 We'll do this, and you will see the recording stop starting just about now. OK, OK, well, with that, I'm excited to dive in. I will say we have a lot to cover today, so buckle up. Here we go. Lancy, would you dance to the slide? Thank you. OK, so for folks on the line who may be new to us, Lancy and I are here today representing New America. We're a non-profit, non-partisan organization headquartered in Washington DC. We are essentially a think and action tank that works across a number of issue areas. And both Lancy and I work within New America's Center for Education and Labor, which we call in shorthand Selma. And Selma's mission is really to restore the link between education and economic mobility. To do that, we focus on policies and programmatic innovation that's intended to strengthen key social institutions necessary to better connect education and economic mobility. So we do a wide range of work on things across the higher education, work-based learning, workforce development, and job quality landscapes. One of our larger projects at New America within Selma is the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship. And the project that we will be presenting on today was done in part with our PIA hat on, our Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship hat on. But it does include a number of organizations that are not exclusively focused on youth apprenticeship and may have kind of come to PIA through this project rather than the other way around. And we're happy to share more information about the PIA initiative later in the call. But this project is really kind of a cross-cutting effort on behalf of our team. So one of the things that we work on through PIA, we support a number of public-private partnerships around the country. And all of those organizations are led by an organization, sorry, all of those partnerships are led by an organization that's charged with coordinating cross-sector partners. We often refer to those entities as intermediaries. And I'll advance the slide and talk a little bit more about that, okay, thank you. So what is an intermediary? Before we dive into the research, we think it's important that we lay a little bit of common language down here for us. But intermediaries, as we'll be talking about them today, are organizations that really work across partners to establish a shared vision, to facilitate communication between stakeholders, and to coordinate implementation of work-based learning programs in a way that yields benefits for all stakeholders. Typically in the youth work-based learning space, we're talking about partnerships across many different entities, high schools, community colleges, employers, as well as workforce boards, unions, chambers of commerce, and community-based organizations too. These partners need to work really closely together to run work-based learning programs, but that's not always easy, as they all have different areas of expertise and often speak different languages and think differently about the purpose of work-based learning and training and their own roles within it. So to function successfully, work-based learning programs need a partner that's responsible for coordination, translation, and program administration among all of those different entities. And so we refer to that as an intermediary. Intermediaries come in all shapes, sizes, and scopes. They can be private entities, nonprofit organizations, chambers of commerce. They can also be public entities, or sorry, they can be public entities, community colleges, school districts, workforce investment boards, and many other agencies and departments as well. They can also operate at a hyper-local level or regionally, some also exist at the state level. And they typically play an important role in aligning partners, not just around a vision for the work, but also how the work can advance equity and working to ensure across partners that students and businesses are receiving adequate capacity and supports to deliver equitable outcomes through their work-based learning programs. Next slide, please. So I'm not gonna spend a ton of time on this slide, but we know from our registration, many of you are intermediaries or work near them and may be searching for a definition of them. So I just wanted to draw your attention to the fact that in the report, we did produce a table of intermediary functions and we really honed in on four key functions, categories of functions that intermediaries provide in these partnerships. And we've labeled them here, program development and delivery, stakeholder engagement, monitoring, evaluation and supports, and strategy and field building. An organization doesn't need to provide all of these functions to be an intermediary and typically they're actually coordinating these functions and sharing them with other partners. But we do think it's important to just understand and articulate the kind of things that intermediaries do and the kind of things they are funding. So we'll refer you to the table in the report to look at this more closely, but we don't wanna dwell too much on it today. Next slide, please. Because intermediaries sit at this junction between K-12, post-secondary, the private sector and other government entities, they typically combine multiple funding sources to operate. They can be public grants, formula funding and other types of sources and streams from public entities, local, state or federal. They can also pull down often private funding from philanthropic grants or fee-for-service revenue streams. There's a wide range of opportunities for these organizations to tap into, but their access to funding will typically depend on an organization's role and mission, what it is they're trying to do, their status, whether the organization themselves is public or privately run. The population of learners enrolled, certain entities, certain student populations have different types of funding eligibility like LIOA or IDEA is just two examples. The program types offered as we learned through our research, there are a number of state policies that allow for funding that's specific to apprenticeship, fewer that are specific to work-based learning, but the type of program type can affect the access to different types of money. And finally, state policies, different states fund intermediaries in different ways. Again, some of that is tied to program status or program type, but others have innovative policies to support intermediary capacity more generally like in the state of Indiana. Next slide, please. Okay, so with some of that language squared away, so you know what we're referring to when we talk about intermediaries, we wanted to share with you kind of the origins of this project. And so we have been working with a number of intermediaries through PIA and it occurred to us that there was really a lot of demystification that needed to happen about how intermediaries, about finance themselves, how did they make the money work? And so we developed this