 I'm Jake Edwards. I'm a director at Social Finance. We're a nonprofit in our missions to mobilize capital to drive social progress. And we do that by structuring a range of outcome-based and performance-based tools that sit at the intersection of the public, private, and social sectors. I have the distinct pleasure of moderating the panel today with a group of close friends and colleagues who I've been able to work with closely over the past few years. The foundation for this discussion and this panel is based on one truth and one hypothesis. The truth is that there are finite sources of revenue to invest in the upskilling, re-skilling, and training of individuals in our society. Those sources are government, philanthropy, employers, individuals themselves. The hypothesis is that the needs of our communities are so vast that the resources of one single of those stakeholders is insufficient, insufficient to actually provide folks with the skills they need to thrive and achieve the American dream in a rapidly evolving and complex economy. And so today, that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to dive into how folks can use their own capital deployment strategies to ultimately crowd in, leverage, and incent those various stakeholders to collaborate, coordinate, and drive the greatest possible impact they can for the folks that they're serving. To start, we're fortunate to have Stuart here. Stuart is a tremendous resource and expert in the arena of financing workforce development. I had the pleasure of meeting Stuart five years ago in Louisiana on a panel at Jobs for the Future about pay for success. It was a much newer space then. And since then, Stuart's gone on to chapter, to author a three series of 1,000 page plus publication called Investing in Workforce. So Stuart, we'd love for you to give a little bit of backdrop for the situation we find ourselves in, the macroeconomic challenges that we face, the various ways in which we can finance workforce development, and some key insights and themes that you found through your research. Sure. So I'm excited to be here. It's really interesting to get to be with a group of people that are pursuing social impact through investment. This is not my normal space. I spend most of my time in looking at effective workforce development policy and education policy. So it's a really interesting thing. But a few years ago, we really started to look into the role that the funding and financing system played in driving outcomes in workforce development. And I want to talk about a few things. First is that there's a lot of money that gets spent on education and training and trying to get people connected to jobs. But there's a lot of dissatisfaction with that, and it's not necessarily reaching the right people. Employers are big spenders, but it often doesn't reach the actual occupations that they say that they have trouble filling and meeting their kind of frontline business needs. Government has had massive declines in the amounts that they spend and the ways that they spend money. In a few of the core kind of skills training programs that the government investment has down nearly 90% since the 80s, individuals have shown a real serious willingness to invest in themselves. There's about $120 billion of originations in student loans every year. But there are certainly plenty of headlines that suggest that some people are not getting the hope that they had out of those student loans. One of the problems is, and so one of the strains that we saw is that a lot of people are really looking at investments in skill as costs. They really started to say, these are things that cost money and we're not sure that we wanna do them and you could start to see that reticence in kind of all of the various players that are involved in it. We were interested in kind of trying to take an investment mindset to the whole space. And I would say that one of the things that we thought that an investment mindset could do by thinking about return on investment to all of these, whether it's social or actual financial returns is that it could help get money to effective programs and help them to scale. It could help government reorganize the relationship that they had with people that they contracted with to help drive and pay for quality. And it would help individuals manage risk in a world where they're making very difficult choices. So one of the things that we've been doing is really trying to look to the tools of finance to improve the funding quality and scaling of those programs, which is what has brought us here today. We think that there's some great promise in outcomes-based finance, in workforce development, in education and higher ed as well, in a world of quickly changing work and demands for higher education. Thanks, Stuart. So we're fortunate to have folks from a range of organizations that spend their days figuring out how they can deploy their capital to achieve the greatest impact. They do that through a range of deployment strategies, from grant capital to catalytic capital to market rate returns, all with slightly unique focuses, somewhat overlapping target populations, but distinct theses. So, Isabel, we'd love to hear a little bit about your strategy, your focus. And then similarly, Sara can pass it on to you and Justin, we'd love to hear the same. What is your mandate? What is your focus? And what are the tools in your toolbox that you ultimately can use to achieve that objective? Yeah, thank you. So I'm Isabel Howe. I work for the Omidyar Network, which is the philanthropic investment firm of Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay and his wife, Pam. And in US education, we have a two-generation strategy focused on one hand on the littlest learners, birth to five, which is obviously not the main topic of this panel, although there is a lot of connections. And then the other end of our strategy is focused on adult learners and specifically those who have children, which happens to be actually a nice overlap about 75% of adult learners happen to have a dependent child. So that's our overall strategy trying to bring economic mobility into family units and ensuring that people at the start of life have an ability to have high-quality learning opportunities. Sarah? Hi, my name is Sarah Kay, and I'm with Prudential. I work on the Corporate Social Responsibility Team that's part of the broader diversity, inclusion, and impact group. And we manage a couple of different financial resources, our employee time and talent, and the inclusion and diversity efforts of the enterprise around recruitment, retention, and promotion of diverse candidates. Within the financial resources side, we manage philanthropic grants, corporate sponsorships, corporate partnerships, and