The Economic Opportunities Program’s Workforce Leadership Academies help leaders from workforce-development boards, nonprofits, community colleges, unions, public agencies, and other organizations reflect on the challenges they face and build the relationships necessary to solve them. The academies bring the leaders together for a yearlong fellowship that builds a lasting local network. The academies’ faculty explore a range of topics like race, equity, and evidence-based decision-making before culminating classes with a collaborative capstone project: fellows develop a proposal for a strategy that meets the needs of their local workforce and economy and then present it to local leaders. These projects have turned into real-world endeavors. A group of fellows from the Baltimore academy developed Good Business Works, which helps business leaders improve job quality and recognizes businesses that provide good jobs with a badge they can display. Good Business Works also launched an app that helps Baltimoreans easily find businesses that reflect their values. In the past year, the Economic Opportunities Program has launched academies in Chicago, Dallas, New Orleans, and Hudson County, New Jersey. Academies in Jackson, Mississippi, and Detroit will launch in 2020.
Thank the Academies
Publications Section 4: Strengthening Practices to Improve Job Quality
Tools: Employee Ownership
View tools and resources related to employee ownership.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Centering Workers in Workforce Development
The Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance collaborates with employers and stakeholders to boost employment, earnings, and equity for local workers.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Lessons and Leadership To Foster Economic Justice for Illinois Workers
LEP trains workers to promote equity, enforce rights, build unions, develop leaders, ensure workplace safety, and advance economic justice.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Worker Owned and Worker Driven
While the rideshare apps have increased convenience, they’ve eroded job quality. See how the Drivers’ Cooperative is helping to end exploitative conditions.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Creating Employee-Owned Businesses That Provide Good Jobs and Succeed
Through employee ownership, The Industrial Commons is building a new Southern working class that erases the inequities of generational poverty.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Strengthening the Hidden Resilience Workforce
We see the effects of climate change, but we rarely see the people who help to rebuild — and they often lack safe conditions, decent pay, or benefits.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Advancing a Pro-Worker, Pro-Climate Agenda in Texas
The Texas Climate Jobs Project advances a pro-worker, pro-climate agenda — helping to solve the climate crisis while creating millions of good jobs.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Organizing and Coalition Building for Structural Change
LAANE, led by Job Quality Fellow Roxana Tynan, is fighting to build an economy rooted in good jobs, thriving communities, and a healthy environment.
Job Quality Fellows Profile Series Longform
Organizing Unemployed and Underemployed Workers
UWU, led by Job Quality Fellow Neidi Dominguez, engages unemployed/underemployed workers, a population that has not been mobilized at scale since the 1930s.
Longform
How Local Journalism Can Bring Communities Together
MIT Center for Constructive Communication Director Deb Roy explains how the caricatures Republicans and Democrats paint of each other diverge from reality, and the ways local newsrooms can leverage their “trust capital” and emerging technology to promote listening and understanding amid disagreement.