project and were guided through the project by three primary research questions. One, we were interested in understanding how intermediary organizations leverage different funding streams to support work-based learning and we were interested in the trade-offs and different kind of funding. So what major benefits or challenges do they face in combining these sources? How do program formats, intermediary types and partnership structures influence access to various resource streams? Was our second question, we wanted to understand if a program is run by a nonprofit organization versus a public entity, what does that mean as just one example for their access to different types of funding and the way that they can work with different partners who themselves may have access to different types of funding? And finally, we were interested in understanding what changes in practice or policy could enable more effective and efficient combinations of resources from across the different sources in streams that support and or could support high-quality work-based learning models for youth. And so the project that we're here to talk to you about today really tried to get at answers to these three questions. Next slide, please. To do that, we worked with a partner called Kinetic West which is a mission-driven consulting firm based in Seattle, Washington. And we worked with them to develop a survey to collect two years worth of financial data from seven work-based learning intermediaries across the United States. That survey asked to these intermediaries to share information with us about their organizational revenue, their program revenue and their program expenses. And the survey yielded really interesting information but just candidly, some of the data was not as clean as we thought it might be. And so at times it was difficult for us to draw comparisons or conclusions across the whole cohort which we share really just to underscore for you how complicated this work is. When we, we will share some of our findings in just a second from across the cohort but we were really keen to understand some of the how. The survey tells us what folks are doing, what it looks like but we were really interested in understanding how they make the money work. And so to understand that we also conducted extensive interviews with three intermediaries, Ajak from Washington State, career-wise Colorado in Colorado in Illinois High School District 214 from Illinois. And we have representatives from those three orgs on the line today and you'll have a chance to hear from them about how they make it work. Next slide please. So just before we dive in to start showing you some of what we found in this work, we wanted to share with you kind of a high level framing for how we were thinking about the process of combining funding. So we know that these intermediaries are working hard to combine funding to cover costs. And we knew headed into the project that there were the common terminology that folks use to describe this practice. One is braiding and this you've probably heard before, but braiding essentially means that funding sources are combined to cover costs, but each funding source retains its award specific identity for accounting and reporting purposes. In the graphic on the left side of your screen, you can see that there's a purple line that's a public funding source kind of in the middle of the diagram. And so let's say this is just a federal grant because it's braided in this example, that means the intermediary applied for that grant to support these two programs specifically. The intermediary tracks the use of these funds to ensure compliance with the funding agency's requirements. And when the grant ends, it's likely reporting on the outcomes for these two programs using a template or reporting document that is specific to the use for which it was applied, for which they applied for the grant. When the grant ends, those outcomes from program one and program two, they may report to that federal source, but they're likely reporting on those outcomes using different templates for all of the different sources that may be going into program one and program two. Some of the brown funding here, for example, also supports program one, but the intermediary likely use a different process to apply for those funds and will report separately to that funder, even though those two funding sources support the same program. On the right-hand side of your screen, you see blending, and blending works a little bit differently. As you can see in the graphic, the funding types are essentially pooled in a blended model. So once the money is received by an organization, and you can see in this example, there are both public sources and private sources being blended all together, they're essentially combined into a pot of funds and lose their unique award-specific identity. So, and just as an example, for reporting purposes in this hypothetical case, the intermediary would report outcomes on program one, but they would use the same metrics and reporting process essentially to all of the funders on that left-hand side of the screen. This is a super oversimplified example, but it's intended to convey the general idea of blending. And we will say it's much less common because it requires it for statutory approval or other types of approval from funders. And it's pretty rare, even though it may feel for program staff that the money is just one big pot or pool for your accounting staff and the folks that are really managing budgets, it doesn't look like that on the backend. In our work, we saw no evidence of true blending going on across these intermediaries. And so we're happy to talk a little bit more about that later, but that was an interesting finding for us really early on in the project. So I have been in charge of kind of laying the groundwork of what we sought to learn and who we are and what we started learning as we peel back the surface, but I'm gonna hand it over to my colleague, Nancy Down, who's a policy analyst here on the PIA team at New America to walk you through some of our findings and share a little bit more about the research. So Nancy, over to you. Thanks, Taylor. I am gonna talk a little bit, oh, next slide. I'm gonna talk a little bit about sort of the what of what we found in this cohort and then we will talk to our wonderful panelists about the how. So the table on your screen right now provides some basic and anonymized information about the seven intermediaries in our study. I'm not gonna go through every single piece of information but there's just a few sort of important things I wanna call your attention to here. The first is that these intermediaries offer intensive work-based learning opportunities or they offer a range of different work-based learning opportunities and we focused on the most intensive offerings they have. So these are our job preparation and job training programs, not exploration or job shadow type opportunities. We also had a range of