2024 in Review: SCG's Workforce Funders Collaborative Programs & Resources
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Southern California
SCG's Workforce Funders Collaborative convenes funders from various disciplines who work with systemically and historically excluded communities to promote equitable access to quality jobs in the Southern California region. The Collaborative meets quarterly and collaborates to share learnings, create networking opportunities, and explore funding models to inform individual and collective grantmaking.
2024 Event Timeline & Recap
SCG's Workforce Funders Collaborative had a busy year with various workforce events and learning opportunities. We appreciate everyone who joined to make the discussions lively and thought-provoking. We are grateful to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation for making this work possible.
March 2024
In early March, we hosted a peer funder conversation open to all SCG funders. During the call, funders introduced themselves and explained their funding priorities and strategies. The conversation uncovered areas of and allowed new funders to meet their peers.
August 2024
SCG was invited to attend the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Opportunity Youth Initiative Mexico City Convening, Collaboration Across Place: Building Better Futures With Opportunity Youth. The event, which was our first global convening, recognized our shared purpose of creating greater opportunity and well-being for the world’s young people. During our time together, we shared individual work, fostered knowledge sharing, set joint direction, and illuminated best practices.
Over the summer, SCG also partnered with The Smidt Foundation/Harbor Freight Tools to host Thriving! Investing in Paths from High School to Family-Supporting Jobs and Careers in Los Angeles, an in-person event at the Port of Los Angeles. During the event, funders heard from educators, nonprofits, and industries helping young people build skills, experiences, and relationships that will allow them to thrive as adults and make the Ports communities greener, safer, and stronger.
September 2024
Most recently, we hosted several breakout sessions at the SCG’s Annual Conference, Better Together: Creating a Collective Legacy, featuring different opportunities to invest in improving the LA region's workforce system. These included:
- Transforming Systems for Opportunity Youth in Los Angeles highlighted The LA Performance Partnership Pilots (LAP3) Horizons 32K Strategic Plan, a roadmap to a future where all Los Angeles opportunity youth secure and persist in quality education, training, and employment pathways.
- Creating Sustainable Pipelines to Employment explored how California's 2045 clean energy goals have set the stage for cross-sector leaders to think differently about workforce development and training. It also discussed how funders can work together to ensure underserved communities have a competitive edge in our current and future workforce.
- Understanding California's Master Plan for Career Education, reviewed California's Master Plan for Career Education, a blueprint for postsecondary and workforce training across the state, and engaged practitioners from higher education, economic development, and systems-change spaces in a conversation about how philanthropy can contribute to the Plan's implementation by working alongside communities engaged in regional systems change efforts.
December 2024
Our last session of the year, Building Partnerships: Education and Workforce Collaborate for Equitable Economic Mobility through Systems Change and Programs, concluded with a discussion on sector-based approaches and the role of intermediaries in building equitable pathways to economic mobility. As an intermediary launched in 1998 by the City of Los Angeles, L.A. Unified School District, and L.A. Community College District, UNITE-LA will share models for collaboration between employers, education institutions, and training partners to increase access to high-mobility careers for populations experiencing racial and historical disadvantage.
Ongoing
The Workforce Steering Committee continued to meet and offer its guidance to the group on the types of discussions to host, partners to engage, and areas of potential for 'deep dive' learning opportunities in the future. This included several strategy discussions to identify areas within philanthropy where there may be interest in developing strategic collaborations.
Looking to 2025
The SCG Workforce Funders Collaborative is hosting a virtual briefing, Update on Teen & Young Adult Disconnection in California, on Thursday, January 23, 2025, to discuss the California Opportunity Youth Network's recently released report. This briefing is open to California funders, community partners, opportunity youth, and advocates.
We are also planning a 2025 kick-off call in the late Winter before our next Workforce Funders Collaborative meeting taking place in person at The California Endowment on March 11, 2025. We will discuss the LA region workforce ecosystem themes, focusing on how the field is defining success through different vantage points. We will feature partners working across the youth and young adult sector, with youth that have varying degrees of 'system involvement' including those with none.
We are also planning a spring event featuring insights from a workforce development pilot focused on recruiting and retaining more Black workers in the healthcare field. This pilot uses a 'trusted messenger' approach in partnership with Black-led organizations in South LA and Inglewood to engage residents in preparing for and seeking family-sustaining wages in the healthcare field.
View Upcoming Workforce Events
If you are interested in helping SCG's Workforce Funders Collaborative ahead of next year, we invite you to complete our 2025 planning survey below.
Workforce Resource Collection
Opportunity Youth
- An Update on Teen & Young Adult Disconnection in California
- How Should High School Change? These Districts May Have the Answer
- On-The-Job Training Prevails as Students' Disinterest in College Grows
- Poll Shows Overwhelming Demand for Skilled Trades Classes in LA County High Schools
- Promising Practices for Integrating Positive Youth Development in the Workplace - Child Trends – ChildTrends
Economic and Workforce Research
- Promoting Labor Force Opportunities for California's Latina Population - Public Policy Institute of California
- Los Angeles County Regional Report, California Jobs First, Part 2 (September 2024)
- Segregation in the Low-Wage Workforce | WorkRise Network
- WIOA, Employee Ownership, and Good Jobs: How Workforce Legislation Can Support Employee-Owned Companies and Boost Job Quality - The Aspen Institute - The Aspen Institute
- 3 Things to Know about Labor this Labor Day | FrameWorks Institute
Post-Secondary
- Community colleges are California's largest higher education system, serving about 45% of all undergraduate students. More about CA's higher education system & funding outlook.
- The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) serves 200,000 students annually across nine colleges through career and certificate training programs, associate and select bachelor's degrees, and pathways to transfer into four-year colleges and universities. About half of LACCD's students report incomes near or below the poverty line, 1/3 are parents, 80% are under the age of 35, and the majority are people of color. Less than 5% of all philanthropic giving in higher education supports community colleges, and an unknown share of all philanthropic giving in the arts supports community colleges.
- For more information about community college programs in Los Angeles and ways to partner and support specific efforts, contact Kelly King, Executive Director, Foundation for the Los Angeles Community Colleges, kingkc@laccd.edu.
- Los Angeles Regional Consortium (LARC) September Newsletter
- What We're Reading: College for All Has Failed America. Can It Be Fixed?
- 'Just Try It Out': What's Behind a Shift Away From 4-Year College.
Thank You to Our Partners
Thank you to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation for their ongoing support to make our workforce work possible.