our skills-based volunteering program. And then we also work closely with our impact and responsible investing team that makes impact investments in social enterprises, VC funds, real estate development projects. And our mission statement is the company's mission statement, which is to solve the financial challenges of a changing world with a lens towards underserved communities. And so we focus on how do we drive inclusive economic growth through a couple of different program focus areas. One is around closing the skills gap. How do we make sure that people are connecting to high-quality skills training program to be able to compete for and succeed in a good job? How do we wanna make sure that a job is actually of quality and it's not a bad job? We also look at how do we either scale, create, develop, connect low-income populations to financial products and tools to help build their wealth and protect their assets. We look at systems change in communities, particularly in our headquarter city of Newark, New Jersey, where we were founded in improving the public education, public safety, and workforce development and economic development systems. And then finally, we also focus on disaster relief and recovery on a global level. Thank you. This is Sarah's third panel in a row. So she's got her talk track down. Justin, how about yourself? Yeah, so my name is Justin Steele. I lead the America's team for Google.org. Google.org is Google's philanthropy. When the company went public, it was established through an ongoing commitment of 1% of net profits that aside for cash grants to nonprofits. So every year, Google.org gives out over $250 million of cash grants based on that 1% commitment. And I have the privilege of being able to lead all of that work in the US, Canada, and Latin America for the team. We have several different topical giving areas, but the economic opportunity is the largest one. And within that, we definitely have a lot of work focused on skilling for Americans. And part of this is the recognition of the changing nature of work in the country. 15 years ago, only around 40% of jobs in this country required a medium or high level of digital skills. Today, that number is 70%. So if you're gonna get a job in this country, it's very likely that you're gonna need a medium or high level of digital skilling in order to be able to be successful in those positions. And we also know, I mean, I have three kids who are in elementary school and Oakland public schools. And the research shows that 60% of kids who are in grade school are gonna work in jobs that don't even exist today. So the economy's changing, digital skilling's becoming more and more relevant. And so one of the things that we're really focused on is how do we give Americans, and across my other region in Canada and Latin America, the relevant skills to be able to take the jobs of today. So we've done some work with social finance. My colleague, Andrew Dunkelman, who leads our topical strategy work around economic opportunity has pioneered a lot of that. And then my team making grants in our region to nonprofits who are innovating on models of job skilling. I should also say I worked a year up for five years before I came to Google. So I spent five years training young people to get jobs in the tech sector before I took this job. So I kind of have that double hat of nonprofit person who was working with young people in this capacity and now funding this work. Excellent. So Stuart, you mentioned that there are trends with regards to the various revenue sources for investing in skills. And that some of those are going down, some of those are actually trending in the other direction. People are willing to invest in themselves. Isabel, Sarah, and Justin, we'd love to hear an initiative or an investment that you all made with either the direct or the indirect objective of crowding in additional capital, additional resources from any of the other stakeholders that should be thinking about workforce from an investment lens rather than a cost lens. Justin, you want to come back around or? Yeah, I'm happy to start. So two of the investments that my colleague Andrew has led with social finance and Merit America, but I won't speak to those because I don't know them as well. I'll speak to a grant that my team is making in New York City and it's not public, so I can't give all the details, but we just made a $2 million grant to a nonprofit in New York City that's retraining low income New Yorkers for jobs and technology and using income sharing agreements to experiment and pilot and try to learn whether those agreements could work. And that nonprofit has seen that the average income of the person who's coming in to be trained is $18,000 and they're training in software development, so 80% of the people who graduate the program end up getting jobs and the average salary of those jobs is $85,000. So it's a hugely significant jump and the way they structured that agreement is that if you make a salary over $60,000 a year that you would then for three years pay 12% of that base salary back to the organization to cover all the costs because while they're in the program it's zero cost plus they get a stipend, so you're sort of trying to come back and cover the cost. I think the other thing that we generally think about is the fact that there's just not enough research about what actually works in this space and so trying to fund measurement and evaluation to prove which programs are working and hopefully incentivize the government to get some of that big government funding to come back in. Sarah? One example that I'll give, we've been working with Social Finance for quite some time and I'll talk about one piece of work later but another organization that we've been supporting is called Third Sector who's another intermediary partner in the pay for success space and we supported them two years ago to work with five local workforce investment boards in five local communities across the country which included San Diego, Austin, Northern Virginia and I'm forgetting the other two but basically they were looking at how to restructure the WIOA contracts with workforce organizations to create pay for performance contracts and so we were looking at before WIOA dollars went out to these workforce training programs and they went out at the beginning and it didn't matter even if the students fully graduated from the program whether or not they get placed whether or not they're still employed six months later it was really for training's sake and so what the pay for performance contract looks like and there's three different options there's one you can split the payment let's just say 50% upfront and then 50% when the person gets placed into a job or it could be you get the