by Raul Santa | Sep 23, 2019 | DC Updates
Disability
An evaluation of diverse projects to support the employment of people with disabilities found a focus on changing attitudes, person-centered approaches, replication strategies, community partnerships and wraparound services led to stronger projects.
The Kessler Foundation is the philanthropic namesake of Dr. Henry Kessler, an orthopedist who founded the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, a rehabilitation company headquartered in West Orange, N.J.
Since 2004, the foundation put forth more than $41.5 million in funding to a diverse array of grantees to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
Read more about the Kessler Foundation here.
Entrepreneurship
The Self-Employment Training initiative, funded by the federal government, led to gains in entrepreneurial activities and self-employment for dislocated workers recruited by the workforce development system.
Commissioned by the Employment and Training Administration in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Self-employment Training Program ran from 2013 to 2017.
Mathematica Policy Research conducted an evaluation on ETA’s behalf. The results showed how the program ‘’maintained family income while developing a small business’’ or ‘’ given the potential risks of self-employment, keeping the door open to the traditional job market.’’
Request a copy of the report here.
WIOA Waivers
The number of states with waivers of Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act requirements and the number of individual waivers granted to states each more than doubled over the past year, as more states sought flexibility on planning, spending and performance obligations.
Illinois received a waiver in the second week of January allowing the state to designate a single local workforce area across more than one planning region.
Unlike the other states, Texas is the only one to hold a waiver to allow it to use modified performance measure in performance goal negotiations with local workforce boards.
Find the WIOA waivers here
Native Americans
The Employment and Training Administration unveiled additional performance indicators for grantees of the Indian and Native Americans workforce program.
The statutory purpose of the program, at Section 166(a) is: “to develop more fully the academic, occupational and literacy skills of [Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian individuals]; to make such individuals more competitive in the workforce and to equip them with the entrepreneurial skills necessary for successful self-employment; and to promote the economic and social development of Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian communities.
Find out more about it here.
by Raul Santa | Sep 19, 2019 | Affiliate News
Paty Funegra of La Cocina VA has raised $2 million to turn her community kitchen into an incubator, a café and a place of hope for struggling immigrants.
By Collen DeBiase – The Story Exchange
It’s a big moment: Paty Funegra is getting ready to move her kitchen out of the basement.
Funegra is the founder of La Cocina VA, a social enterprise that helps unemployed Latino immigrants find jobs in the food industry by teaching them food and language skills. For the past five years, she has run the culinary-training organization from the lower floor of Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Arlington, Virgina. But now, she’s ready to scale — and recently raised $2 million to open the Zero Barriers Training & Entrepreneurship Center, which will include a state-of-the-art kitchen incubator, a community cafe, and, she hopes, the promise of a successful future for newly arrived immigrants.
An immigrant herself, the Peruvian-born Funegra says she feels it’s her responsibility to help the vulnerable — especially now. In the wake of the El Paso shootings, and amid anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump administration, “we see a lot of fear in our communities,” she says.
“My position is to hands-on jump in and do something about it. Don’t fight back that rhetoric with words but with actions.”
Learning the Best Approach
It took Funegra a while to figure out how to best help immigrants.
She grew up in Lima during a turbulent time of violence, poverty and narcotics trafficking. In 2007, she moved to the U.S. after falling in love with an American (the relationship didn’t work out) and eventually took a job with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. While the bank finances economic development projects in Latin America, Funegra felt disconnected, being so far away. “I was never able to experience how families in Nicaragua, or in Brazil, or back in Peru, were being the beneficiaries of these investments,” she says. “So I started looking around, here in the D.C. region, for opportunities to get involved with my Latino community.”
Funegra became a volunteer at DC Central Kitchen, a 30-year-old community kitchen that helps unemployed adults learn restaurant-industry skills while also donating the meals that they cook to the homeless or hungry. “So I went there to chop carrots and onions,” she recalls, noticing that the kitchen mostly served the African-American community. That was her “a-ha” moment. She asked Executive Director Michael Curtin if she could replicate the community kitchen idea, but this time serving Latinos. “Mike was very generous, accepting right away,” she says with a laugh, but “he didn’t realize that I was serious about it.”
Not only was she serious, Funegra launched La Cocina VA a short six months later, while still working full-time. “I didn’t have $5,000 back then” to hire a lawyer, she says, so she took online courses on how to start a nonprofit. Then she needed to raise more money and find partners. “I remember I was skipping lunches and breakfast at work, just to go and knock on different doors.”
The missing piece — and it was a big one — was an inexpensive kitchen for hands-on preparation, plus classrooms for English classes. Fortunately, Funegra knocked on the door of Mount Olivet, which took an interest in her idea and donated the use of its basement. “This has been an amazing partner,” Funegra says. She quit her day job, drained her savings to print her first promotional materials, and began her new career.
