The New York City Workforce Funders Collaborative’s first convening of 2022 will take a closer look at new efforts to measure the efficacy of the workforce development system.
The lack of a comprehensive data infrastructure to track program outcomes has long been recognized as a barrier to understanding—and improving—the system. Indeed, the lack of a unified data system may hamstring efforts by our new gubernatorial and mayoral administrations to identify and increase investment in the most effective strategies for connecting New Yorkers to good jobs. Before we utilize a unified system of this kind, however, we must agree on which workforce outcomes matter most—what constitutes success? Private funders ask grantee partners to measure and report on program outcomes in different ways. Public agencies are similarly required to report differently to different public funding streams. While past efforts to encourage private funders to adopt a common set of workforce metrics proved unsuccessful, the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity has been working to align the largest public workforce agencies on common metrics for its new workforce data portal.
This session brings together a range of workforce stakeholders—including intermediaries, funders, and government leaders—to discuss strategies to build data infrastructure capacity at both the training provider and system level. Workforce intermediaries and funders will highlight the ways in which a weak data infrastructure limits the ability of community-based organizations to partner effectively and to assess areas for improvement and limits the public system’s ability to scale the field’s most impactful solutions. Leaders from the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity will discuss the city’s use of common metrics and the potential of their new workforce data portal to assess the system’s efficacy. Members of the Baltimore Workforce Funders Collaborative will share learnings from their efforts to develop a system to integrate data from community-based training providers.
What will you learn?
- Ways of defining and measuring workforce program efficacy
- Approaches to addressing training providers’ data collection capacity
- Data infrastructure as equity strategy
- Using data to understand who is being served and how well
- Using data to inform job seekers’ decisions about training and education pathways
- The role funders might play in advancing common metrics and a system-wide information infrastructure
Who Should Attend?
All interested funders. What to expect: panel discussion followed by Q & A.
Speakers
- Linda Dworak, Director, Baltimore Workforce Funders Collaborative
- Matthew Klein, Chief Program and Impact Officer, Robin Hood Foundation
- Sharon Sewell-Fairman, CEO, Workforce Professionals Training Institute
- Scott Thomas, Co-Founder, Arbor Brothers
- Tayyab Walker, Director of Enterprise Data Solutions, NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity
- Laurel Dumont (moderator), Senior Director, Strategy and Learning, Intentional Philanthropy and Senior Director of Grantmaking, Solon E. Summerfield Foundation