full payment upfront and then get a bonus if that person gets placed or you don't get any money upfront and then the full payment comes once the person is placed and that's really to drive governments to think about outcomes and really thinking about the results versus just paying for the upfront training without knowing if the training programs are actually being successful in changing people's trajectory. Thank you, thank you very much. Yeah, one organization that we have funded that has done a really nice job at the Cross Partnership Collaboration is Hall Button School. So we had funded the organization when they had only one site in San Francisco and it's a two-year software engineering pathway that doesn't have any requirement upfront with one exception, you have to be 18-year-old so there's no high school, no education requirement, no software pre-skilled on software engineering requirement and at exit of this program, their average salary is now 108,000 with a very diverse cohort of 70% people of color and 40% women. So that school has now expanded in multiple locations through Cross Partnerships. So in Connecticut they received funding from the state of Connecticut which saw an opportunity to expand that very successful model in New Heaven as well as found some philanthropy to start the efforts there. They just announced an expansion in Tulsa, Oklahoma where similarly they are partnering with the city as well as with a philanthropy there to provide not only the curriculum but also stipends and free housing for the students as a way to see if there is a potential expansion opportunity in states that are not by coastal and attract students toward promising careers outside of certainly the Silicon Valley or East Coast. Wow, that's amazing. So I think we heard a couple of mechanisms to get individual resources in in a way that's outcome-oriented, providing downside protection. We heard about ways to reorient how the public sector is spending its dollars and linking those to performance and outcomes and driving dollars towards effective programs. How about employers? Any examples of mechanisms or strategies whereby you can directly or indirectly get employers to invest in their workforce and or be willing to share in the value that they see from having access to qualified diverse talent pipelines? Is that anything that came up in your research? Stuart, anyone else have particular examples they wanna share? I can talk about it a little bit and say that there's a strong need. I mean, there's a constant drumbeat from employers that there are challenges with workers remaining productive skills gaps and big, big challenges in filling that. And I'll say there's a couple reasons for this is that there's significant reluctance to invest in the frontline. There are a few headwinds that exist. So accounting principles suggest that it's advantageous to invest in technology and capital rather than in human capital because it doesn't sit on your books anywhere. But there's also, I think that one of the challenges is that firms are busy doing what they do and it's very difficult for them to do the evaluative work. So you'll see partnerships with Europe that have shown real success. But when you start to talk about at a broad broad scale, it's difficult. And I think it's also a little bit of a challenge to expect firms to invest in something, hire people and not know whether they're actually getting what they need to get. Which is why creating some opportunities for employers to share that risk with the public sector or with individuals is a great opportunity. There are examples that are bubbling up of not necessarily self-funding but recycling funds where employers pay back some portion of the amount that individuals have invested or some portion of the value that they see for getting workers that are qualified that help solve things that are legitimate costs that they don't always account for. Like turnover cost, advertising and getting workers trained on the job. Those types of things, there are ways that you can create some shared value. Those are a few examples. Anyway, not really more. Okay, I'm much more optimistic. I was not, as of a few years ago, I think there is a huge trend right now and it's probably in connection with a very good macroeconomic environment that we are in but employers are showing meaningful innovations right now. So you have big employers like Starbucks announcing a partnership with ASU to fund education for their workers or Walmart or Bright Horizons now funding all education, 100% of the education for early childhood educators within their early childhood schools and preschool environments. You also have the emergence of learn and earn models that I think are really interesting. Whether it's at Miami-Dade partnering with Tesla on a program where students at Miami-Dade can now get funding in addition to not having any cost whatsoever to pay for their education or for-profit companies like Tectonic in Colorado that has also an apprenticeship program where students are also getting paid while they get their training. I think those models are really interesting. I think this is a, employers are actually finally showing a lot of innovation and willingness to fund either education as a benefit or learn and earn model. I do wonder whether that's happening at the most knowledge-intensive end of the economy because if you look at the way that high-tech companies have structured their employment, we've essentially disintermediated like middle management and entry level is outsourced to vendors and contractors. So there is no pathway from the mail room to the C-suite. Like that just literally doesn't exist. And so there's almost no entry level employment. Like you have to have graduated from a strong college and have work experience. And so there's some jobs at the company that you can argue are entry level but the demand to get into that pathway is so high that you can hire a UC Berkeley computer scientist to do a job probably a year of alumni could do anyway. And so to get those pathways to actually open up to people like Year Up, I mean I was meeting with our CIO last week and it's like you have to intentionally choose to open up those pathways and protect those pathways. And we've done some of that through like an IT rotational program for IT support and Year Up largely funnels through that pathway. But there's pressure on the CIO all the time to open that pathway to elite college graduates or you have executives at the company who say I know a talented young person this is one of our only entry level roles can this person get drafted into this program? And there's other jobs around technical support of ad sales and things like that that could probably be done by people without college degrees but