By 2035, 10,000 individuals with high barriers to employment will complete workforce training and 85% will still be employed 12 months post-training.

Providing more people with more job opportunities is an important path to addressing poverty in Philadelphia. An important first step is connecting job seekers to workforce training programs. In many instances, though, the organizations that provide these programs point to a range of barriers that can prevent individuals from participating in and completing job training that could lead to higher-paying jobs and economic mobility for themselves and their families.

These barriers can include access to affordable child care and the costs of transportation, the inability to go without a paycheck during training, language barriers, and past involvement with the justice system. These barriers can also have an effect on an individual’s ability to stay employed.

An effective approach to addressing these issues is for existing workforce programs to combine paid career training with “wrap-around” supportive services such as child care, transportation, or counselling/coaching. These supports remove barriers, allowing individuals to fully engage in job training programs and overcome the challenge of finding and maintaining family-sustaining employment.

In order to help more Philadelphians secure and sustain good jobs, we are focusing on support for “wrap-around” services in collaboration with established workforce development programs.

We recognize that there are many ways that organizations and communities can contribute to advancing this objective. We are looking for Philadelphians’ best ideas about how to accomplish this in communities across the city, particularly in ways that will result in career entry and advancement for populations facing significant barriers (e.g., young people, aged 16-24, who are not in school and not working; returning citizens or individuals with justice system involvement; and immigrants).

This objective is not intended to support the creation of new workforce training programs, but rather to provide the additional resources needed to address persistent impediments.

We measure progress on this objective through grantee reports of program participants who complete training, transition to, and retain employment.