Minneapolis Foundation CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

Being a disruptor to traditional service delivery. Our model is disruptive. We aim to change how nonprofit providers engage, and how we collectively engage with employers to make the workforce system more effective and efficient for Northsiders. Our partners serve participants with a shared and cooperative approach that is changing how they do business, not only within North@Work but in their organizations. Our approach positively disrupts relationships and mitigates service delivery barriers that previously kept Northside men underserved. Our wraparound supports offer a stronger safety net than what is typically received at individual community-based organizations. Our partners are paid based on performance: as men successfully matriculate through our model, they receive additional compensation. Our relationship with the Northside workforce center and employers is changing mindsets about the talent pool available in a tight labor market where employers face an aging workforce in need of diversification. During the grant period, we enrolled 836 men, 88 men completed credentialed training, and 186 men were employed. Of those placed in the last year, 65% are still working.

Address health-related barriers to employment. We now recognize the persistent trauma and mental health issues men face as they prepare to re-enter the labor market, particularly after prison release. The intensity is surprising even to our seasoned partner organizations. There are a number of men for whom these mental health issues preclude their ability to be job/training-ready and maintain long-term. As a result, several programmatic changes have occurred, including accelerated outreach, intake, and assessment steps to ensure faster engagement in cohort support. To date, 163 men participated in cohort support—empowerment training focused personal transformation through the four building blocks of emotional intelligence. The group setting provides a natural peer support network.

We created additional readiness sessions and supports, intentionally providing more encounters to ensure we know participants well and are able to meet them where they are.

We strengthened relationships between employment service providers and health providers, facilitating better understanding among each so that treatment standards and expectations for “employment ready” are cooperatively met.

Address substance abuse as a barrier to employment. We have worked on several fronts to address substance abuse directly, as it is often a barrier to employment. Our approach thus far has been to candidly and proactively work with participants to ensure that we are aware – in advance – of potential barriers related to substance abuse, and that we engage men with supports including drug testing, referrals to treatment and support programs, and incorporating substance abuse issues deeply in our work readiness and cohort support. We are not dismissing those who fail a drug test from participating in North@Work; rather, we are helping men develop strategies to overcome their abuse; and, we are actively engaging employers to consider where they may be able to shift hiring requirements to accommodate those who may still be actively on their journey away from substance abuse.

Key lessons learned

The labor market is constantly in flux and program execution must be responsive in ‘real time’. Thousands of low- and mid-level jobs are available in the metro that were not part of the landscape when we designed North@Work. This abundance creates a distraction for even the most focused jobseeker to think about longer-term career pathways because the risk of immediate entry is low, and the reward is nearly instantaneous. While we have seen modest wage increases among North@Work participants who have stayed employed (3.5% increase in wages after 90 days retention), the wage differential between ‘transitional’ work that is immediately available and the first career pathway job following training is not significant. Consequently, we’ve adjusted in two ways: 1) identify career pathways and training opportunities that help men focus on a meaningful long-term trajectory; and, 2) strengthen work readiness and barrier mitigation so that men who obtain work can more easily retain and advance while the market remains strong. During the grant period, 88 men received a credential through North@Work which will increase their earning potential over time.

It often takes more than one job for a person who goes through North@Work to find the right fit. Of the 128 placements in the past year, many are leaving within the first 60 days of placement (27% within less than 30 days and another 30% in less than 60 days). Just over half of those who left work before 90 days either quit or were fired. Clearly, this points us to more work that must be done to better prepare men for work – addressing those who might be inclined to quit early in their tenure and those whose skill and readiness level may not yet be sufficient. More and better job preparedness for individuals is the ongoing task of workforce development service providers. We are continually improving processes, supports, and learning opportunities so that more such experiences are more effective for more people. In addition, we have much more work to do to create more welcoming workplaces to overcome common problems that lead to companies discharging men early in their experiences. Working directly with employers to address hiring bias and workplace practice is critical – but has been a challenge to move quickly and in high volume.

Reflections on the community innovation process

Partnering in resourceful ways to test and implement solutions has been most important to completing our work. North@Work is an ambitious and complex project. We are working with multiple community partners, training partners and employers to end the pervasive barriers to unemployment facing African American men on the Northside. North@Work is iterative, and we employ an adaptive learning model with our partners, applying what we learn in real-time to ensure effective service delivery models at all times.