somebody at the company has to make a deliberate choice to open up the pathway and hire people who have non-traditional backgrounds when they could be hiring college graduates. So it's interesting, it's like a macro problem but I don't know that the companies at the most knowledge-intensive end of the economy are creating those pathways or being very innovative about how to protect pathways for people to be able to come in in a non-traditional way. I'm more on this. Got defied, right down the middle here. Being more optimistic I do think, I don't think we've yet seen an employer-based pay for success model. I think we're getting there, I think where employers are recognizing that they have to invest in their current employees and future employees. There's a return on investment that is cheaper than the turnover rates that they're seeing. Internally at Prudential, we have a massive future of work initiative that's launching about upskilling and reskilling our own employees. Some of it is in-grown training, others are working with vendors both on the for-profit, on the non-profit side around that reskilling. Definitely paying for the education and the learning that's happening and then ultimately supporting organizations and we all keep mentioning Year Up. That's another great partner in the sense that we're actually building pipelines of talent that's coming from those organizations. I think we're in the right direction on that side and seeing outcomes-based payers be the employers. I think the market is shifting that way to actually prove that the results are worthwhile. So I think that one of the challenges also that you hear from employers is that they're concerned that if they make the investment that their competitor is gonna reap the benefits. So they'll lose that employer, they'll employ you to another employer, which is, I think this is another space that investment could get bigger behind is actual sector-based training where it's not just one firm making the investments and the idea. I mean, so the concept that you work for one firm and you travel this pathway up is wonderful but it's not realistic in many cases and so there's competitors and if they say, hey, we can solve some of these labor market challenges in non-competitive manners, we can all invest in similar training that we're all gonna need. Even if it changes in five years, then we all lose a little bit. Those are promising practices at least and there are cities across the country that have tried to do this. They have not gotten very, very big but there are some of those. I think that there's also, there's so much firm level strategy because I think that a lot of the programs like the ASU programs and Amazons College tuition reimbursement is often about lengthening and so this is, I think probably some of the mental work that happens as they make these programs is they're saying, if we can keep high-skill warehouse workers around for five years instead of 18 months, that's a huge win. So we'll pay for college and it's a win-win for us because not everyone's gonna take us up on free college and it keeps our highest capacity people around for five years. We know we can't retain them and they could probably do a lot more to figure out how they take those high capacity people and then move them into the knowledge space at Amazon or Walmart or all the places that are doing these types of things. So there's real space for that but there are different ways that you can approach the needs of the firm to do that. What I really wanna know is like how much are the folks coming through those pipelines actually getting into the jobs that lead to real wealth creation? And I think about low-end communities of color in this country and how they've been locked out of wealth and we're training them into these jobs but does the ladder even exist anymore? Like are the rungs between the steps on the ladder so wide that you train people, they can climb the first few steps and they might be able to get into ideally a middle-class job but are they gonna really be able to build wealth if the rungs are so significant between the steps? Can I respond? Please do, my job's become very easy. A couple of thoughts that I have is I shared this study in a previous panel but potentially we have a lot of manufacturing clients and so we surveyed about 1,000 manufacturing companies about the future of work and do they feel like they have the workers they need and over 70, 80% of them felt like they don't have the current workforce that is needed for the future but then we also survey the employees in the company as well and they also expect the employer to provide the training not to go through an outside institution and so I think that with the whole future of work and workers and workplace I think there is a conscious and intentional thought process that people are putting on how to upskill and re-skill their current base of employees and so speaking of the wealth creation and the ladder building I think that we're gonna see more of that as these jobs that have been more entry level and don't require as much higher level skills they're gonna be re-skilling and upskilling their employees for better jobs that with higher salaries by providing their own training. Higher salaries but like wealth generating jobs because of the jobs you just described don't sound like wealth generating jobs to me. I think there's gonna be a combination of both I think the jobs that we're gonna see in terms of the automation of a lot of the manufacturing jobs so I think of course with some of the automation you're gonna see some of the jobs disappear but at the same time we're gonna need people to manage the different systems and I think those jobs are gonna be at a higher level with a higher paying salary level. Yeah I'll step outside of my moderator shoes for a moment and say I think that there's almost two different things that play here and there is the initial point of entry in the access pathway for individuals that might be disadvantaged and underserved and then there is the employers providing access to upskilling and investing in their own incumbent workers as a retention play. I think I'm probably a little bit more optimistic on the latter. I think the former to Justin's point is how building those pathways is really hard. Takes a lot of time. It takes a cultural shift, a mindset shift requires top down buy in and really requires a shift in and how we think about the value of talent that might not look as traditional as what we're used to. It's the hardest thing I've tried to do at Google. What's that? It's the hardest thing I've tried to do at Google. So how do you do it? Or any strategy? I haven't done it yet. I don't have any examples to really share. I mean we've expanded the year up