Changing Lives Through Food
Since 2014, over 120 students have taken part in the fully-funded 16-week bilingual training program, in which they take classes on food prep, nutrition, sanitation and kitchen vocabulary. Graduates receive certification through Northern Virginia Community College. Some 85% have found jobs in the industry, and graduates’ average hourly wage is $14 per hour, nearly double the state’s minimum wage of $7.25, according to La Cocina’s 2018 annual report.
Funegra has signed up a number of corporate partners, including food giant Nestlé. “La Cocina VA is providing students the skills they need to succeed in a huge and important sector of the economy: food,” the company said in a Medium post. With some 1.46 million people in the U.S. working in the food and beverage industry, Nestle added that it’s “thrilled to connect with trained talent.” Other partners include Hilton and Whole Foods.
Funegra says the majority of students are women immigrants from Central and South America, and many have been victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking. With La Cocina VA graduates now holding down jobs and making a collective $2.6 million in salaries, she hopes their success inspires other immigrants “to look at the future with hope and with light.”
The new center, which is scheduled to open this coming March, would triple the program’s current capacity, allowing 120 trainees to graduate each year. It will be located on the first floor of an affordable housing complex. The cafe is expected to generate revenue for La Cocina VA, while the incubator would help aspiring food entrepreneurs test out ideas. “We have dreamers that are dreaming about starting businesses, especially women from the Latino community,” Funegra says. “I am immensely proud that now, in the very near future, we will be able to support them to … create jobs and to contribute to the economy.”
Funegra believes her own experience as an immigrant has fueled La Cocina VA’s growth. “All those moments of challenges and obstacles, and barriers, and lack of clarity of the future, built the skills that I have now,” she says.
by Raul Santa | Sep 17, 2019 | DC Updates
Apprenticeship
The Trump Administration’s Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Program Regulations drew an outpouring of praises and criticisms.
The proposal laid out the most specific details about how the program will operate. Third party groups responsible for approving programs will be called Standards Recognition Entities. Recognition by these agencies will not equal registration, rather it will be an additional step.
While Republicans welcomed the policy, Congressional Democrats called the Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Program regulations ‘’a violation’’ of the National Apprenticeship Act.
Read more about the proposed Industry Recognized Apprenticeship Program here.
Adult Education
A new guidance clarifies when Federal Adult Education and Family Literacy Act funding may be used for credentialing costs in integrated education and training.
Certifications such as occupational safety and health will be allowed, while others such as work readiness will be disallowed.
The new guidance states that adult education funding cannot pay for costs related to general skills certificates that are work readiness credentials.
Contact here, to obtain a copy of OCTAE 19-2, the Allowable Use of Adult Education and Family Literacy Act Funds for Integrated Education and Training Programs.
Future of Work
Cities with educational attainment deficits and large shares of jobs held by African Americans and Latino workers are at risk of Automation, finds a report issued by groups representing minority elected officials.
The report investigated the communities of Columbia, S.C.; Gary, Indiana.; and Long Beach, California.
The researchers identified a range of forecasts., in the three cities, predicting that 32 percent to 46 percent of the jobs held by African Americans are risk of Automation, as are 41 percent to 50 percent of the jobs held by Hispanics.
Find the report here.
Workforce Development Month
September is Workforce Development Month and the Senate will soon consider a funding bill that would invest in workforce and education programs that help workers prepare for jobs at the backbone of our economy – those that require some postsecondary education but not a four-year degree. These programs have helped prepare millions of nurses, carpenters, computer support specialists and machinists across the country for their careers.
Nonetheless, Congress has, since 2001, passed spending bills that have cut funding for our public workforce system by 40 percent, for career and technical education by nearly 30 percent and for adult basic education by nearly 15 percent.
Read more here.
by Raul Santa | Aug 29, 2019 | DC Updates
Youth Labor Force Participation Surged this Summer
In August 16, The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on seasonal employment among 16-to-24-year-olds. BLS reported 9.1 percent youth unemployment rate, its lowest level since 1966. From April through July, 21.2 million young people were employed and 2.1 million unemployed.
Looking at demographics, the July 2019 labor force participation among young men, at 63.2 percent, was up by 2.1 percentage points over the year. The rate for women, at 60.4 percent, was little changed over the same period. By race, unemployment rates were little changed over the year for whites, at 8 percent; Asians, 8.2 percent; and Hispanics, 11.3 percent. Black and African American youth unemployment was 14.6 percent.
