This grant will continue to support the Interfaith Education Fund's efforts to replicate and expand sectoral employment initiatives. These initiatives have demonstrated how social and economic benefits can be achieved through investments in long-term training for those who otherwise would not have the opportunity. The grantee's work with sectoral employment initiatives defines the skills required to succeed in targeted, hard-to-fill occupations with viable career ladders, and then recruits, trains, and develops low-income adults so that they are qualified and ready to fill employers' needs for skilled workers. Funding will enable the Interfaith Education Fund to increase the number being served by existing initiatives in Texas, Arizona, Iowa, and Louisiana and to work with leaders in several California cities and Albuquerque, New Mexico to launch similar strategies in their communities.

Alternative staffing organizations put the staffing services model to work for job candidates who face labor market barriers. They have a dual goal of providing job brokering for workers who face barriers to employment as well as delivering staffing services for customers who need workers. This renewal grant will provide funds for Emerge Community Development to continue to participate in an evaluation of job placement outcomes for clients of four alternative staffing organizations, including a comparison with hard-to-employ clients of conventional staffing firms.

Through its GoodTemps staffing service, Goodwill Industries of West Michigan is providing jobs for people with barriers to employment. As one of the only alternative staffing services in Michigan, GoodTemps is the base for expanding this effective workforce development technique to other Goodwill organizations across the state. This grant will provide support for the client services offered through GoodTemps and allow the organization to continue to support development of other alternative staffing programs throughout Michigan.

This renewal grant will continue to support Mott Community College's enrollment in Achieving the Dream. Achieving the Dream, started by the Lumina Foundation, is a process dedicated to making the student success agenda a priority at community colleges and with state and national policymakers and stakeholders. To create and implement student success strategies, Achieving the Dream provides on-campus coaching with faculty, staff, and leadership; assistance with data collection and analysis; access to information on innovative and successful practices; networking opportunities and resources to address barriers; and guidance on engaging the college and community in supporting student success.

The Sector Skills Academy, a project of the Aspen Institute, will expand the ranks of practitioners who are knowledgeable about sectoral employment strategies and want to become leaders in their field. Individuals from a variety of institutional settings will participate in this, its third class. The academy will draw upon the experiences of leading sectoral practitioners who have direct knowledge of a wide range of approaches to effecting change that will benefit low-income workers. Through a curriculum based on structured, experiential, and group learning, participants will gain the skills to lead the sector field as it expands in breadth, scope, and impact.

This grant supports the expansion of MICROTEST, a grassroots effort to improve the quality of anti-poverty, micro-enterprise development programs in the United States, from 13 to 64 member groups. MICROTEST was established by and for practitioners interested in documenting and strengthening the level of performance in the field. Initiated in 1997, it has become a proven process through which practitioners define, debate, test, and refine benchmarks based on actual experience serving low-income individuals.

Year Up is a sectoral initiative that helps young adults from low-income urban communities focus on acquiring the skills needed to succeed in two industries, information technology and investment operations. The results from an analysis of participants' outcomes two years after they were randomly assigned to take part in an evaluation were very positive-program participants accessed jobs with higher hourly wages and earned greater annual earnings than did people in the control group. However, these findings warrant further exploration of the program's impacts over time. This grant will allow the Economic Mobility Corporation to continue the evaluation by conducting an additional wave of follow-up interviews in order to learn about study participants' employment and educational outcomes 3.5 years after first being assigned to the study.

The Goodwill Association of Michigan was formed by the ten independent Goodwill organizations in the state in the early 1990s. The goal of the organization is to help each of the state's Goodwill organizations to increase collaboration and to provide better services to people with disabilities and barriers to employment. This grant will allow the Goodwill Association of Michigan to continue to serve the state's Goodwill organizations and will allow it to develop a framework to provide greater workforce development services throughout the state.

Focus: HOPE's manufacturing and information technology training programs have enabled over 9,200 graduates to climb the ladder of economic success. These individuals represent a vast, untapped labor pool, especially those who have been historically denied access to training opportunities. Focus: HOPE breaks down barriers to success for these individuals with tools of empowerment including education, training, and supportive services. Focus: HOPE has recently faced the challenge of a declining manufacturing economy in southeast Michigan, as well as continuing declines in enrollment. This renewal grant will help to leverage the investments by other foundations, businesses, and public-sector supporters to sustain the organization.

