Charlene Volk is director of learner success at JFFLabs. She oversees the My Pathway to Achieving Career Excellence (MyPACE) contract, part of the U.S. Department of Labor’s workforce training program, which transforms the lives of young people ages 16-24.
Her work combines technology, labor market information, and occupational assessments to provide student-centered career planning and exploration experience that educates youth and shows them a variety of career pathways.
Before joining JFF in 2021, Charlene was the teaching with primary sources implementation manager at the Center on Representative Government. In that role, she delivered educational programming based on the Library of Congress’s digitized primary sources and materials, established multiple partnerships with institutions to support similar visions of civic engagement and accessible opportunities for educators, and developed curricular content and educational modules based on the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources resources.
She has also worked in multiple K-12 after-school programs, supporting the use of arts, game design, and computer programming for populations that have not received equitable access to education. As a graduate assistant at Indiana University, Charlene developed the curriculum and content for two educational games for Quest Atlantis and One Planet Education Network in subjects including mathematics, English language arts, and systems thinking.
Charlene has a master’s in learning and developmental sciences from Indiana University’s School of Education. She also holds a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
