Category: Uncategorized

Hired is a Minneapolis-based nonprofit whose work centers on advancing economic opportunity justice, and career advancement for individuals deeply affected by historic and systemic inequities. This includes engaging individuals who face barriers to career advancement as a result of limited work or educational experience, justice system involvement, unstable living conditions, and other situational barriers to employment. Core services include individualized support and planning, life and career-focused coaching, and career training. 

Hired’s Medical Manufacturing Career Pathway program provides workers and learners with support to build job readiness skills, customer service, workplace professionalism, and computer skills in addition to hands-on practice preparing for medical device assembly. 

With support from the Fund for Workforce Equity, Hired is working with one of its top employer partners in the Medical Manufacturing Career Pathway, Medtronic, to center workers and learners of color in the design and implementation of a new employee retention program at the company. 

To date, the project team has convened their leadership team to launch programming and guide project implementation, completed focus group feedback sessions with employees, and convened the leadership group to review feedback and responses to concerns raised and to initiate the next phase of the pilot project, which includes delivery of on-site services.  

“Our work in centering workers and learners of color in designing and implementing programs is underway, and we are excited with our progress,” said Deanna Threadgill, Advancement Director at Hired.

Insight Garden Program (IGP), a grassroots non-profit led by people who were previously incarcerated and most impacted by incarceration, provides a “re-connection through nature” restorative rehabilitation approach for transforming the lives of incarcerated individuals. IGP’s in-prison programming and reentry support provide an “inner” and “outer” gardening approach and curriculum that includes vocational gardening, and landscape training so that incarcerated individuals can successfully reintegrate into the community,  transform their lives, and end the cycle of incarceration. IGP currently operates inside nine prisons across the state of California.

Through the Fund for Workforce Equity, IGP is conducting a participant-centered design process that will guide the organization as it considers the next phase of its re-entry work connected to pathways to employment, especially in green economy sectors. This inquiry includes interviews with participants currently enrolled in IGP’s prison programs, alumni who are out of prison, and partner organizations who offer workforce development programs for people in re-entry. IGP has hired program alumni as advisors to the process to ensure that the organization centers the voices of those impacted by the criminal legal system, who are disproportionately people of color in California.

The Fund for Workforce Equity grant has enabled IGP to hire four IGP alumni who have helped to design the process, write the interview questions, and will ultimately conduct interviews with people in reentry and with partner organizations.

“Our four advisors, who collectively hold 100 years of lived experience with incarceration, have already pointed out the enormous gap in training opportunities for people who are serving time in prison and when they return home to their communities. They also emphasized the importance of stabilizing and supporting people so they are ready to enter the workforce into living wage jobs. This includes ensuring that their papers are in order, securing ID’s, emotional support, and attention to mental health and substance abuse issues. These early learnings encourage IGP staff to pay close attention to what our participants and alumni tell us–to really listen to priorities from their perspective,” said Amanda Berger, Director of Community Partnerships at IGP.

The Spanish word “Encuentro” has two definitions. The first, is “a coming together,” as in people coming together for a purpose. The second is a “discovery.” Latine immigrants living in Central New Mexico are coming together to rebuild communities and support one another to discover and create opportunities through adult education.

Encuentro’s mission is to transform New Mexico into a thriving community for all its residents by engaging with Latine immigrants in educational and career opportunities that build skills necessary for economic and social justice. Encuentro primarily serves English-language learning Latine immigrant adults, most of whom identify as women and a majority of whom do not have a high school diploma or digital literacy skills. 

Encuentro’s Home Health Aide (HHA) Program was developed seven years ago in response to students’ concerns regarding the absence of Spanish-language training for home health workers. Since then, the leadership of HHA graduates has become central to ongoing program development. The focus of Encuentro’s Fund for Workforce Equity grant is to build upon the HHA program to create structures and systems that strengthen immigrant leadership, where workers and learners inform continued program design and implementation, build ownership over the program, and inform best practices for workforce policies that honor the experiences of Home Health Aides, particularly Latine, immigrant caregivers.

With support from the Fund for Workforce Equity grant, Encuentro designed and implemented leadership training for home health aides. A cohort of six home health aides, all Latina immigrant women, finished the training in the fall of 2022, and in the spring of 2023, these graduates formed two working groups: education and facilitation needs to support Home Health Aides;  and domestic workers’ rights and local advocacy. These leaders are working to create training and engagement opportunities for Home Health Aide students and graduates. 

Encuentro is now working on a proposal to create a Home Health Aide Leadership Graduate Group, the first members of which are slated to be the six graduates of the leadership training. Members of the group will receive compensation for their participation.

