In last year’s Financial Stability funding round, United Way of Metropolitan Chicago invested in 67 workforce development programs around the region that are working with those populations with the most significant barriers to sustainable employment–people with disabilities, ex-offenders, youth, the homeless, survivors of violence, immigrants, etc. These programs are working in three basic areas–preparing for work, getting a job, and keeping a job. After nearly a year of funding these programs, two points have become increasingly clear:
1) For participants to find and keep a job that provides self-sufficiency wages, they often need access to training and further education; and
2) Workforce development leaders, business, educational institutions, and the community need to come together in a coordinated way to streamline processes and ensure that the skills being developed are those that are most in need in the marketplace.
The Illinois Department of Corrections has been working on this type of training and coordination with inmates by partnering with community colleges to offer sector-based training and opportunities for higher education. These efforts, which cost about $10M per year, equate to the annual cost of incarceration for about 241 inmates (there are 47,000 inmates currently in IL prisons), and they have shown resounding success–dramatically lowering recidivism by two-thirds for those individuals participating in the training programs. Unfortunately, like many human service and education programs in Illinois, these programs appear to be at risk in the FY11 IL budget. A recent report by The John Howard Association–a United Way partner agency–summarizes the pending cuts and potential consequences of these decisions.
These cuts are of particular interest to United Way because we know that a) training and education is a critical upstream strategy for creating stable families and communities; and b) incarcerated individuals are most often released to their communities of origin, which are disproportionately low-income areas that are already struggling with high unemployment rates, violence, etc.
For more information about United Way’s efforts in workforce coordination or advocacy work around training and education for inmates, please contact:
Annette Charles (workforce coordination): 312-906-2410
John Maki (The John Howard Association): 312-503-6305
It just makes good sense to invest in the futures of individuals for whom the past has so poorly played out in terms of building a successful life. The United Way is
making a sound investment in building communities and making them safer through these funded programs.