pathway but that already existed before it came five years ago but it is the hardest thing to create real pathways both entry points like on ramps and to create pathways up through. It's requires culture shifts like macroeconomic sort of pressures are pushing away from that. I mean to the point earlier, we don't train anymore. We don't have those kind of entry level training programs. They're not internal. You don't come to the company and then go through like Google University and get trained up. That doesn't really exist anymore. The corporate investment in internal training has significantly decreased over time. So it's a structural problem that's hugely intimidating and hard to crack. Stuart, what's your employer training statistic in the C-suite? I'm forgetting which one. 85% of dollars by employers? Yeah, about 85%. So I'll say this, just in terms of actual hard money that employers spend it's about 150, depending on which estimate you believe, 150 to 200 billion dollars a year gets spent on hard investment. So money that someone spends to pay someone to do training, firms spend about that much annually. If you then include things like mentoring, coaching and informal training that are provided through soft costs, lost productivity or trailing shifts, anything like that, that number's about in total, so about another 350 billion dollars. So about a half trillion dollars a year employers spend on training. The vast majority of that over 80% goes to workers that already have a bachelor's degree. So depending on who you are, and my employer could in the accounting ledger list this as a, my travel, my registration to this conference as part of that money. And so most of that goes to this because conferences and travel and executive training are very, very expensive compared to other things. And this is true, this is true since the early 90s that fewer employees report on the job training or employer funded training. It's down to like one out of five employees say that they've gotten something in that range. And that survey, so employer might say that they're serving more, but very few people say that they're actually getting access to that. A lot of this, then you look at executive surveys I'll say and very much, you don't see executive surveys saying we're having difficulty hiring people to mid-management. You look at those surveys and it says we're having serious concerns because we've got big expectations for automation and very difficult time recruiting people in sales, IT, customer service. So there's some mismatch. I think that there's gonna be pressure. I actually do have some hope about this is that there's pressure. What are the sides? That these are long-term things. It's not just going to be a cyclical issue that we have low unemployment rates, but we have a lot of retirements coming. We have a rapidly diversifying population and workforce. And that's gonna make integration and skills development, especially in a lot of these jobs, critical long-term. I think that we're in this world right now where we have to figure out how we're gonna sail through that challenge. Shifting a little bit. You all have your own focuses, investment strategies, theses. As you make those deployments, how are you thinking about holding yourself accountable to success? What does success look like? And ultimately, how does that play into the current and future deployment strategies? Is that what you wanna start? Yeah, so that's an area where, actually I would be very interested in hearing the answers from the other panelists because we have three goals. One is increasing post-secondary completion for student parents. So right now, 50% of student parents, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report, drop out or never complete. And that compares to about 30% average population. So it's a much higher rate of drop out in a population that we are doing work on. And completion is still, as of today, one of the greatest driver of economic mobility. Two, we are looking at increase in income, so economic mobility. And that's on a relative basis. So I love just in point because it's on a relative basis and are we ambitious enough? So that's an interesting observation. And then three, we added a well-being. So we are looking at Gallup that has five domains of well-being for adults. Just thinking that a lot of people, including myself, have made choices in my life that were not only driven by economic outcomes. They were driven by other factors, many other factors that have to do with purpose, that have to do with where I live and community, that have to do with where my family is. And so how do we factor those into what success looks like at the individual level beyond simply looking at economic outcomes? So we're in the process right now of figuring out how to better think about impact. I would say we've been at a more superficial level in terms of our thinking around it. I think we're bringing in external vendors to help us think through that. I think up to this point, as I mentioned, it's our mission, which is how do we make sure that more people have the opportunity to achieve financial security? But what underneath that is what we're trying to unpack, which is definitely around income increases, how long they're staying at jobs, what do jobs look like? We have a big focus on the quality of jobs. And so that means livable wages, safe working conditions, stable working schedules, career advancement opportunities, benefits that include health insurance and retirement, and how are we changing people's behavior? So it's not just about opening up a savings account, but are they actually starting to build their wealth? And so those are some of the components that we're thinking towards. And then what's the intersection of work and wealth? I think that's also a really big part where there have been changes in the labor and financial markets, and yet they're not talking to each other. They're not thinking together collaboratively on the solutions. And so how do we better measure that? So I would say we are in a work in progress right now, and hopefully more to say in a couple months. Justin? Yeah, part of corporate social responsibility is always nose counting. So we were gonna flash the big, huge numbers of 10 million young people training computer science. And we just signed a pledge to retrain 250,000 Americans over the next five years. So that's the highest level. But then within each individual grant, I think it's the things that have already been said. So what's your retention rate? What's your average job placement rate? What's the average wage? Is that wage stable one year out, two years out, three years out? And then particularly just thinking across the sector, particularly income sharing agreements, that's the