Building Career Ladders for Low-Income People

About this grant

This renewal grant will allow Aspen Institute to mine the data collected at six demonstration sites in order to learn more about community college/nonprofit sector partnerships. These types of partnerships have great potential to combine industry-recognized training and credentials with a range of supportive services to address the wide range of barriers to skills attainment and career advancement that many low-income adults struggle to overcome. In a growing number of locations, such partnerships have proven successful and offer instructive models. The work of building and growing such partnerships at the scale that is needed is complicated by many factors such as bureaucratic and structural challenges, inflexibility or incompatibility of funding structures and performance indicators, and historical and personal dynamics among institutions. This project will develop a set of tools and products that will support local leaders’ efforts to adopt the community college/nonprofit partnership approach and will encourage investors and policymakers to support these collaborative efforts.