Funding Opportunity: Expanding effective workforce solutions through improved effectiveness of public systems; job training and placement programs; pilots of employment programs to address special needs.
Chicago is the fourth largest metropolitan region in North America and the third largest in the United States. It is home to two-thirds of Illinois’ population and jobs. As an international city, Chicago will continue to grow, attract people, support multiple industries and experience demographic shifts over the next few decades.
Despite Chicago’s strengths, the region’s slow recovery from recession has meant continuing high unemployment and increased structural unemployment, which together point to the need for retraining, skill flexibility, and better labor force matching. Continuing globalization, weakening of organized labor and pervasive technological change will intensify those demands. Such trends will put a premium on educational attainment beyond the high school level and require that workers learn new skills multiple times over the course of their careers. The region’s current workforce system is inefficient, allowing lags between employer needs and supply readiness. Another problem is the mismatch between job opportunities and housing.
To develop a workforce that is skilled, productive and competitive in this environment, leaders in the Chicago area need to bring workforce systems and strategies to a new level. Required are regional analysis, coordination and flexibility to adapt to the ever-changing needs of employers and individuals. Also needed are accessible “on ramps” to careers as well as education for the least skilled individuals. Programs must prepare workers to contribute to the productivity of employers; evaluation must account for programs’ net effect on the local economy as well as on individual clients.
Grant making in Workforce supports Community Goal #1: Advancing opportunities for human and economic development.
Outcomes Sought
The Trust seeks to reduce unemployment and poverty in the Chicago region through implementation of a number of workforce development principles and strategies. These include:
1. Working with public institutions to ensure publicly funded programs are the strongest they can possibly be. As appropriate, this may include funding technical assistance, planning processes, development of integrated data systems and program evaluations.
2. Supporting job training and placement programs that generate economically sound benefits including:
- Skill training and job placements are made with industries expected to be sustained or grow with the new economy.
- Individuals are placed in employment positions with livable wages.
- Workforce training and development systems feature clear economic goals and system performance measures.
- Clients who enter the labor market with the help of intermediaries do not displace other job seekers.
- Job trainees obtain enduring, transferrable skills.
- Workforce programs are linked to employer location decisions and enhance firm productivity.
3. Supporting rigorously evaluated pilot programs that help us to better understand which are the strongest service strategies in emergent fields.
The Trust also is interested in the creation of new jobs through social enterprises which produce revenues over the amount of investment made by philanthropy.
Our Funding
To achieve the outcomes described above, the Trust supports efforts to promote workforce system change and improvements through strategies that may include:
- Working with city colleges, workforce boards and other public institutions to develop policies and practices responsive to economic needs.
- Developing programs linking workforce development with economic development and job creation.
- Developing benefit systems, access and policies that help make low-wage work pay sufficiently to sustain families.
- Creating integrated data systems that facilitate evaluation and planning of workforce strategies.
The Trust will support workforce development and/or employment programs that can deliver on the outcomes described. Strategies may include:
- Programs aimed at specific underserved populations or neighborhoods.
- Pilot programs aimed at testing innovative strategies.
- Projects linking workforce development to specific job creation.
- Pilot programs demonstrating potentially scalable solutions to workforce development challenges.
Requests for Proposals
Job training and placement programs: RFPs were released on November 15 and proposals were due on January 5.
Improving effectiveness of public systems through public policy advocacy: RFPs will be released on July 15 and proposals are due on September 1.
Contact Us
Please direct all inquiries to Jim Lewis, Senior Program Officer at
