At a Glance
Launched in 2019, the Building Equitable Pathways initiative brought together JFF and seven leading intermediary organizations to support Black and Latinx youth and young people experiencing poverty in exercising self-determination and building rewarding and engaging futures. This webinar series is designed to share what we have learned, and provoke a national conversation, with pathways ecosystem stakeholders about what it will take to bring about a true reimagining of how we prepare youth for careers in today’s world.
In this final episode of JFF’s Building Equitable Pathways Webinar Series, the national experts at HERE to HERE and City University of New York (CUNY) will share how they engage with employers and educators to encourage new thinking, and embrace a concurrent approach to education and work.
We will explore how HERE to HERE:
Join Abby Jo Sigal, the founding CEO of HERE to HERE; Joshua Poyer, director of the HERE to HERE Hub and student voice; and Angie Datta Kamath, the university dean of continuing education and workforce development at CUNY, in reimagining employer engagement and applying these lessons to different local, regional, and state contexts.
As a major employer serving Chicago’s West Side, Rush University System for Health takes a contemporary approach to ensuring equitable access to education and employment opportunities. For over 30 years, the Rush Education & Career Hub (REACH) has worked to support underrepresented youth in reaching their academic and professional potential and to increase diversity in STEM and health care careers. REACH partners with local K-12 schools, postsecondary institutions, and community organizations to impact over 4,000 youth, parents, and educators each year.
In this episode, Rukiya Curvey Johnson, executive director of REACH, and Natalia Gallegos, manager of strategic initiatives, share lessons about supporting collaboration and capacity building across sectors to positively impact young people and the community.
Join JFF and REACH’s Rukiya Curvey Johnson and Natalia Gallegos to learn:
Hear from the national leaders at Career Connect Washington and learn:
Maud Daudon, executive leader of Career Connect Washington, and her colleague Marc Casale, CEO and founder of the social impact consulting firm Kinetic West, share lessons learned from the first year of implementation, including the progress and strategic decisions made along the way as they have scaled their approach across Washington State. They also offer policy recommendations to drive similar work forward nationally.
This episode considers new approaches to the use of labor market information (LMI) to ensure equity in the design and outcomes of college and career pathways. Pathways developers have come to rely on the best LMI to inform regional pathways. Now, COVID-related unemployment has upended the economy.
In this session, Sara Lamback and Julia di Bonaventura of JFF, Isa Ellis of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Joel Simon of Burning Glass Technologies explore what recession-informed workforce data is, how we make it useful to pathways that are already in place, and where immediate pivots are needed for the future. Looking through an equity lens, we explore the current best thinking and advice experts have for job seekers, especially young people still in school, planning for college, or getting ready to graduate. We also highlight several organizations that are leveraging LMI data in innovative ways to drive career pathways development.
During this session, JFF’s Amy Loyd and Kyle Hartung introduce and elevate the efforts and learning of leading local-, regional-, and state-level intermediary organizations who were in the first cohort of the Building Equitable Pathways initiative. We explore the core work, functions, and design features of intermediary organizations that are essential to develop, organize, and mobilize stakeholders for equitable college and career pathways in the communities they serve. Additionally, we raise questions about and consider the imperative for intermediaries to design and lead with equity and the critical role they play in transforming systems and outcomes to better meet the needs of Black and Latinx youth and young people who are experiencing poverty.
Launched in 2019, the Building Equitable Pathways initiative brought together JFF and seven leading intermediary organizations to support Black and Latinx youth and young people experiencing poverty in exercising self-determination and building rewarding and engaging futures. Together, these organizations committed to testing six hypotheses about how to effectively guide the development of more equitable college and career pathways.
Intermediaries are essential to driving cross-sector collaboration required for building equitable pathways systems and scaling work-based learning. They play a key role in bringing together leaders in K-12 and postsecondary education, industry, and government to forge partnerships, craft strategies and innovative solutions, and source funding to develop truly equitable college and career pathways systems.
Critical to our work is an explicit inquiry about the challenges we face as a field to embed equitable values, policies, and practices at the heart of an intermediary’s work to build pathways systems:
This webinar series is designed to share what we have learned, and provoke a national conversation, with pathways ecosystem stakeholders about what it will take to bring about a true reimagining of how we prepare youth for careers in today’s world. The content of these webinars are relevant and engaging for intermediary and community-based organizations, K-12 and postsecondary education leaders, employers, governmental and elected officials, and policymakers and advocates.