sizes represented here. For example, you can see annual revenues range from less than $500,000 to more than $5 million and we had a similar sort of wide range in the number of participants served which range from as low as 15 to up to 13,000. All of these intermediaries serve youth in some shape or form. Five are focused specifically on youth and they're remaining to serve both youth and adults. And then in terms of sort of the type of intermediary they are three are program implementers which means they are focused on program delivery and partner coordination primarily to our field builders which means they are more focused on building and supporting programs that are led by other organizations and the last two identified themselves as a hybrid which means they do sort of a mix of both of those things. Okay, so this figure shows the funding source types that each intermediary in our study relied on and I hope it'll start to give you a sense of the very, very complicated and complex work these organizations are taking on. There are a lot of colors on the screen, a lot of bars. So just to situate you very quickly, the letters on the left represent the different intermediaries in the study and each bar represents the intermediaries overall revenue, the different colors or the different sections of each bar represent proportions of that overall revenue. So while we cannot compare dollar amounts across bars we can compare proportions. You will also notice the very colorful legend at the top. As you'll see from that the intermediaries in our study relied on a whole bunch of different funding sources to run their programs. The teal blue and purple shades represent different public funding types and the red and brown shades indicate different private funding types. Overall public and philanthropic grants were kind of the two most dominant types of funding sources with philanthropic grants taking that top spot. Most, we also noticed some really interesting trends in the philanthropic grants that we want to point out quickly. Most of them were really very small, more than half or under a hundred thousand dollars and had really short performance periods of under a year which was especially notable because many of the programs they were supporting lasted a year or longer. So in terms of the breakdown of these seven intermediaries, four of the seven, which are intermediaries A, D, F and G relied primarily on philanthropic dollars which we defined as 50% or more of total revenue in the year reported and the other three which are BC and E relied primarily on public funding. Okay, so with this slide we are moving from that organizational wide view down to a more sort of programmatic level. This figure shows the programs each intermediary runs and for each program it indicates the number of funding sources that support it. At the program level, which is what we're looking at now, this is where rating tends to get even more complicated and that's because even within the same intermediary programs draw on different combinations of funding sources to support their work which adds sort of a whole other layer of complexity. So for example, you can see here intermediary B runs three different programs. One pulls on 10 sources, the other 12, the other three. So just based on the sheer numbers alone you know that they are not relying on the exact same combination of funding sources which may mean budgeting for those is rather tricky endeavor which you'll hear a little bit more about later. And then just on average the intermediaries in our study relied on seven sources to fund individual programs. And with that back to Taylor and then we'll go to our panel. Thanks, Lancy. I'm gonna be pretty quick on this slide. I just want to cover a couple of them that we think are probably most interesting because I think our panelists are gonna get into some of these points later on but I would be interested to know and you can drop this in the chat if you agree with this, if you're part of an intermediary but one of the things that we heard is that program expenses are typically easier to fund than personnel costs especially if those personnel costs are to cover personnel who are doing things that we might consider field building activities or employer recruitment or the kind of things that are important for growth and important for the kind of growing towards scale but are not always directly tied to enrollments. So that was interesting to us and consistent with what we had been hearing from across the PIA network in the years prior to kicking off the study. Again, not terribly surprising because time-limited grants are useful at startup but they pose challenges to sustainability over time especially as Lancey said, when they are very short and they are like one or two years but the programs themselves last for two or three years that can cause some anxiety among partners who really want evidence and assurance that the program is well-funded beyond a particular enrollment program cycle for a cohort. We did see some evidence that intermediaries are accessing more public funding as they grow they are more competitive for public funding particularly public grants and that having a larger profile and a larger footprint may be one way to be more competitive particularly for federal funding. Sometimes folks do this just by sheer growth others have found ways to do it through partnerships and sort of group or consortia-based applications. There is sort of a myth I think in or maybe myth is a strong word for it but there's sort of a sense among work-based learning intermediaries that if you can tap into public funding you have a route to sustainability and one of the things we learned in both the qualitative responses and through our interviews is that public funding is not always necessarily more attracted and the intermediaries that we spoke to talked about the trade-offs of public grants they can be larger and longer term but they also take a lot of work to administer and apply for, maintain and they can leave big gaps in folks budgets when a particular funding source disappears or is not renewed. On the flip side they are longer they tend to be for higher amounts of money and so they do provide a level of stability for folks that was attractive. One of the most interesting things we found was that intermediaries on the whole struggle to communicate the true costs and value of their programs particularly if they were leveraging funding from partners that didn't show up in their own balance sheet. So it's just one example if you are a nonprofit intermediary working with a school system and you were using CTE classes for instructional purposes as part of a program you may not necessarily be able to quantify the value of those courses which makes it difficult for you to turn around and say the true cost of administering of this program is X, Y and Z. We also think that's important because it makes it difficult for intermediaries to articulate the value of resources that