Third Sector works with communities and our government agencies to reimagine our workforce systems so they can help people find the careers and lives of their dreams.
Our Approach to Workforce Pathways
Most of us believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to build the life of their dreams—no matter what they look like, where they are from, or what their circumstances are. But for too many of us, our dreams seem out of reach because our nation's system of public benefits and workforce development fails to provide the support and tools for entry into well-paying jobs that will help all workers achieve economic mobility.
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Our government agencies have created many programs and services, and often work closely with other stakeholders including employers, to better serve America’s working people. And while these public-private partnerships aim to connect jobseekers with jobs, too often, people are trapped on the sidelines because of a lack of basic economic security and mismatches between available jobs, worker readiness, and jobs that pay a living wage. As a result, too many workforce development systems struggle to meaningfully recruit, train, and sustain a talent pipeline in the critical industries that need workers and pay living wages.
Ultimately, we believe in a future where a well-integrated and coordinated workforce development system has the tools, resources, and capacity to support all workers with dignity, no matter their race, background, or circumstance, in finding fulfilling work and uplifting careers that pay a living wage and provide opportunities for meaningful advancement.
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Workforce Pathways Focus Areas
We undertake work in workforce pathways in the following ways
Featured Projects
| Project Name | Scope | Location | Status |
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| Coordinating Employer-Driven Sector Partnerships to Strengthen Early Child Care Employment and Training in Massachusetts | State | MA | Closed |
| Third Sector worked with the City of Boston's Office of Workforce Development, Community Advocates for Young Learners (CAYL) Institute, the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care, training partners, and workforce boards to build and strengthen sector partnerships in the field of early care and education. This effort helped to identify collaborators to recruit, train, and place teachers in the Greater Boston area to scale up the pipeline to careers in early childhood education. This initiative is one of two projects awarded to Third Sector through the U.S. Department of Commerce's Good Jobs Challenge. | |||
| Utilizing Sector Partnerships to Strengthen Workforce Systems and Provide Good Jobs in Rural Central Texas | County | TX | Active |
| Third Sector is working with Workforce Solutions Rural Capital Area, Workforce Network, Inc., Smithville Workforce Training Center, training partners, and employers to build and strengthen sector partnerships in the skilled trades, health care, finance, and IT sectors. This effort will recruit, train, and place working people in seven rural counties in central Texas into quality jobs. This initiative is one of two Third Sector projects awarded funding through the U.S. Department of Commerce's Good Jobs Challenge. | |||
| Creating More Equitable Pathways to Well-Paying Health Care Jobs in Marin County | County | CA | Closed |
| Third Sector facilitated a design process with the Healthy Marin Partnership (HMP), a collaborative of Marin Country health care stakeholders, and training partners to develop an action plan for workforce system improvements. Through this initiative, the HMP and training partners will investigate challenges in achieving well-paying health care jobs and design solutions in collaboration with jobseekers and workers. | |||
All Workforce Pathways Projects
| Project Name | Scope | Location | Status | |
| Coordinating Employer-Driven Sector Partnerships to Strengthen Early Child Care Employment and Training in Massachusetts | State | MA | Closed | |
Description:
Third Sector worked with the City of Boston's Office of Workforce Development, Community Advocates for Young Learners (CAYL) Institute, the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care, training partners, and workforce boards to build and strengthen sector partnerships in the field of early care and education. This effort helped to identify collaborators to recruit, train, and place teachers in the Greater Boston area to scale up the pipeline to careers in early childhood education. This initiative is one of two projects awarded to Third Sector through the U.S. Department of Commerce's Good Jobs Challenge.
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| Utilizing Sector Partnerships to Strengthen Workforce Systems and Provide Good Jobs in Rural Central Texas | County | TX | Active | |
Description:
Third Sector is working with Workforce Solutions Rural Capital Area, Workforce Network, Inc., Smithville Workforce Training Center, training partners, and employers to build and strengthen sector partnerships in the skilled trades, health care, finance, and IT sectors. This effort will recruit, train, and place working people in seven rural counties in central Texas into quality jobs. This initiative is one of two Third Sector projects awarded funding through the U.S. Department of Commerce's Good Jobs Challenge.
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| Better Careers Design Group: Using Human-Centered Design to Advance Equitable Economic Outcomes in California | County | CA | Closed | |
Description:
The Better Careers Design Group was a multi-year initiative across four California counties that brought together government agencies, nonprofits, and local community members to design human-centered and outcomes-oriented solutions for systemic workforce challenges and to advance the equitable economic outcomes in California. Third Sector led the group of 20 participating organizations through each phase of the human-centered design process so that local teams could apply lessons learned to engaging members of their local community.
