Child care centers throughout California struggled to find people with the right credentials to look after their babies, toddlers and preschoolers. At the same time, many people who wanted to become early childhood educators faced difficulties in earning the credentials.
The Service Employees International Union and its partner organizations thought of a fix: creating apprenticeships for these would-be workers that paid for their college tuition, books and tutoring to earn teaching permits and offered them wages for their training.
The union was able to help build these apprenticeships in part because of the Workforce Accelerator Fund, a pot of money intended to go to California-based organizations with ideas about solving different workforce woes. The California Workforce Development Board received money for the fund in 2014 and piloted it soon after with leftover federal dollars for workforce development.
“In early childhood education the employers do not have extra money to pay for people who are not fully qualified to work,” said Pamm Shaw, who was executive director of the early childhood department for the YMCA of the East Bay. The service employees union partnered with child care centers, such as the YMCA of the East Bay, to carry out the apprenticeships. Shaw has worked with dollars from five accelerator grants, either directly from the fund or through subcontracts. “Most people don’t get paid for training at the K-12 level, let alone the preschool level. For us, it was really critical to get outside funding.”
The people that end up in these early childhood care apprenticeship programs are also largely low-income, about half are immigrants and almost all of them are women, which means it is achieving one of the accelerator fund’s goals: helping populations that commonly face barriers to employment get jobs. Each year, the fund picks a different set of Californians to prioritize, such as veterans, tribal nations, youth, unhoused people, disabled people, immigrants and others.
Since its inception, the Workforce Accelerator Fund has awarded over $52 million and assisted about 250 projects. Some of those include building career pipelines in the hotel and water/wastewater sectors, according to Joelle Ball, deputy director of the California Workforce Development Board.
“Having funding that supports innovative space in government is different, and it’s appreciated in the field, and it results in some unique solutions,” Ball said. “To try to change the workforce system or the government in general is like turning the Titanic. It takes a long time and the right people behind making those changes. But if we’re seeding those changes at the ground level with something like Accelerator and it grows from there, that to me is the best way to make policy for the state.”
When Ball looks at who to fund, she said she prioritizes two things: a unique idea and a competent core team. Grant applicants must illustrate a gap in the workforce system and describe how their idea plans to address it. They must also have a core team that includes the “customers” (i.e. the workers or employers), experts that understand the workforce system, innovators that are testing the idea, and people in a position to change policy.
The accelerator fund is intentionally broad and has funded many different entities, Ball said. But the diversity of grants has made it difficult to measure the fund’s exact impact. “It’s a whole entire fruit basket of projects, not apples to apples,” she said. “It’s harder to measure with clean data what the return on those investments are. But we’re looking at what system changes have happened because of Accelerator? What impacts to the workforce system have happened because of Accelerator?”
Tracking systemic changes takes time and keeping up with past grantees requires time and money.
The service employees union’s early childhood apprenticeships program is one of the accelerator fund’s repeat grantees that scaled. Part of the reason it was able to do that is because of the networking and technical support the fund provided, according to Dr. Randi Wolfe, who wrote and administered the grants for the union and has since become a national leader for early care educator apprenticeships.
“It let us get to know people,” Wolfe said. “They would always have these statewide meetings of all the grantees. All of us were new to this. Nobody really knew what they were doing, we were all learning together.”
Wolfe later started a nonprofit addressing jobs in early childhood education. That nonprofit, Early Care & Education Pathways to Success, has outgrown the size of grants the accelerator fund gave out, she said, but those initial meetings and grants were key.
“The best thing about the grant was I got to know people, I got to ask a million questions, and I got to learn things, which is why 10 years later, I’ve built what I’ve built … It’s not the level we’re at (anymore),” she said. “But at the beginning, it was very important.”