Alternative staffing organizations put the staffing services model to work for job candidates who face significant barriers to the labor market. Alternative staff organizations provide both job brokering for workers who face barriers to employment as well as delivering staffing services for customers who need workers. This renewal grant will provide support for Goodwill Industries-Suncoast to conduct tie-off activities associated with the end of the three-year Alternative Staffing Demonstration Project, including dissemination of findings and continued sharing of data with the program evaluator. Funds will also be used to expand the program's capacity to train hard-to-place clients.

Alternative staffing organizations put the staffing services model to work for job candidates who face labor market barriers. They have a dual goal of providing job brokering for workers who face barriers to employment as well as delivering staffing services for customers who need workers. This third and final renewal grant will provide funds for Goodwill Staffing Services to continue to participate in an evaluation of job placement outcomes for their clients. The grant will also disseminate the results of the evaluation and additional marketing activities to grow the organization's customer base as it moves to being self-sufficient.

Over the past three years, Public/Private Ventures has managed an effort to launch three alternative staffing organizations in Louisiana's Gulf Coast region. Alternative staffing organizations are temporary staffing firms owned and operated by community-based agencies that bridge the gap between the needs of hard-to-employ individuals and employers. With this renewal grant, Public/Private Ventures will continue to support and evaluate the implementation of three alternative staffing projects while developing and publishing two reports that outline the scope of the work done by alternative staffing organizations; the services they provide; and how they can complement other workforce development services in the communities they serve to help advance the field. Public/Private Ventures will also provide pre-launch support for a potential alternative staffing organization in Flint, Michigan being developed by Goodwill Industries of Mid-Michigan.

This renewal grant to the Aspen Institute provides partial funding for the fifth-year activities of the Scale Academy for Microenterprise Development. The academy is an initiative designed to provide funding, peer learning, and technical assistance to high-performing microenterprise development organizations committed to scaling up their operations to serve more aspiring entrepreneurs. Through participation in the academy, member organizations are expected to strengthen their capacities, achieve a marked increase in the number of clients served and/or loans made, and work together to advance each other's progress.

This renewal grant will allow Aspen Institute to mine the data collected at six demonstration sites in order to learn more about community college/nonprofit sector partnerships. These types of partnerships have great potential to combine industry-recognized training and credentials with a range of supportive services to address the wide range of barriers to skills attainment and career advancement that many low-income adults struggle to overcome. In a growing number of locations, such partnerships have proven successful and offer instructive models. The work of building and growing such partnerships at the scale that is needed is complicated by a myriad of factors such as bureaucratic and structural challenges, inflexibility or incompatibility of funding structures and performance indicators, and historical and personal dynamics among institutions. This project will develop a set of tools and products that will support local leaders' efforts to adopt the community college/nonprofit partnership approach and will encourage investors and policymakers to support these collaborative efforts.

This grant renewal continues partial support of the National Skills Coalition, a practitioner-focused coalition that inserts effective practice and on-the-ground experience into national policy debates about how to move low-income adults into skilled, long-term employment. The coalition acts as a central voice for grassroots training practitioners and employers in the national debate about welfare-to-work and workforce development policies, and serves as a clearinghouse of information for both practitioners, employers, and policymakers. The coalition's four-point strategy focuses on: building a national, multistakeholder network; conducting or encouraging strategic research and analysis; developing communication tools for local workforce advocates; and engaging in direct and grassroots advocacy to inform public policy.

This general purposes grant will impact more than 120,000 workers through PHI's direct practice, and many more broadly through its national policy research and advocacy efforts. This grant will enable PHI to expand its network of healthcare worker training programs. In addition, this grant will strengthen healthcare worker benefit advocacy in selected states and nationally while allowing PHI to disseminate program outcomes from its Cooperative Healthcare Network and promising practices that resulted in increasing workers' productivity and benefits.

The purpose of this grant is to allow Public/Private Ventures to continue a random assignment evaluation of Project QUEST. The grantee expects to publish the final report on this project in late 2013. The report will examine whether participating in Project QUEST improved participants' employment and earnings over control group members at two and four years after random assignment, and will concentrate on the implications for sector-focused training in partnership with community colleges.