are central to our theory of action and change, particularly in helping entry-level workers advance in this economy. We’re an organization that was co-founded by a businessman, and we have a fundamental belief that we can’t succeed without the business community on board, understanding how these programs can actually advance their results, improve their retention rates, and reduce turnover.

LP: The fact that the core of your work focuses on longer-term projects reflects your emphasis on systemic change. What are some of the success stories that have reinforced your commitment to this kind of large-system approach?

MS: In one recent initiative, we partnered with a coalition of national funders and local key stakeholders to shift the central goals of community-level workforce development efforts. As a partnership, we said, “Look, we’re doing well placing people in low-paying jobs; our real goal should be about helping people get into family-supporting careers and wages. We need to think about restructuring our workforce systems to meet that objective.” The approach we took had a couple of key components.

First, we focused on education-business-community partnerships—what we call workforce partners—who could work together to decide how to best organize and structure career pathways for working adults that would allow them to advance within certain industry groupings.

In Boston we started off with a 5-year goal of serving over 3,000 entry-level workers in three industries: healthcare, the automotive repair services sector, and hospitality and building services. In the short period that we’ve been working together, we’ve seen some incredible results. In three years, over 2,000 people have been served, with over 1,300 receiving wage increases or promotions.

Second, we assembled a coalition of local organizations to do advocacy for this work at a policy level, which resulted in a $20 million appropriation from the state for workforce partnerships and new programs as part of the economic stimulus package.

That initiative has served as the model for similar new partnerships in a number of cities such as San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York, as well as in the state of Pennsylvania, where the governor put in another $15 to $20 million. You’re starting to see a transformation in local thinking about how to prepare people to advance through better careers. One reason for our success, is that we take a dual-customer approach in which we’re not only helping those at risk, but we’re helping businesses get the skilled labor they need. Statistics show that 80 percent of new jobs will require a post-secondary credential in the next 10 to 15 years; businesses are very aware of that need.

Another success story would be our Early College High School Initiative. In the past four and a half years, we’ve partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the creation of about 200 high schools nationwide that integrate high school curricula with the first two years of post-secondary education. Targeting underrepresented youth, these are four- to five-year programs that will lead to an AA degree or a transfer to a BA degree program for over 100,000 students. We’ve just seen our first four-year graduating classes and they offer some promising results with over 95% of the students earning a diploma, 57% earning AA degrees, and over 80% being accepted into 4 year colleges. Most significantly, these students come from districts where the average drop out rate exceeds 30%. High expectations, good academic support, and the chance to be on a college campus or participate in a college environment really improve the odds that kids will succeed.

We have our own flagship project here in Massachusetts called University Park Campus School (UPCS). It’s an amazing story of a seventh- through twelfth-grade school that’s situated in the poorest section of Worcester—right next to the campus of Clark University, which is a partner in the project. This school serves kids who many would write off as unable to succeed: 90% are on free lunch, and 80% are ethnic and racial minorities. The stories of what these kids are coping with in their lifetimes would make your hair stand on end.

The school has had three graduating classes thus far, and every one of the kids has gone on to college. One young man, Damian Ramsey—who some would have predicted was not going to get through high school, let alone get through college—was valedictorian at UPCS and is now in his senior year at Brown University. We laugh about the fact that the Clark University Board agreed to waive tuition for those who met their entrance requirements, and we ended up with a number of kids turning Clark down to head for Brown and other universities.

LP: Tell us a little about how your two focus areas—creating successful transitions for youth and building economic opportunity for adults—complement each other.

MS: They are quite interrelated. Nationally, we have high school drop out rates of 30 to 50%, low transfer rates to post-secondary, and low post-secondary completion rates. And in the labor market right now, we have probably 40- to 50-million adults who don’t have the basic skills and education that they’re entitled to and that they need to succeed in today’s economy. It’s a clear continuum.

But if we fixed all the problems in urban high schools across the nation, we’d still have a skills shortage. We need to engage adults in the idea of finishing their post-secondary education. And institutions need to change to better accommodate people. Think about how incredibly tough it is to balance the demands of work and family while trying to get through a BA degree in today’s economy. We have to work at every part of the pipeline to ensure that over the course of the next decade we can produce many more people who have the education and skills to meet the labor market demand.

It’s a whole social/ecosystem. We improve the lives of the children by helping the adults improve their lives and giving them the education and social tools that they need to succeed. That, in turn, increases the odds that their children will succeed. This is a powerful social and moral belief that we hold as an organization.

LP: What can our readers do to support the work you’re doing?

MS: I’m a big believer in corporate social responsibility. Every business is part of a community; and I find businesses really care about the health of their communities and are open to exploring strategies to support them. As your readers focus on profits and the quality of their products I would encourage them to step back and think about how the kinds of strategies and innovations that we’ve talked about could add to their business quality and outcomes. How can you incorporate these practices as a part of doing business? Can you broaden tuition reimbursement policies in a way that supports the entry-level worker in contributing more to the quality of the work and the bottom line?

Last spring we released a study on dropouts that included some interesting revelations. We found that most of the students who drop out recognize that they’ve made a mistake and are highly motivated to reengage in their education because they see it as the vehicle that will make their lives better. But there aren’t enough good programs to help reengage them. At the most fundamental level, your readers can simply recognize that there are a lot of people out there who haven’t been served well by our education and training systems, but who are very motivated to improve themselves: to improve their education, to improve their skills, to make their lives better for themselves, their children, and the communities in which they live. They need an opportunity. Creating workplaces and supporting efforts that promote lifelong learning opportunities is something we all can do.