part number of social finance is just trying to understand, do these things work and are they scalable? And how do we get high training, high quality job training programs to scale? Because it's like year up is just, there's so much exceptionalism around that, how many nonprofits can have a budget over $100 million a year of annual revenue and have the philanthropy engine to drive that? What are other ways that we actually scale these programs? So on multiple levels. Awesome. Well, we have 20 minutes left. We have more like 25 minutes for Q&A, so we're a little behind. If folks have questions, please either raise your hand or step up to the mic. We'd love to hear from the audience. Any thoughts or comments that they have for this group? I do have some backup questions, but opening up, please do. Yeah, hello. I'm from the National University of Singapore, where as a student team, we have worked with a Singapore-based organization called Trisector Associates, previously known as, previously it was the Asia Arm of Third Sector Capital in Singapore. So we helped them design an impact bond for skills training in India. And one of the biggest challenges that we are facing is our definition of employability, employment retention is very different from how the government defines it. For example, the government says, if you're employed for just three months in a year, you're employed. But we are saying, no, you have to be employed for at least two years to show that the program is working. And so I want to know from experiences in the US and the West, how do you manage to discuss with the governments on what the right outcome should be for measuring, because if they see outcomes as one way, and we look at it very differently, we're not able to get that convergence when we actually want to design an impact bond. Can I say that without thinking about the impact bond part, that's one of the challenges that this whole field faces is that there's so many different definitions of success. Just to talk about the federal government portion, there's 23, 25 agencies in the federal government that provide funding for some type of skills training. They don't, there's no administrative alignment between them. So you might be an organization that receives two portions of funding, or funding from two different portions of the federal government, and you're gonna have to have different reporting standards. That's a lot, that's a challenge for a non-profit. It's one of the reasons that it's difficult to scale when you're dealing with that. But it also, and so it makes places like Europe, Europe probably does participate in many federal government programs, but some of the very effective programs say, it's not worth the administrative cost, and we're gonna try and raise it. When I was there five years ago, it was barely worth it, and we leveraged it a tiny bit. Particularly, I was leading the DC site, so we were leveraging some workforce investment funding through DC, but it was the hardest money, and we'd always ask ourselves, is this really worth it, or should we just go pitch another high net worth person and get a grant to cover it? Right, which makes complete sense, but it's not gonna reach population scale. You have to get into, you have to deal with some of these, and some of this is doing the performance-based contracting, rethinking the way that government does a lot of these things is critical to make it work. Questions from other folks in the audience? Go ahead. Is there a room in the government and not a real spot in it? I mean, that's like a gap, you know, so is this sector at least like so enough for all of you? Are you all thinking about this challenge coming up with what the success looks like? For those of you who might not be able to hear, Cliff Notes, how are you all thinking about measures of success to further make a compelling argument and articulation to government, to engage in scaling and investing in more effective solutions? This is probably the appropriate time just to let everyone know this is a very, I'm not technically part of the federal government, so I'm also supposed to tell you at the beginning, anytime I say something, I'm not even speaking for my institution. You can make what you want of that. Jack-Om House rules. But, you know, so the Federal Reserve spends a lot of time looking at the labor market. Clearly, we're in a very low unemployment position right now. A couple of things that I always think about, though, are that currently, labor force participation has rebounded some since the Great Recession, but it actually resembles, it's been in decline since before the Great Recession. We have a labor force participation right now that looks more like the 1980s, when women were not fully entered into the workforce in the way that they were. There are longstanding persistent disparities in unemployment, so you can call it the one and a half times or the two times rule of black to white unemployment. If it's 3.7 right now, it's seven and a half for blacks. In the recession, when it was 10% for whites, it was 20% for blacks. There are challenges that exist in the labor market, and those are things that have lasted for decades that need some attention. I'll just add, you know, as unemployment is incredibly low right now, the income inequality, though, is incredibly vast and ever-increasing, so I think the reason why, at least in the United States, the government seems to be more interested in learning about these pay for success or pay for performance types is, it's basically the erosion of the American dream that if you worked hard and you got a good salary that you'd be able to buy a house, send your kids to college, and that's just not a reality for most people anymore, and so how do we better work with nonprofit organizations and for-profit institutions to create better results around economic mobility and security for Americans? And then to address the question that was before in terms of the measurements, I'll say, you know, we're still new in this pay for success on both the grant side and on the impact investment side, and it is an untested field and we're learning, and one of the things that I'm learning in this is to get market rate investors to invest in these type of pay for success models is that there are nuances to the deal in terms of the measurements of, you know, who gets to participate in the program, what are the outcomes that we're looking for? Like I'd love to see two years of retention, but that might be too long for investors and so there's a lot of negotiation and compromise that's rooted in big evaluations and data, but is something that I'm still learning and is something that's definitely, you know, people come at it with different varying viewpoints, but to make it successful, you