they are leveraging and moving from the public sector and also from employers in the form of wages or other investments in the programs. And finally our panelists will get into this sustainability is an elusive and ill-defined concept. No intermediary in our study could like very clearly define the absolute route to sustainability. We heard often sustainability is kind of a goal but we wouldn't necessarily know for sure if we got there because the complicated nature of these funding models means that there are always parts of the model that are apt to change at any given time. And so one of our, we walked away from this feeling like the field needs to do a bit more to understand what true sustainability would look like, what the optimal balance of resources might be for particular organizations operating in different contexts and that sustainability is not the sort of like static concept but it really is something that changes and evolves as the intermediaries in the programs themselves do and understanding kind of thresholds for what is considered sustainable or not would be helpful additional research for the field to engage in. And so again, these are trends and challenges from us. We had a series of recommendations that we included in the report. We are not gonna walk through those here but instead what we're gonna do is give a chance for some leaders in the field to share the work that they do and they I'm sure will have some recommendations for you on the line for us. And many, much of what we heard from them is reflected in some of the recommendations that we included in the report. So Lansing has dropped that report into the chat. We're happy to answer questions about anything that we've presented on related to the report but before we do that I'm gonna hand it over to Lansing for the second portion of our webinar today. All right, thank you so much. So we are gonna dive into a conversation with our three panelists today who are and I'm trying to spotlight them as I go here. So excuse some slightly delayed response times are Janet Persky from CareerWise in Colorado, Chris Pearson from AJAC in Washington State and Marcella Zipp from Illinois High School District 214 in Cook County, Illinois. So what we're gonna do, how we're gonna structure this is I'm going to sort of direct questions to each panelists one at a time and then we'll wrap up with some questions for the full group. Feel free to keep putting questions in the chat as they occur to you and we will get to them at the Q and A at the very end. So without further ado, let's hear first from Janet Persky who is a VP at CareerWise USA. CareerWise USA is a field building intermediary that works on youth apprenticeship efforts nationwide. Our analysis here and what's depicted on the screen focused specifically on CareerWise Colorado which is essentially a business unit within the larger organization of CareerWise USA. CareerWise Colorado just for some quick context operates in 10 Colorado counties offers youth apprenticeships across 35 different occupations in 10 industries. As you can see in this slide which shows CareerWise Colorado's funding sources in 2021 the organization braided 11 different funding streams. Two of those were federal grants which are those blue lines at the top and then the remaining nine sources were various private sources with most of those as most of those being philanthropic dollars. So Jana, my first question for you is a little about CareerWise's history and where you're going. So when CareerWise Colorado started out you had some pretty major philanthropic grants that allowed the organization sort of to get up and running and launch its first programs. But as we heard in interviews with your staff the organization is actually interested in shifting away from sort of that more intense reliance on philanthropic funding towards a more even split between one philanthropic dollars to public funding and three earned revenue. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the drivers and motivators behind that strategic shift. Yeah, thanks, Lancy. It's great to be here and happy to speak a little bit to that. Really the main driver behind that is the sustainability and scalability of our program. And as Taylor mentioned that can be a little bit elusive to define but trying to move in that direction. First of all, we are really grateful for our philanthropic funders we continue to be and so that was a huge part of getting us started. But as I think a lot of us know philanthropy can be fickle. As Lancy mentioned, there can be short timelines ranges of dollar amounts changing priorities from foundations or donors restrictions on the usage. So it can be pretty difficult to build a sustainable program at scale that's reliant only on those films are five dollars. And so bringing in the government funding opens up opportunities for scale. US Department of Labor has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in youth apprenticeship just in the past couple of years. And so I have to believe that's orders of magnitude greater than the collective philanthropic investment in apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship specifically. We definitely face the trade-offs that Taylor mentioned between restrictions on those funds versus the stability of those funds. So it's not the be all end all but it's a valuable resource that also demonstrates credibility and alignment with established government standards programs things that can help institutionalize some of this. And then the final piece is earn revenue which is much more flexible and can be deployed in any way to kind of fill those gaps across the program. As you can see, we have a lot of different funding. It's presented here as a break it but we actually I think are probably more in the blended category in that it can be really hard for us to break out like specific elements of our program that are supported by specific funding streams because it's all in service of building this youth apprenticeship program. So having that earned revenue that's entirely unrestricted that can fill those gaps makes it much easier to fund our program across the board and by accessing these three pots of money it gives us sort of flexibility to move towards scalability with the support we need in a way that feels sustainable and not overly reliant on just one stream or just one sort of area of interest but really being able to balance and diversify that. Thanks, Jenna, I think you've done a good job setting up the next question because you've talked a little bit about the earned revenue stream and I wanna direct folks on this graphic specifically to that sort of thin bright red fee for service line, which is the second from the bottom because that is a pretty small line on this graphic but it actually has a pretty big conceptual significance for career-wise and for career-wise as youth apprenticeship model. So I'm wondering if you can close us out here with a sort of quick explanation of what