Looking at the distribution of employed young workers by industry or sector, 24.9 percent worked in the leisure and hospitality sector; 17.2 percent worked in retail; 13.4 percent worked in education and health services; 8 percent in professional and business service…
Read the report here.
Families Provided Care for Education, Training Vary
The Urban Institute has been researching state Child Care and Development Fund policies, examining the intersections of childcare with workforce development and postsecondary education, for more than half a decade. The recent research briefs provide a first look on the actual use of CCDF-subsidized care by parents enrolled in education and training and an update on state policies in this area.
Coverage levels and eligibility policies vary significantly across states. Generally, care that is subsidized by the federal block grant must be provided to low-income families. Most states prioritize recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits and working families. States, however, have discretion in providing care to parents who are enrolled in education or training, or are searching for jobs.
Find the research briefs here.
Public Charge Rule to Expel Legal Immigrants Based on SNAP
The Department of Homeland Security published final rules of an immigration regulation advanced by the Trump Administration that will deny admission to the United States for immigrants who have used certain public benefits, such as nutrition and housing assistance, when it takes effect on October 15. The regulation is formally titled Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds, but it is commonly referred to as the Public Charge rule.
The Immigration and Nationality builds off the Immigration and Nationality Act. The regulation allows the Department of Homeland Security to deny admission to anyone who is “likely at any time to become a public charge.” This prevents people without wealth or advanced education from achieving legal immigration status. Its policies make holding down a job important for people seeking permanent admission. The law states that age, health, family status, assets, resources, and financial status as well as education and skills shall be considered but does not specify how.
To learn more, click here.
by Raul Santa | Mar 7, 2019 | Affiliate News, Event, Press Release
WHERE: Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan St, Fall River, MA
WHEN: March 23rd, 1-3 PM, 2019
On March 23rd, a collaborative photography exhibit, “Through Our Eyes, will open at the Narrows Center for the Arts. The over thirty contributing photographers are all adult English-language learners at SER-Jobs for Progress, Inc. who have made their home in Fall River. Over the past year, the students have been exploring the world around them through the lens of a camera and taking photographs of whatever struck them as important, interesting, or beautiful. Every week in their beginning and intermediate ESOL classes, they shared their photographs with one another and in what often became quite animated discussions, explained the meanings, cultural traditions, and artistic visions behind their depictions. They each created work-in-progress journals that included all the photographs they had taken over the course of the semester, selected a set of favorite images, and then worked hard to create accompanying captions that expressed their thoughts and feelings. This exhibit is the culmination of the students’ efforts to use photography to tell stories about themselves and their communities and to share those stories with wider audiences.
The exhibit opening is also the kick-off to the 40th Anniversary celebrations of Southeastern Massachusetts SER-Jobs for Progress, Inc. This non-profit organization has been a leader in adult education, training, and employment since 1979. Originally founded to improve the educational and employment outcomes of Portuguese immigrant families in Fall River, SER-Jobs currently serves residents of the greater Fall River area and other communities in Southeastern Massachusetts who come from diverse cultural backgrounds by offering a wide range of programs and services. The programs they offer include classes for English to Students of Other Languages, high school equivalency preparation classes for adults and out of school youth, and career exploration activities, training in computer literacy and technology, and job and career planning, counseling, and placement.
The themes of the Through Our Eyes exhibit reflect the students’ diverse interests and points of view. Some of the photographs focus primarily on connections with family and friends. Others depict traditions such as the making and sharing of food and celebration of special events. Still others depict the beauty of nature, neighborhoods throughout the city, or new ways to see details of daily life. A goal shared by all of the contributing photographers was to convey the important role the supportive educational space at SER-Jobs plays in their lives. Their captions and autobiographical accounts reveal hopes and dreams and what it has been like to leave a homeland in order to make a new life for themselves and their children in the U.S
This project was made possible by a generous grant from MassHumanities, as well as contributions from SER-Jobs for Progress, Inc., and the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. The second phase of this project, which will entail public art installations of photographs throughout Fall River, from the Through Our Eyes collection, is supported by a Creative Commonwealth Grant from the Community Foundation of Southeastern Massachusetts. All the photographs are also accessible to the public via the Fall River Portraits website (fallriverportraits.org) which was made possible by a Creative Economies Grant from the University of Massachusetts President’s Office.
The exhibit opening and kick-off anniversary celebration will be held at the Narrows Center for the Arts on Saturday, March 23rd, 1-3 PM and is open and free to the public. Families are especially welcome! The exhibit will be up through Saturday, April 27th. Gallery hours are Wednesday thru Saturday, 12-5 PM. For more information contact the Narrows at 508-324-1926, Andrea Klimt at aklimt@umassd.edu, or SER-Jobs for Progress at 508-676-1916.
