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The 22 sites of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions are working at “ground zero” of a national crisis: unemployment that appears stuck at almost 10 percent. More and more, local media are searching for innovative, local solutions. What they are finding is the National Fund.

San Diego Site in the News for Changing Lives

The July 4 issue of the North County Times (CA) looks at one effort to change how the local economy creates jobs and careers. Featuring one mother’s moving story, it’s a quick but great read about the Medical Assistant Training Program of the North County...

There are a thousand stories in the National Fund for Workforce Solutions. Well, actually based on our most recent evaluation data, at least 18,000 stories (that’s how many participants were served in 2009) – but it seemed like a catchy way to start a post about some of the recent press coverage generated by local National Fund sites.

This is a great segment that CNN recently ran about the Biotechnical Institute of Maryland, a project training low-income residents of Baltimore for jobs as lab techs in the biotech industry. The Institute is supported, in part, by the Baltimore Workforce Collaborative.

Here’s something we may not always think about: how scary a new training and career advancement program can be for incumbent employees. Watch the three-minute video clip below. It’s from an interview with Timothy Meade, a mental health worker at Temple University Episcopal (part of Temple University Health System) and a participant in the District 1199c Training and Upgrading Fund.

Meade’s in an interesting position and offers a unique perspective. Not only did he participate in the training program, he’s a union delegate and helped put this project into the union contract. At the beginning of this interview he talks about the fear that was...

Day two at Rx for the Health Care Workforce, and the goal today is to think about the way the 90 leaders here—representing employers, labor, government, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sectors—think about scale up and sustainability. In other words, public policy.

The opportunity is great: as yesterday showed, future investments in building a skilled health care workforce can draw on many promising models from the education and workforce development sectors—on the job, in higher education, and in our communities.

At the same time, extending promising models broadly will require unprecedented action. Without strong public action, promising models cannot be implemented on the scale the nation requires in...