that line means and why it's so important for a career-wise model. Yes, thank you, Nancy, it's a great question. So just some context, there are two sources of career-wise generally fee-for-service funding. One is business fees, which is what businesses pay career-wise to support youth apprenticeship within their program. So that's standing up the program providing hiring support. And because this chart is primarily focused on career-wise Colorado, that is the vast majority of the funding there but our broader organization also does consulting and we're really fortunate to do a lot of that work alongside New America and PIA, but we've received some funding and fees to provide consulting services and technical assistance to communities throughout the country that are interested in standing up youth apprenticeship. So that's where that earned revenue is coming from right now. And I mentioned earlier, it's important because it offers us a path to sustainability without relying on philanthropy. And we're a long way away from that being our source of funding. This work is hard and the value of it isn't always obvious which is why that philanthropic funding and that government funding is so important but it is a key element of that path. But beyond just the sustainability, it's also a philosophical question for us. And this is why Nancy, I really appreciate the question because it speaks to the core of what career-wise is trying to do. We want our program to have value. We want it to have value to employers, to apprentices, to the partners that we provide services to. And while not everything of value can be quantified by hard dollars, having people give you hard dollars demonstrates that there is a degree of value there that you're moving in the right direction and that you're moving towards being a sustainable program embedded within the system. And that investment also gets skin in the game from our partners. It's a pretty common story that when people receive a free or subsidized service they don't often invest as much in scoping the work up front, providing the capacity to implement it, really seeing it through. So in identifying partners whether that's employers or other communities who are willing and able to put funding up, even if it's not covering 100% of the cost, it's a really helpful filter and helps bring us some of our most bought-in and successful partners. Thank you so much, Jana. I'm going to turn now to Chris Pearson of AJAC. Chris is the Director of Operations and Funding at AJAC, which is a nonprofit apprenticeship intermediary that serves workers and employers in Washington State's aerospace and advanced manufacturing industry. AJAC, as you can see on this screen on the right-hand side runs three different programs and in fiscal year 2022, AJAC rated 21 funding streams to support those three programs. And most of its funding, as you can see on the left-hand side came from various, lots of various public sources. So Chris, I'm sure the audience is looking at this and as Taylor and I did this project, wondering what the heck is going on? This is a really enormously complex image. And one thing I want to point folks to amidst this complexity is that thick dark blue line that says state contract. This is really important funding for AJAC. So I'm wondering if you can start off by giving us a sort of quick and dirty, high-level explanation of what this funding stream is and why it matters so much for AJAC. Sure, thank you, Nancy. And very happy to be here and appreciate all the interest in our work and the opportunity to talk about it more. So AJAC has been around since 2008 and we were founded through a state investment from Washington State. So it was around the time that a very large aerospace company was moving from Washington to other parts of the country and Washington State really wanted to make an investment in apprenticeship and specifically the supply chain in the aerospace industry to say, hey, the lights are still open here in Washington State and this investment is gonna help keep this industry alive and thriving. And so that investment basically helped to create AJAC and what it did was provided funding to support the delivery of apprenticeship training and the funding was kind of split into two different buckets. One was essentially to support the operational expenses of supporting a registered apprenticeship program and then a smaller bucket was basically in the form of FTE or full-time enrollment funds that went through our community college system. So the operational funding basically gave us the programmatic bandwidth to support everything having to do with apprenticeship on the backend from employer recruitment to coordinating with customers to colleges, to supporting apprentices, enrolling them into the program and identifying what their needs were. And then the classroom portion of the training was what helps to generate the FTE funds that support the instructional component of the program. And so that funding basically came to, it has been coming to AJAC since our founding until very recently as an annual contract. Really until about three years ago, we were the only organization that could provide this to the state. So it was essentially a no bid contract for all of that time up until about three years ago when other programs basically came around that could also potentially deliver on this. So it has basically shifted to a competitive bid and the shifted from a kind of annual contracts to a five-year contract. And we're two years into that five-year contract now. Sorry, I wasn't sure if it was muted there, but I'm not. So I think what Taylor and I learned in talking to you, Chris, that we thought was interesting and notable is that that funding stream goes only to, essentially it can only be used for your adult apprenticeship program, but it is sort of so large that it helps support not only the program, but AJAC's existence as an intermediary, which your other two programs do the apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship can sort of in some ways leverage to help, that you can leverage to help those programs run. So I wanna talk a little bit more about the pre-apprenticeship program, which you told us when we spoke in roles the most economically vulnerable participants of all three programs. And because of that, your team at AJAC works really hard to ensure that pre-apprentices can participate in that program for free. But that is not always easy to do. And that's in part because the pre-apprenticeship program is also the hardest of these three to fund. It does not receive a big state contract for the operational costs that come with running it. And you can see there that there are about a dozen really tiny funding streams going into it. And that's what I'm gonna have Chris explain here. So Chris, can you tell us a little bit about how AJAC fills the gaps to make sure pre-apprentices can participate at no cost? Yes. So the way that we deliver pre-apprenticeship is in partnership