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| Creating More Equitable Pathways to Well-Paying Health Care Jobs in Marin County | County | CA | Closed | |
Description:
Third Sector facilitated a design process with the Healthy Marin Partnership (HMP), a collaborative of Marin Country health care stakeholders, and training partners to develop an action plan for workforce system improvements. Through this initiative, the HMP and training partners will investigate challenges in achieving well-paying health care jobs and design solutions in collaboration with jobseekers and workers.
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| MassHire Workforce Board Cohort | State | MA | Closed | |
Description:
Third Sector lead a series of workshops with the MassHire Learning Community - a cohort of Massachusetts workforce boards - designed to build a greater understanding of outcomes-orientation strategies and identify concrete next steps for implementing components of outcomes-orientation.
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| NAWB SNAP Employment & Training Cohort | National | Closed | ||
Description:
Over the course of three years, Third Sector and Seattle Jobs Initiative partnered with the National Association of Workforce Boards to provide multi-faceted technical assistance to workforce development boards across the country looking to become third-party SNAP Employment & Training intermediaries or providers and deliver high-quality, impactful, and equitable services to help program participants achieve economic mobility.
Read more.
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| Southeastern Cohort on Young Parents and Families | State | GA, KY, SC | Closed | |
Description:
Third Sector worked with a cohort of states (Georgia, Kentucky, and South Carolina) to provide outcomes-oriented technical assistance to enhance and align each state’s programs, policies, and systems to better support young parents and families. Learn more
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| The Empowering Families Initiative | State | FL, CO, CT, IA, MA, NC | Closed | |
Description:
In 2018, Third Sector partnered with six state and local government agencies with the goal of demonstrating how agencies could align social services for parents and social services for children to generate better outcomes using strategies such as innovative contracts and data-sharing agreements.
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| SIF Workforce: Boston | City | MA | Closed | |
Description:
Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs) are an integral part of youth workforce programming for cities across the country. But how do cities ensure SYEP is a meaningful experience that measurably enhances outcomes for the young people engaged? In the City of Boston, the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development (OWD) partnered with Third Sector and Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy to answer this question. Through the feasibility process, Third Sector worked with numerous stakeholders, including government agencies, researchers, providers, funders, and employers, to understand Boston SYEP goals and opportunities to integrate an outcomes orientation.
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| SIF Workforce: Austin | County | TX | Closed | |
Description:
Third Sector collaborated with Workforce Solutions Capital Area (Austin, TX) and the project’s Steering Committee to develop a model to better meet the talent pipeline needs of local employers and the workforce training needs of youth in Austin/Travis County. The project sought to improve education and employment outcomes for 16-to-24-year-olds that are disconnected from both school and work, known as Opportunity Youth. The project evaluated the opportunities and risks of scaling the highly successful Youth Employment Partnership program through a pay for performance contract.
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| Empowering Families – Massachusetts | State | MA | Closed | |
Description:
The Learn-to-Earn (LTE) Initiative is a large-scale interagency workgroup that was launched to improve coordination across state agencies and ultimately support individuals and families received public assistance move towards a path to self-sufficiency. The initiative focuses on five public assistance programs - the Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program, State-Aid Public Housing, Temporary Assistance for Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and subsidized child care. While the programs serve many of the same clients, misaligned eligibility requirements and structural disincentives to work limit agencies’ abilities to serve the whole person or family. Third Sector supported the initiative’s efforts to leverage administrative data to define statewide education, employment, and income outcomes and improve the agencies’ abilities to match individuals and families with the right mix of supports through the development of data use license agreements.
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| Expanded Subsidized Employment (ESE) Project | State | CA | Closed | |
Description:
California Department of Social Services (CDSS) aims to help counties improve employment and life outcomes for families through the expanded subsidized employment (ESE) program. To identify challenges and best practices in implementation of ESE programs, as well as current outcomes, Third Sector interviewed county welfare departments, employers, workforce development boards, and other stakeholders. Third Sector then developed an ESE Toolkit in partnership with CDSS to help counties move programming, contracting, and data practices towards an outcomes orientation.
