Minneapolis Foundation CI Report – Interim

What has been most instrumental to your progress?

Strengthening recruitment and enrollment: North@Work’s goal is to employ 2,000 Northside African American men aged 25 and older over the next five years. We knew even in this year’s pilot period that we would have to establish excellent recruiting processes to meet our aggressive goal. Our initial approach to recruitment centered around an organizational recruiting model, relying on one partner organization’s connection to community to attract men into the program. This approach, however, was very slow and did not provide the results needed. As soon as we identified this, we worked with our recruiting partner to modify their strategies to be more relevant and responsive to our target audience. The shift in recruiting practice resulted in an influx of almost 200 men in a three-week period, which led to considerable intake and assessment from August through October 2016. In total, we enrolled 252 men in North@Work during the pilot year.

Increased training offerings: We also made progress in the pilot year in strengthening our training offerings. During the grant period, we created a direct enrollment-to-employment pathway for qualified men to ensure more men who complete training obtain a job. Dunwoody College of Technology has been a critical partner in this work, matching our scholarships for North@Work participants and helping us identify industries and employers that are ready to place trained employees immediately. By the end of the pilot we advanced 41 men into training and 38 men obtained employment. As we move into Phase II, we have more than doubled the number of career pathways available for trained men and now have enough training capacity to accommodate all those enrolled in the coming year.

Reflection and refinement: 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 black men on the Northside. Ongoing assessment of our work will be critical to meet our goal to employ 2,000 men, and we are grateful to have had the opportunity to pause, review our progress from the pilot, regroup with our partners, and launch Phase II in July 2017. Only a small portion of what we learned is reflected above, as this program is iterative and we employ an adaptive learning model with our partners, applying learnings in real-time to ensure relevant service delivery models at all times. We have improved our systems, and realigned our partner commitments so that we are better positioned to achieve our shared goals. There is little substitute for the value of being able to stop and think about our work, engage additional outside consulting support to analyze our progress and results, and then make changes to our strategy.

Key lessons learned

Our partnerships are interdependent and must be deeply interwoven within each partner organization. We learned that multiple people from each partner organization must understand their commitment to North@Work to overcome challenges of employee turnover. Three of four partner organizations experienced significant staff changes during the grant period. In all cases, one of the key liaisons to North@Work was replaced. This caused some disruption in our team-building and service delivery. The lesson, now being implemented, is to develop written and verbal messaging that is communicated at multiple levels—senior leadership, program leadership, and direct service program staff—frequently, and in various forums. We developed guidance material outlining the program approach, a compilation of lessons learned, and clear written expectations. We are learning to institutionalize implementation so that we can communicate effectively and strengthen relationships between our organization and our peer/partner organizations in ways that can transcend staff shifts over time. Together, these approaches help develop interdependent, mutually beneficial relationships to advance shared goals.

Protocols are critical. North@Work aims to disrupt the status quo in the way African American men receive employment training and placement services; and to ultimately scale this disruption to improve the entire workforce development system. This will require trust, responsiveness, and commitment to protocol on behalf of all the organizations involved. Where we have seen breakdowns in protocol—for example, in the initial recruiting process described above—we know we have missed opportunities to engage and employ men. Moving forward, we are refining a fairly regimented program schedule, tight recruiting and program reporting protocols, along with closely monitored performance goals tied to contract payments, to ensure that we have the capacity at every layer and function of the program, to manage the volume we need to meet our long-term goals, and to meet the expectations and needs of the men and employers we’re serving.

Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving

The collaborative component has been most critical. We have been amazed and grateful for the level of collaborative problem-solving and mutual ownership that has developed among our partners: CommonSense Consulting@Work, Dunwoody College of Technology, EMERGE, Mind The G.A.P.P., Minneapolis Urban League, Summit Academy OIC, and Twin Cities Rise. Coming together around a significant problem, our partners have brought what they each do best to our collective table in service to the Northside men we serve, and the employers with whom we are engaging. We have identified new program solutions and approaches as a result of our collaborative problem solving and added recruiting partnerships with MAD DADS, Masjid An-Nur, New Salem Baptist Church, and Sub Zero Collective.
We have also begun to see shifts in approach within partner organizations, reflecting the experiences thus far as partners of North@Work. This is a major part of our long-term goal: shifting the responsiveness of the workforce training system for African American men. Our collaboration has resulted in practical programmatic improvements with direct impact on the people, businesses, and partners with whom we are engaged.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Embedded in inclusivity and collaboration, but deserving particular attention, is the element of clear and honest communication. Led by NFG Executive Director Tawanna Black and Program Officer Tony Tolliver, our communications with North@Work partners during the grant period was clear, straightforward, honest, and timely. We have fostered an environment of direct communication and respectful exchange, and this is foundational to our ongoing ability to collaborate and innovate. Working across partner organizations who don’t share space or see one another every day can be challenging, so regular communication and quick responses in the areas that needed adjustment or improvement were and will continue to be important. We have seen how effective this has been in shifting program strategy. The example of the rapid improvements made in our recruitment strategy, going from just a handful of recruits to more than 250 in a few weeks’ time, and then shifting our strategy to ensure that we don’t continue to overwhelm the network by exceeding our capacity, shows that our team can respond and problem-solve collaboratively and with a mind toward improvement not competition.

Understanding the problem

While the need has not shifted, our innovation strategies have shifted as we learn what works. We have gained clarity about the volume of Northside men who may be able to move directly to work—with supports—but not necessarily having enrolled in a credential-bearing training opportunity. Many unemployed men have already completed training or have work experience that lends itself to direct employment. Nonetheless, data from DEED indicates that African Americans are the least successful at entering the workplace after receiving workforce training. Consequently, we have learned that a more strategic, integrated approach, which engages employers as leaders in generating solutions to this problem, can help us reach goals more quickly and sustainably. Too often, employers participate in workforce programs because they believe in the programs’ charitable missions, but do not believe in the program as a strategy for solving their worker shortages. Our model is building new relationships that challenge those perceptions by addressing hiring bias and biased perceptions about the skills of African American men through close relationships with employers that have significant of jobs to fill.

If you could do it all over again…

The learning about how to communicate and engage at multiple levels within partner organizations might have prepared us better to handle staff shifts during our pilot phase, saving us some delay and ensuring we continued to recruit and train men during staff shifts. We did not fully appreciate the extent to which staff shifts and employment transitions within partner organizations would affect implementation. This is important because we projected a higher rate of employment during the pilot phase of North@Work. The good news is that we intentionally created a pilot phase so that we could learn and adjust. That is what pilots are for. What we learned during year one helped us launch a better North@Work program in July and prompted us to engage consultants who helped us build a more robust evaluation model that is helping not only us, but also our partners manage to performance.

One last thought

We are on track to meet the quantitative and qualitative performance targets outlined in our grant request. The pilot phase yielded enrollments, training starts, and employment outcomes that were meaningful. Our launch into Phase II—with significantly higher-volume targets than were expected during the pilot phase—has already brought us closer to our expected goals. We are confident that we will meet our performance targets before the next reporting opportunity in August 2018 and we feel confident that our lessons learned will help other community based organizations, and other foundations, including the Bush Foundation, continue to innovate in this field.