with our community and technical colleges. So we predominantly deliver those programs on community college campuses to the extent possible. Those programs are on the books at the colleges for credit, which can be applied to degree pathways at those colleges. If that's the next step route that those pre-apprentices choose to go or if they wanna continue on the apprenticeship path, we support them in that to get them employed and then into apprenticeship. But really where all of those different funding streams come into play is covering the cost of tuition and other participant fees that need to be covered. And to fund the instruction, we work with our colleges to remunerate off of the FTEs that are generated through those classes. So the instruction is covered but because they are credit-bearing students, there's tuition involved with those. And depending on the college, those can be quite expensive for a one-quarter program because they're one-quarter programs, they're not held eligible. So we really work with our college partners and various community partners who have access to SNAP E&T resources, WIOA resources, a whole host of various worker retraining, workforce development funds to essentially cover those costs, let's say through an ITA or something of that nature. And so we really do a lot of work on the backend to help folks to co-enroll through community partners or to enroll in those programs at the colleges to make sure that those fees are covered and there's no cost to the individual. Great, thanks so much, Chris. Last but not least, we have Marcella Zipp, who is the director of grants and special programs at Illinois High School District 214. I think we referred to her in the report as a budget wizard. So you'll get a sense now of why that is. D214 is located in the Chicago suburbs and is home to the Center for Career Discovery, which essentially functions and operates as an intermediary within the school district itself. So the Center for Career Discovery operates a whole bunch of different career exploration and training activities, but for this or opportunities, but for this analysis, we looked at just the three most intensive programs they run and I have not changed the slide. So I will do that, there you go. So the image on this slide shows that in fiscal year 2022, the Center combined eight different funding streams to support these programs. Local K through 12 education funds, which are that big purple line made up the largest portion of the overall funding sources followed by federal and then state grants. So Marcella, when we talk to you, you told us about your sort of very strategic approach to breeding those K through 12 dollars with the federal and state dollars. And I think it's really interesting in the group will have a lot to learn from that. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about that approach, which funds do you apply first and why and what are the benefits of this approach to D214 and the Center for Career Discovery? Yes. Hi, everyone. Great to be here and talk about budgets with work-based learning favorite thing. As Taylor did allude in the beginning, she described some of the challenges with state and federal grants and the gallities around blending them with other funding streams. So, you know, we don't deal with blending. I'm not gonna take on that fight right now. And we take a braiding approach to how we fund the Center for Career Discovery and our work-based learning within that. And when developing our program budgets, I apply the grant dollars first to all of our expenses beginning with the least flexible funding streams we have, which are those with the most specific and rigid student eligibility requirements and then move towards applying grant dollars to our program with the more flexible grant options. And I worked directly with the Center for Career Discovery staff on identifying students' eligibility for these certain grants as well as what grants are able to support the program itself. So we're crossing all our Ts and dotting our I's to make sure that the students getting funded by this are the ones that the grant intends. So for example, with our students with disabilities who are in a work-based learning program in our vocational education area within the Center for Career Discovery, these students are placed onsite working on skills in a work center lab. And we built that lab last year with some of the COVID federal grant funds that we received, or they could go out with an external employer with typically grant funded job coach if they need some support, but with the goal of eventually getting them to a self-supported work site where they need minimal or no assistance from a job coach. And the grants that fund this are IDEA, which is Individuals with Disabilities Act. This is a common formula grant most school districts receive anyway for special education. STEP, which is secondary transitional experience program. We received this through the Illinois Department of Rehabilitation. And then we have youth WIOA funds through the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership. So we identify which category the student would fall into based on their eligibility. So if they're an IDEA student, STEP student or WIOA student, and which grant would also work best for them with their work-based learning goals. So that these funds sort of follow the student and can be used to support their participation in the different programs with work-based learning. And this setup allows our local district funds, which have the fewest restrictions and reporting requirements compared to grants to be applied last, covering whatever the grant dollars don't or can't. And then a very specific example of this would be that we would have a student enrolled in WIOA who needs transportation to and from their assigned work site. The cab costs would be covered first by the WIOA funds. And if there's still remaining transportation expenses at the end of the school year because we used up all of our WIOA grant funds for the year, then we have some district funds set aside to cover any remaining costs. And this practice certainly ensures that our WIOA grant is completely spent down each year and minimizes the use of district funds for the transportation. I've been doing this in district 214 since 2013. I've talked to a lot of people about braiding funds for their program. I see a lot of hesitancy with people about spending down their grant because of course we're all worried about running out of funding, but our approach is to spend down the grant first and then apply our district funds if needed. We even have a small contingency fund for like a super emergency situation if we spent every dime we had or the bottom completely fell out of grant funding with our totally separate organization, District 501C3 Foundation. So that the entire program wouldn't collapse completely if there was a gap in our funding. Yeah, thanks Versa. I think one of the most interesting things, Taylor, and I