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| San Diego Veterans | City | CA | Closed | |
Description:
Veterans across the country face numerous barriers as they seek to reenter the workforce. While many supportive services are available to veterans, the process of navigating through a local network can be daunting. Project (re)Launch will seek to ameliorate this issue by expanding access to 2-1-1 San Diego's Courage to Call (C2C) service offering, a closed-loop case management service that connects veterans to over 1,200 mental health, housing and financial assistance providers in the San Diego area, and coupling the C2C program with the VA's Vocational Rehabilitiation and Employment (VR&E) program. Third Sector is providing technical assistance/project structuring support to 2-1-1 on the project. Veterans that are enrolled in the VR&E vocational training program will be assigned a navigator from C2C that will help assess the veteran's needs, refer them to appropriate supportive services, and track their progress towards barrier removal through 2-1-1's Community Information Exchange data platform, a system that allows 2-1-1 to interface with service providers in its network to track participant progress. Our theory of change is that if veterans are well-equipped to remove health related barriers as they go through vocational training and the job search process, they will have an easier time achieving desired employment outcomes.
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| Administrative Data Pilot: Santa Cruz | County | CA | Closed | |
Description:
Third Sector, in partnership with Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality (CPI), helped Santa Cruz County’s Human Services Department (HSD) to gain access to numerous administrative databases to better understand short- and long-term effects of the County’s subsidized employment program, funded through CalWORKs. Third Sector and CPI helped to deploy data insights to improve and embed outcomes in the contracts between HSD and the providers of workforce development services, building the outcomes-oriented contracting expertise that will assist in broader agency shifts.
Santa Cruz County’s HSD joined San Diego County’s Health and Human Services Agency and the Washington State Department of Early Learning in Third Sector and CPI's Social Innovation Fund Administrative Data Pilot cohort, which will also include a Learning Community designed to facilitate cross-site collaboration and technical/process trainings around data analysis and deployment.
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| SIF Workforce: San Diego | County | CA | Closed | |
Description:
San Diego County had a significant population of justice-involved youth and young adults that are at a high risk of recidivism, and are disconnected from both employment and education due to lack of services from traditional workforce channels. Second Chance, a local service provider, looked to deliver a program tailored to justice-involved youth that would provide skills training and other wraparound supports that prepare youth to attain and succeed in employment and post-secondary education. Third Sector provided SDWP, the county workforce board that contracts for employment services, with technical advisory in building the project. SDWP, through this partnership, looked to replicate an outcomes-oriented service model across its county-wide programs, and project involvement from the state level Employment Development Division (EDD) to pave the way for scaling outcomes-orientated services to workforce boards throughout California.
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| Empowering Families – Iowa | State | IA | Closed | |
Description:
Third Sector worked with Iowa's Department of Human Rights to move its Family Development and Self Sufficiency program towards an outcomes orientation. Third Sector conducted work to incorporate family voice into 2-Gen related program changes and to rethink how different TANF systems interact in order to better serve families.
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| Empowering Families – Colorado | City | CO | Closed | |
Description:
Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) administers critical resources and supports to thousands of Coloradans who struggle to afford basic living necessities. Many of these individuals also face steep barriers in obtaining the skills, training, and employment opportunities needed to achieve long-term self sufficiency and economic stability. Third Sector partnered with CDHS to incorporate outcomes-oriented contracting principles within the Colorado Works Subsidized Training and Employment Program (CW STEP). Third Sector worked with CDHS and its partners to embed a focus on outcomes and financial incentives into the CW STEP contract and apply lessons learned across other contracts in the agency, with the goal of further enhancing the CDHS' existing culture of performance management and measurably improving long-term outcomes of parents, children, and families served.
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| Year Up | Nation | National | Closed | |
Description:
Year Up received a developmental technical assistance award from Third Sector to explore the PFS feasibility of the Professional Training Corps (PTC) Model for workforce development. The PTC Model was an intensive one-year program for young adults, aged 18 to 24, who have a high school diploma or GED. PTC participants spent six months learning technical and professional skills in the classroom and then applied those skills during six-month internships at one of Year Up’s 250 employer partners. Year Up presented an opportunity for a provider to scale nationally through PFS.
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| United Way of the Bay Area | County | CA | Closed | |
Description:
Third Sector worked with the United Way of the Bay Area on assessing PFS readiness of its programming, specifically in the workforce development sector. This feasibility work developed PFS value propositions for promoting financial self-sufficiency and analyzed projected impact, necessary fundraising, and the economics of various projects for stakeholders.
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Get in touch
Jess Praphath
Managing Director, Workforce Pathways
Denver, CO | jpraphath@thirdsectorcap.org