In 2021, with funding and support from The James Irvine Foundation, a group of partners that included Make Fast Studio, Aspen Labs, Jobs For the Future, Turning Basin Labs, the California Workforce Association and CivicMakers set out to explore the degree to which human-centered design principles were present in workforce boards in California and across the country. The goal of this work was to develop a set of tools to help guide LWDBs toward discovering a more empathetic organizational body language. We hypothesized that by changing this body language, and the practices and policies that underlie it, workforce boards will deliver more equitable and meaningful outcomes to those they serve.
With insights gained from interviews with LWDB leaders, community-based organizations, and learner-workers, we developed a “maturity model” that maps LWDB behaviors along a spectrum of customer and community engagement.
Now, in order to solve the deep structural barriers facing the public workforce system, JFF, along with these partners, is establishing a Workforce Transformation Corps. This group will initially be composed of five full-time fellows tasked with utilizing the maturity model to drive human-centered innovations alongside five California-based workforce development boards.