learned while working on this report was the way you all are thinking in really innovative ways about how to make the funding work, not only to be compliant with all the requirements, but also to make it as flexible and workable for your program as possible. I just want to close up with a quick question before we move on to sort of a lightning round with the full group. That line at the bottom, those two small brown lines represent philanthropic grants which are clearly compared to the public sources of a really small share of your overall funding, but you use those philanthropic dollars really strategically. So I'm wondering if you can give us just sort of a very brief explanation of what those philanthropic dollars go towards and again, a little bit about why that model works for you all. Yep, and I'm gonna say the word fickle again with grant funds because we've not really relied on philanthropic grants to support our long-term program costs because those dollars, as I've worked with them seem to be more fickle than district funds or even our multi-year public grants. If a public grant award would be reduced or eliminated, we usually know that's gonna happen probably two years in advance. So that at least gives us a heads up. So we know that we can't count on the funds for the next year and it gives us time to secure new funding streams or adjust the program and staffing to somehow accommodate for those funding changes. But private foundations on the other hand could choose not to renew a grant with little advanced warning. And that's uncertainty really makes staff nervous because we don't wanna be making drastic changes year to year entirely based on funding. We want the program designed to be consistent because it works better for students. But the philanthropic funds do have a very important role within the Center for Career Discovery and our work-based learning. One of the great things about philanthropic funds is that is much less intensive grant management and we will use those philanthropic grants to pursue new untested pilot programs where we're essentially channeling the private dollars into R&D research and development efforts. And we use this strategy to launch new programs or expand existing ones, then evaluate them to determine if they should become permanent. If they became permanent, then we apply the braided funds to those students using the strategies I previously described. So we can develop and test new programming to be innovative this way with philanthropic funds but not jeopardize all of our other funding because we weren't meeting wheel of benchmarks or any other required performance indicators that usually come along with the state and federal funds. Awesome, thank you so much, Marcella, Chris and Jana. I have one more sort of lightning round question for you. I'm conscious of time and wanna make sure our audience has a chance to ask questions. So I'm going to just ask this one question and we have, I don't know exactly who all is on the line but I imagine we have some folks who are in the policy making and or philanthropic funding space. And so this is your speak truth to power moment here. And so I wanna know, we've talked a little bit about the strategies and challenges you all encounter in this work, the strategies you use to make it all work for you. I'm wondering if you could share one thing that policymakers or philanthropists that that makes more sense for your organization could do to make financial sustainability more of a reality for your organization in the long term. And I will go in reverse order. So I'll start with Marcella and then Chris and then Jana. Yep. I have two items on this one. First is that multi-year grants of three to five years provides a high level of commitment and certainty from a funding perspective. So you can focus on program implementation and serving the students instead of constantly chasing down dollars to keep the program running. And then the second one is to broaden the target populations for youth work-based learning. District 214's philosophy is that all youth should be able to participate in work-based learning opportunities. But sometimes the funding dictates only certain groups of students can be funded or student, this happens to us a lot. A student must meet multiple criteria which then makes the target population so small it's not even worthwhile to have a grant. So for example, a student that would have to be low income, have a disability considered from a historically underrepresented gender or ethnicity in the occupation, you start out with a pool of 100 and then you're down to only maybe five students that meet those eligibility requirements. So making sure that the funding isn't so restrictive that it makes the number of students eligible too small. And my recommendations almost are exactly the same as Marcella's, I think that especially the funding horizon for grants, it's already been mentioned in Taylor's overview, the grants of really less than two years, I don't think are, do us well in the long run. These are programs that are typically two years in length at minimum, especially if we're looking at trying to invest in career pathways, even if it's starting with a pre-apprenticeship experience, we wanna be set up so that we're supporting young people along a broader pathway and that three to five years really not only helps to support those youth, those young people along that full horizon but it also gives us the stability that we need to be able to execute on delivering those programs in as effective way as we can. And Marcella, I think your point too about considering all of the different hoops that people have to jump through in order to be eligible for funding does end up reducing the pool that we can work with. And that's part of the reason why at least for us, you see 20 plus different funding streams that we're trying to work with because we don't wanna have to say no to someone who comes and says, I wanna participate in this program to get to a better spot. And so I think that your point on that was well taken. Yeah, I'll echo what Chris and Marcella said about just restrictions being really difficult to do innovative work. If you look at the private sector and like VC investments and venture capital investments and things like that, folks are picking teams. Interesting those teams to make the right pivots and do the work to have the impact of what they have. Philanthropy and government and other sources often pick a very narrow source of impact and restrict you to doing that. And it can actually diminish the impact that you have when you don't have that flexibility to be innovative. And so if we're putting people in positions to do this work, we should create the opportunity for them to do that work. And then that also involves reducing the admin burden. I was also on the Philanthropy side. I think that before career-wise, there's some really good conversations about this, but every funding source, government, Philanthropy asking for