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Alison Schmitt

Associate Director

Alison Schmitt is an associate director at JFF. In that role, she helps drive the Oakland office’s place-based approach to regional economic development.

Her skills and areas of expertise include:

Policy analysis
Inclusive economic development and mobility
Nonprofit finance
Financial modeling
Systems change
Project labor agreements
Pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship
Strategic planning

Before joining JFF, Alison served as the director of financial analysis at ReNEW Schools, a nonprofit charter school network in New Orleans. While at ReNEW, she also served as a college and career counselor for seniors at an alternative high school for over-age, under-credited students.

Earlier in her career, Alison worked at a boutique strategy and management consulting firm and was an inaugural member of Venture for America, a fellowship that matches recent graduates with startup companies in post-industrial U.S. cities.

Her most recent work includes collaborations with the National Employment Law Project, where she assessed the effectiveness of pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs for California workers with criminal records, and the Port of Oakland, where she evaluated the capacity for project labor agreements to advance racial equity.

Alison is a member of SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association.

She says she was drawn to JFF because the organization offers her an opportunity to apply creative, cross-disciplinary solutions to dismantling the structural barriers to economic mobility. At JFF, she explains, “I am able to leverage my formal training in business and policy to help strengthen communities.”

California has a history of investing in regional strategies to support the educational attainment and economic growth of its many regional economies. These include the Strong Workforce Program, California Career Pathways Trust, to name a few, and now new programs like the Community Economic Resilience Fund. In this brief, we share recommendations to state leaders for what is needed to ensure these significant regional investments can build a foundation for shared prosperity as well as close economic and educational equity gaps.

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A group of community-based organizations in the Inland Empire are on a mission to shift the narrative about what it takes to do workforce development in a way that centers equity. These leaders have proposed a set of investments needed to achieve equitable economic empowerment in their communities.

Many communities are embracing "inclusive economic development" as a way to address inequity that persists even as the economy grows. In an effort to spark a national conversation about the conditions needed to achieve inclusive economic development, this report gives an overview of what JFF has learned about the topic through our research and in the field.

Cluster-based economic development can be an effective strategy for regions to generate economic growth that benefits all residents, provided that equity and inclusion are at the center of the approach. JFF explores an emerging case study in the Inland Empire region of California, examining what it takes in practice to implement a cluster strategy towards the triple bottom line goals of job quality, environmental sustainability, and inclusive growth.

This initiative aims to identify, seed, and support employers that have found creative ways to advance worker power, improve job quality, and support career development for low-wage earners.

Equitable economic growth requires inclusion at every step of the way, from how we design our education and training systems to how we use collaborative strategies and coordinated investments for regional economic development. JFF presents a vision for growing our economy differently, prioritizing asset-based, cross-sector approaches to build community resilience.

JFF and Turning Basin Labs are engaged in a multiphase initiative to identify and invest in high road employment models in California. This update documents the results of Phase 1 of this project, which include the worker-led development of a new framework for assessing job quality and an interactive tool that employers can use to design rewarding and fulfilling jobs that reflect worker experiences and perspectives.