On the technical assistance opportunities provided by the Fund, Fiore Gorvetzian, Leadership Development Manager of Encuentro’s HHA program said, “We believe that peer-learning and learning communities are also a great tool to learn best practices and challenges from other organizations. The learning community sessions have been really helpful in connecting with peers across the country to learn from each other, and gain new tools and insights on centering the voices and rights of workers of color.”

Fair Work Center (FWC) is an organization with a grassroots worker base that is focused on raising and upholding labor standards and building worker power while fighting for economic and racial justice. Fair Work Center supports workers in learning about their rights;  developing tools for exercising those rights; organizing and advocating for changes in the workplace, including industry practices, laws, and work values; and holding employers accountable. FWC is committed to empowering workers in all of its policy campaigns.

 FWC initially applied to the Fund for WorkforceEquity to support the launch of a peer-to-peer “promotora” enforcement pilot for its new agricultural warehouse worker committee in Central Washington, where agriculture is a powerful and lucrative billion-dollar industry that nonetheless has left many workers behind.      

 The enforcement pilot was specifically designed to engage women workers, who face gender-based discrimination and harassment across the industry. The “promotora” model is based on the understanding that workers are uniquely positioned to advocate for themselves and their peers because they know their experiences and needs better than anyone. 

FWC envisioned building a small cohort of workers who commit to being trained on outreach, one-on-one conversations, workplace issue spotting, legal enforcement processes, and trauma-informed peer support. The idea is that workers who decide to move forward with enforcement have the ongoing support of a cohort member throughout the process.

As FWC began implementation, however, they found that they needed to take a step back first and focus on building trust and relationships with the workers before they could engage them in leadership training and in the enforcement pilot. Because the warehouse work was a newer sector for FWC in terms of its organizing, and because many of these workers had a history of being discriminated against and harassed, workers really needed to get to know FWC and its intentions first. 

So, FWC pivoted by beginning their grant period with more intensive community outreach and one-on-one meetings with workers. They launched community clinics and small focus groups with bodega workers to understand the key issues in the workplace and to support them on enforcement issues. This helped to build trust with the community and establish FWC’s Centro de Chinampa as a space for the community where workers can organize and make connections.          

“This came to fruition when several warehouse workers from different sites approached us for support regarding their workplace issues. These warehouse workers connected to us through the different events and outreach that we’ve been doing. Most importantly, these workers have been facing retaliation from their employers for taking sick and paid time off. They then banded together to write a demand letter to their employer. These workers attended our clinics and were able to get 45 signatures on their letter at Centro de Chinampa by talking to colleagues and connecting with them outside of the workplace. Taking the time to build relationships and trust has been pivotal to making progress on our larger goal of empowering workers to advocate for their rights.” Said Colleen Fontana, FWC’s Basebuilding Director.

Chicago Commons is a neighborhood-focused non-profit organization that supports and empowers under-resourced individuals, families, and communities in overcoming poverty and systemic barriers. Chicago Commons utilizes a multi-generational approach to its available services, which primarily focus on childhood education, family support services, and senior services.

Their Family Hub programs include a range of support services which help to strengthen families’ economic mobility. These services focus on workforce development and educational opportunities including financial and employment coaching and supporting parents in career pathways and post-secondary education.

Support from the Fund for Workforce Equity is enabling Chicago Commons to deepen parent engagement in its Pathways for Parents (Pathways) program and work toward its goal of organizing, engaging, and empowering parents to build an ecosystem of family-supportive job training, education, and employment opportunities. Grant funds helped Chicago Commons implement new parent-led subcommittees, facilitate Strengthening Family Coping Resources (SFCR) Peer-to-Peer support groups, and establish an Employer Cultivator.      

As part of this work, Chicago Commons has also deepened collaboration with fifteen Chicago-area partners who share the organization’s values of parent empowerment and engagement and who are working together to build a pipeline of family-supportive skills training and employment opportunities.

The project’s objective is for the Employer Cultivator to establish resilient pipelines for parents to join these companies, thereby dramatically increasing retention due to a mix of well-trained parents and family-supportive employer practices.

As a part of the support from the Fund for Workforce Equity, Chicago Commons meets regularly with fellow grantees as a part of a learning community. “The insights gained from participating in the FWE program have proven invaluable in our efforts to apply concepts and tools beyond our own context. The coaching and technical support we’ve received in areas such as power dynamics and journey mapping have significantly enhanced our leadership approaches and the operational processes we employ to integrate worker input. It has helped us challenge program decisions to ensure that we are grounding our implementation with parent worker voices.” -Vikki Rompala, Vice President of the Family Hub