lots and lots of really difficult in specific reporting on a specific cadence on a specific timeframe can be true admin burden in terms of the work. And again, if the goal of providing this funding is to maximize the impact, you gotta be able to set people up to do that work, to trust them to do it, to not have them, to allow them to focus on doing that. And so just anything that can be done to open up space and support space for people to make the right decisions for the students, the young people, the employers, you know, all the different participants that they're working with and not spend time focused on exactly what the funding source needs or has restricted. I think that first bucket of time is way more impactful. Great, thank you all so much. I know we only have a few minutes left, so probably not time for a whole bunch of questions, but I see Jenny with her hand raised, so Jenny, I'll let you come off mute and ask your question. First, thanks so much you guys for doing this work because this is super confusing in a way because it's not all neat. And so this is actually probably as much for the PIA team as it is for the speakers, but I'm interested in sort of how much it's costing to deliver youth apprenticeship in particular, and when I look at the numbers that we've sort of combined a bunch of numbers that include internship and pre-apprenticeship, which are probably invariably less expensive than apprenticeship, so just wondering if there are sort of doing that next level of data analysis to, I should stop talking. So, but about the, how much it's costing so we can begin to sort of see, compare again, not perfectly, but just in a sense, how much it's costing to support youth apprentices. Lancy, I'm happy to take that one real quick if you want to. Hey Jenny, thanks for a good question. We actually had hoped to be able to do program level analysis in this research. We got, I'll be really honest, in the survey, the way that folks answered the program expense questions varied considerably and the data was not clean enough for us to do the analysis that we wanted to do. And so, I think what you're asking for is right and something we need, but we need to think of a different way to get at that information from a wide range of program providers that are organizing their budgets and organizing their expenses in really, really different ways. And so, as just one example, we had a very difficult time looking at the data teasing out direct and indirect expenses because we had programs that include staff entirely as an indirect expense and some that included it as a direct expense in programs and many, many, many that split it depending on the function of the staff. And so, when we were trying to isolate program costs for intermediaries that run multiple programs, it became almost impossible for us to do that across a cohort of sites because all of the budgets looked very, very different. And so, you are not wrong. We do need that. We did try and we need to probably go back to square one to figure out a cleaner way to collect that from a smaller group of folks who are kind of designing, describing and conceptualizing their programs and their budgets more similarly than we found in our cohort. That said, we chose a really diverse cohort on purpose because we wanted to understand a little bit how the organizational type might have influenced the way they did that. So, like on the line right now, we have two nonprofits that are training intermediaries, work-based learning, apprenticeship intermediaries and a school district looks totally different when we start talking about how you conceptualize your role in an ecosystem and how staff is allocated across the many different functions that intermediary might be providing. So, kind of a long answer, but. All right, thanks Taylor. I don't see anybody else's hand raised right now. So, I just want to point our panelists quickly to this program from Chris Harrington in the chat. He says, one, what is the typical administrative cost as a percent of total that funders will allow? And two, what percent of funding can be used to leverage other funding? And then he gives an example that I think will be easier read than read aloud to. So, curious if any of our panelists want to tackle either of those quickly in our remaining two minutes together. I could speak quickly to this, that this is the typical answer you're gonna get from a grant's professional, is that it depends on the grant. Because like the idea of grant, we're not allowed to put any administrative costs into that, but we have other federal grants where we could put 5% administrative costs into it. Our WIOA grant, we have a full-time supervisor paid by that. So, it really depends on the grant and what the grant requirements are that you have to look closely into. And that all figures into the funding puzzle then of sometimes people are split between three and four grants in terms of how their position is funded. All right, Chris or Jenna, any super, super quick final words on that? Nothing else? I want to say the exact same thing. Okay, great. All right, well then, I know we're right up against time, so I'll turn over to Taylor to close us out quickly. Great, thank you, Lancy. Folks, if you have additional questions that we didn't answer today, always feel free to send those through to us. We will not bother Marcella, Jenna or Chris anymore because they have given us an awful lot of time and expertise over the last several months through this project. But we're happy to do our best to try to get some answers for you. We know this is really complicated stuff and to the question that Jenny asked in my answer, like I think we have a lot more to learn in this space and this is really just kind of a dipping our toe in this area of research to lay some groundwork for further questions. So huge thank you to Chris, Jenna and Marcella, again for your time and your expertise and your endless patience with our questions because you really helped us learn quite a bit neither Lancy nor I are finance professionals. So we learned a lot over the last several months. Big thanks to everyone on the line who joined us today and finally a big thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who supported this work and a lot of our work through the partnership to advance you the partnership more generally. Please keep your eye out for various emails and updates from PIA for future webinars like this one. And we wish everybody a happy, healthy, safe holiday season and we look forward to reconnecting with you or I look forward to reconnecting with you in the new year. So you may have other connections with our staff for the next few days, who knows? But I'm signing off very soon. So just a big thank you to everybody for all that you do, for all that you have shared with us and we invite you to continue working with us as we learn more and more and more about this growing field. Thanks so much. Thanks all, take care, bye bye. Thank you. Thank you.