know, you need to have a really strong infrastructure in place. So we are investing in a success measure for the little ones. So, and that's actually related to the future of work because having a whole child approach starting from beginning of life will hopefully yield results later on. So having social emotional learning kids who are creative minds and critical thinkers is what we want to see societally. So we are investing in this in partnership with the federal government and in child trends which is one of the most prominent research firms in early childhood on a success measure nationally. We have not invested yet on the workforce side. We are more in a learning mode at the media network on at the moment, especially around that idea of wellbeing or wellness or how could we have a bigger perspective on an individual person and the choices that they make. We invested in, you may have seen this, this was just published this week in quality of jobs. How do we define quality of jobs? But it's not getting exactly to measurement yet. And hopeful that with more tech, more data, we will, because one of the big issues until now was outcome data, how do you even track someone's outcomes over a certain period of time and reliability of those data? I think we are getting there on technology solutions and big data to do this. So hopeful that there may be solutions that some of us can partner on with the government over time. Go ahead. I'm Bethany. I'm a Kellogg MBA student. I was wondering, you talked a little bit earlier about kind of the idea of upward mobility, but I was curious about your thoughts within the workforce space on the trade off between a wage and a living wage. And particularly as the labor market is so tight right now, you might be seeing people who might never have participated in the workforce before taking advantage of some of your programs. And so how do you think about giving them their first wage or a minimum wage versus giving them the opportunity to have a living wage? I think the flavor I'll add to that is the geographic component to it, whereby the same occupation might provide a living wage in Ohio, but not be sufficient to cover rent in a city on the coast. And so how does that play into the way in which you're thinking about the cost effectiveness or the ROI of a program and ultimately how it should be availed to populations in need? Yeah, that's a great question. I think one of the challenges is recognizing that as middle class jobs are declining, how do you bring up the sort of lower wage service work that's booming, right? We're growing at the top and then we're growing at the base and we've partnered with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to figure out how do you bring more wages and dignity to those service positions? How do you create portable benefits that people can sort of bring between their jobs? And if you're a house cleaner, like how do you access benefits that would provide a safety net for you? And I think we really need to think hard in this economy of how to bring those lower wage jobs up because those are growing tremendously. And I think the other part of it is you need to make sure that if you're in one of those jobs, we probably, many people can raise their hand and say that they've worked in a job that was pretty low paying as their first job and there's differences between first jobs, but are they traps? Are you stuck in it forever? And I think that we don't do a great job of creating pathways like we've talked about. And so that's really important. I'll do a shameless plug. We do a whole, we have a thing called the Opportunity Occupations Monitor. You all tech savvy, you can Google that. And it's a look, we use 100 million job ads to look at the cost of living and adjusted and figure out what jobs pay above median wage, regionally adjusted for cost of living and what type of jobs are available for people without a bachelor's degree that are gonna pay above median wage and what jobs require a bachelor's degree but are not so well paying. And so one thing that we run a survey every year called the Survey of Household Economic Decision making the shed, which is where you'll hear the percent of the US population that doesn't have cash savings or credit for a $400 emergency, that number has come down a lot but it's still like a third of the population doesn't have that. One of the things that we constantly hear and reporting is that they would prefer a stable job. So there's lots of dimensions to a quality job beyond the wage. They would like to know that they got to work 40 hours a week rather than having an unpredictable schedule. They wanted to work during the day or they wanted to work in the evening to fit their life. So there are lots of things and stability and predictability in work for most workers in that survey is more important and that's a national representative sample more important than the actual wage if they had to take a trade off. So there are lots of components to job quality. Also maybe be provocative again and say like have we overtrained and do we overpay the top? Like somebody in my position you have to have I have an engineering degree I worked in management consulting I have two master's degrees I'm like 10 years in post master's like and I think what I observe in these like knowledge economy jobs is that we then we take these like super highly trained people we put them at the top we disintermediate a lot of middle management and just put everything on that tippy top and we use technology to like augment those people to be able to be super managers and do everything and then we also let all of the sort of wages then pull up at the top and I just don't know if that's sustainable and I don't know the answer to that question either it's just something I've been thinking about. Ooh is that a pause? Snaps? Go ahead. Hi my name is Karen and I run a community development organization called Consult Your Community and my question is to what extent are rigorous evaluation processes like randomized control trials actually used when measuring the efficacy of partnerships or even you know anything that you've administered in terms of a grant? I'm happy to actually go. So Prudential engaged in one of our Pay for Success projects whereby we scaled a program called Jewish Vocational Services in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. JVS is a tremendous organization in the greater Boston region with the track record of serving low income individuals across a range of different program tracks. Through this initiative, we were able to raise 12.2 million dollars to help them expand their services to 2,000 immigrants and refugees and expand access to four particular program tracks across a range of different intensities