Economic Opportunities Program
The Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy.
We recognize that race, gender, and place intersect with and intensify the challenge of economic inequality and we address these dynamics by advancing an inclusive vision of economic justice. For over 25 years, EOP has focused on expanding individuals’ opportunities to connect to quality work, start businesses, and build economic stability that provides the freedom to pursue opportunity.
We collaborate with national and local leaders across the United States — nonprofit leaders, policymakers, labor leaders, business leaders, educators, academics, and more — and we actively seek input and ideas from individuals and communities affected by proposed approaches to address economic opportunity challenges. Through our leadership and fellowship programs, applied research and evaluation, data and analysis, and dialogue with diverse stakeholders, we work at both local and national levels to build understanding and galvanize action to address the challenge of economic opportunity in America.
Events
Room for Growth: A Survey of Upskilling Approaches — 2026 Analysis
This publication examines how fragmented skills, credentialing, and workforce data systems limit the potential of skills-based hiring and advancement, and outlines a shared vision for building the interoperable infrastructure needed to create a connected skills ecosystem that benefits workers, employers, educators, and governments.
What Employee Ownership Means to Workers
Firms differ in how equity or profit is allocated, how long the ownership structure is intended to last, and how workers participate in governance and the workplace, all of which affect how workers experience ownership.
Employer-Friendly Practices: A Guide for Higher Education
This resource is designed to help colleges and universities become more employer-friendly and build the kind of institutional capacity that sustains and grows partnerships while simultaneously better serving working learners. It offers role-specific guidance for leaders across the institution, a self-assessment spanning five domains of practice, and a process for turning results into action, grounded in the conviction that institution/employer partnerships can become easier without compromising academic missions.
MillerKnoll: Developing Operations Leaders from Within and Beyond — A Case Study in Structured Talent Development
Bridge, Propel, and Career Academy are built on a practical philosophy: that MillerKnoll has great talent already inside the organization. Finding that talent, developing it, and aligning it to the right opportunities is key to its success. T
A Typology of State-Supported Work-Connected Learning Programs
States invest in work-connected learning through dozens of distinct funding streams, grant programs, and agency initiatives, often developed independently over time by different administrations and agencies pursuing different goals.
Foundational Skills: Early Insights from Employers and Providers
This publication examines how fragmented skills, credentialing, and workforce data systems limit the potential of skills-based hiring and advancement, and outlines a shared vision for building the interoperable infrastructure needed to create a connected skills ecosystem that benefits workers, employers, educators, and governments.
From Crisis to Continuity: Optimizing CDFI Capital and Partnerships for Natural Disaster Response
Traditional emergency aid through SBA or FEMA takes time, and lower-income communities often face significant approval hurdles. Speed is essential to business survival.
The Workforce of the Future Starts with Adult Basic Education
To create a future-ready workforce system, we must move beyond outdated credentials and analog processes to one that is skills-first, transparent, data-driven, and aligned with the evolving needs of workers, educators, and employers.
Nonprofits Need Better Jobs
This brief shares key lessons and takeaways that could be used to implement internal job quality practices to strengthen CDFIs and other small business support organizations.
Adult Working Learners Vote With Their Feet: What Employers Are Learning About Foundational Skills
Putting people at the center of the systems we are building means accepting that career paths are rarely linear. It requires us to build infrastructure that accommodates life transitions, recognizes informal learning, and values a worker’s agency over their own data.
Videos
Building Economic Security: A Book Talk with Arindrajit Dube and Carrie Joy Grimes
Economic security shouldn’t be a lottery. Yet for millions of working families, stagnant wages and precarious jobs collide with the daily grind of managing money on shaky ground — leaving stability feeling less like a plan and more like a gamble. Fixing that takes more than one lever. It takes structural reform and the tools people need to take control of their financial lives, working together.
Videos
Work and the Social Contract in the Age of AI: How did we get here?
“Social contract” has quickly become one of the most-used, least-defined phrases in the AI policy conversation. This first event in a two-part series will trace the origin and history of the American social contract, examining how work became the anchor of economic security, mobility, and civic identity in the United States.
Videos
Disposable Workers: A Book Talk with MIT Sloan Professor Paul Osterman
For decades, economists and policymakers have debated how to help workers get better jobs. But what if the more fundamental problem is that employers have systematically redesigned work itself to make a third of the workforce expendable? In his forthcoming book, “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment,” MIT Sloan Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman examines this idea and what it would take to reverse it.
Videos
How Tax Policy Can Help Employers Expand Access to Learning
In this interview, Chelsea Miller of Upskill America speaks with Nick Greif of InStride about how employers can design education benefits that are more accessible, strategic, and aligned with workforce goals.
Videos
Metrics that Matter: Improving Financial Analysis of CDFI Small Business Lenders
CDFI boards, leadership teams, investors, and regulators have long relied on a familiar set of financial metrics to assess organizational performance.
Videos
The Impact of Foundational Skills on Workforce Success
This is the final event in our Job Quality in Practice series. In this conversation, hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program on May 7, 2026, we hear from the Institute’s Job Quality Fellows who are embedding job quality into their work across a range of contexts and strategies — from employee ownership models that give workers a direct financial stake in their company’s success, to apprenticeship programs that create structured pathways to higher-wage careers, to worker advisory committees that bring employee voice into business decision-making.
Videos
The Necessity of Employee-Centered Strategies: A Book Talk with Steve Dawson and Jerry Rubin
This is the final event in our Job Quality in Practice series. In this conversation, hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program on May 7, 2026, we hear from the Institute’s Job Quality Fellows who are embedding job quality into their work across a range of contexts and strategies — from employee ownership models that give workers a direct financial stake in their company’s success, to apprenticeship programs that create structured pathways to higher-wage careers, to worker advisory committees that bring employee voice into business decision-making.
Our team
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