North@Work has become a connector of major private, public, philanthropic and community-based systems. We use existing community networks and relationships to recruit men, so they know they can trust us. Our peer cohort model is intended to replicate the supportive relationships we saw budding in peer-to-peer conversations during our design work. And, we have developed strong buy-in from employers, who are beginning to challenge exclusive workplace practices and public policies that have contributed to the Northside’s African American male employment gap.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Within the loop of testing and implementing solutions, a significant part of our effort focused on gathering and building trust among our collaborating partners. (See below for an important lesson about working with multiple partners.) In the process of building a community innovation gathering, forming, and trust-building of community partners to deliver a solution (as distinct from ideating and exploring) is foundational.

Progress toward an innovation

We have experienced breakthrough in relationships among and between service providers. The partners within North@Work have a much deeper understanding of each other’s work and a willingness to partner that will certainly extend beyond North@Work. We have established roles for faith-based institutions, public & private traditional workforce organizations, and colleges, that have never been done before, and even with the complexity, collaboration has grown. We have piloted having faith-based institutions serve as case managers and cohort support providers, in addition to recruiters, and it’s working. These collaborative relationships, built within a shared pay-for-performance arrangement, now allow philanthropic and public grant makers to consider new ways of paying for services and reporting on collective outcomes. Further through our partnership with the Itasca Project, for the first time, we have large, corporate employers working alongside community-based organizations to address this need, as a mutually-reinforcing need for talent. This shifts the paradigm from charity to economic opportunity and is opening new career pathways and financing models for the program.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

N/A

What’s next?

Continue elevating the economic opportunity this initiative offers for the region. With the launch of the Center for Economic Inclusion we will expand our impact through increased focus on policy changes to accelerate employment growth. We focus on increased racial equity and inclusion through public policy, employer policies and practices, and continued innovation within the service delivery system to sustain and scale current impact and improve results.

We will address several trends that may impact our ability to connect Black men to sustainable work:
• Transit-Investment Driven Development: Increase access for Northsiders cut-off from opportunity by limited car ownership and efficient transit routes to major job hubs.
• Signs of Gentrification & Mobility: North Minneapolis is perhaps the last area to be gentrified, often leading to displacement of low-income residents.
• Increase Focus on Regionalism: Compared to other areas, the MSP has lagged in identifying and marketing itself as a region.
• Shifting Funding Landscape: Increased movement toward less federal investment in poverty alleviation and workforce preparation (particularly for lower-income individuals)

If you could do it all over again…

As we began North@Work, we thought a lot about the energy and promise of collaborating among a group of community-based partners. We anticipated some of the tension that might arise, and in some respects, we planned for that by creating lots of opportunity for communication, setting of shared expectations, and a collaborative learning approach. However, we did not plan sufficiently for the natural turnover of staff within partner organizations. During the grant period, we have had 46 individual staff from among all our partners engaged in this work. Of that number, 12 staff have left – a turnover rate exceeding 25%. We are not sure that this is unusual in the world of nonprofit service providers, however, it does require a level of planning for “on-boarding” new staff that we have not had in place and did not anticipate needing. As a result, we would advise ourselves to plan for that in advance if given the opportunity to start over.

One last thought

We share our observation about connecting employers within the workforce development arena: it is complex. Typically, service provider relationships with employers are transactional (i.e., look for immediate job openings and identify potential candidates). With North@Work, we envisioned creating deeper relationships that consider longer-term opportunities and advancement for employees, as well as helping employers look closely at workplace culture, hiring practices and retention strategies. During the grant period, we’ve cultivated a close working relationship with several business associations and intermediaries which led to relationships with business leaders, however, serious systemic barriers around race inhibit needed progress. Minnesota’s form of exclusion is often quiet, and includes excuses related to liability, insurability, and customer exposure to continue exclusive practices within their firms. Other times, more overt individual racist behavior keeps people of color from consideration or hiring (e.g., exclusion based on name and geography remain prevalent). We remain committed to addressing this systemic issue, and appreciate the Foundation’s investment as we do so.