and immersiveness. So a basic skills training for people that are looking to get their foot in the door at entry level job. A certified nurse's assistance and industry recognized credential in track and then a bridges to college track. And within that program, the four program tracks we employed two different measurement and evaluation programs, not programs, structures. One program has a randomized control trial. A thousand people will get the program. A thousand people will not. The other three programs have a pre-post based on where people started. Was there material improvement in their income 24 months later? So that randomized control trial what we're actually measuring is in a two year period what was the earnings differential for individuals that engaged in the skills training program relative to a control group. And the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will repay the upfront investment based on the actual measured causally attributed earnings impact on the program. And so that's one example in the 30 pay for success social impact bond projects in the United States. They all employ a range of different measurement and evaluation approaches. And at the end of the day that evaluation methodology has to match the program, the population, the ultimate objective and intent of the program. And so it's the right tool in some instances and not the right tool in others. And that comes down to a series of conversations and discussions amongst the project partners. Anything else folks want to add around measurement and evaluation within their own portfolios? No, like I said, we're at the beginning stages. And so we will, you know, we completely understand too to ask for evaluation, a stringent evaluation that has randomized control trials that requires a lot of financial capital from our side. So we're also very conscious of the fact of how we look at our partners individually and then as a portfolio as a whole. Yeah, same for us. We track and we have goals on how many of our portfolio organizations have different types of rigorous evaluation. There's a spectrum. Even in our city, if it's done in a controlled environment, may not actually be scalable or may not be conclusive on whether something that works in a particular city or region will work in others. So even our cities are not perfect and they are expensive. There are a variety of evaluation methodologies that one can use. We are big fans. I think the field needs more rigorous evidence and evaluation. So we are tracking overall as a portfolio with a goal of having a meaningful percentage of our organizations move over time toward that goal. So we only have a few minutes left. Take both questions and we'll crowdsource them across the stage. Sure, hopefully mine's an easy one. My name is John. I'm with a corporate venture fund called Pearson Ventures. Other than Stuart's publications and the occupations opportunities monitors, do you have any recommended resources or readings so that we could take this topic back home with us when we leave the conference and continue to learn? Stuart's publication is long. So if you start it now by next SOCAP, we can talk about it. Second question. That would require less than 10 pages of reading a day. Yeah, so my name's Alex. I run a city funded accelerator for low to moderate income residents in San Diego to build businesses. And one of the things that I was wondering about is are there any models or things that you are looking at to sort of pair people who are seeking jobs and job training with the individuals that are actually sort of creating their own jobs from sort of an entrepreneurship standpoint. That seems to be sort of a big gap where they need employees but they can't seem to find them because most of the programs are putting people in sort of larger organizations. Thoughts on either of those questions? On the first question, I'll say social finance has a ton of resources and publications that they've put out and will soon, actually, maybe not soon in relatively some time in the future we'll be putting out a book particularly with the Federal Reserve Banks on ISAs. Other resources, Stuart? Where do you get your information from? Aside from me. No, so I will say... Self-sinerating font of nothing. We've put together, at least, for the Federal Reserve on finance-related issues. If you get onto our website, the Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity, we've pulled together all of the work that's happened on the Community Reinvestment Act and Workforce Development and so you can find that all in one place. There are... In terms of written work on the finance portion of Workforce Development, there's not a lot. There's a now 12-year-old e-book that you can find written by Heath Prince that's got a lot and it's got more than just outcome space. It's got state bonding efforts. It's got a lot of kind of... The re-applications of the tax improvement... Or TIF districts to training and connections with economic development organizations the way community colleges have funded themselves. So there are different types of innovation, but there's not a lot written on it. I'm happy... You can consider me a resource if you have questions about something you're looking for. I'm happy to do my best to try and answer it. We just don't do a ton of promotion of non-fed stuff, but there's a lot of... There's good stuff up. You won't find it on our website, at least. Thoughts on the second question? Kind of connecting entrepreneurs, individuals looking for jobs as a way to stimulate local economies, address skills gaps, find getting constraints. I love the question. I think it's underexplored. We just made our first commitment to small and medium-sized businesses three weeks ago, and so it's going to be a huge focus for us in 2020, and I love the nudge to explore the intersection. We've been doing all this skills training work and job creation work, and now we're going to be doing access to capital for underserved entrepreneurs, so definitely promoting people who might be able to work for themselves, but then it's also interesting to think about how might you be able to have some of those pathways actually go into small and medium-sized businesses, which the majority of Americans are employed in small businesses anyway, right? So it's a good question. I appreciate it. So we are doing a lot of work in childcare that happens to be only small and medium-sized enterprises and low-income workers. So that's an area of specific focus on our early childhood strategy, where we are seeing some models emerging of not only quality outcomes for the little ones, but also economic empowerment for the caregivers, very promising ones. Excellent. Well, we are at time. Please give a big thank you to the panel. Thank you.