Search

Hiring people who have served prison sentences has never been a priority in the United States. For men and women who were once incarcerated, finding any job is difficult; finding a sustainable, family-supporting job is nearly impossible. Today the country is at a critical crossroads on this issue, and it's time for change. As the nation works in earnest toward an equitable economic recovery and focuses on preparing people for the jobs of the post-pandemic world, action must be taken to ensure the reentry population is positioned for employment. This report argues that the nation must match the breadth and scale of the investments that support U.S. systems of incarceration by investing in a comprehensive and scalable approach to workforce development that connects returning citizens with jobs and equips them for long-term careers. [This report was supported by the Justice and Mobility Fund.]

This document identifies guiding principles that intermediary staff members and leaders can use to support equitable career outcomes for youth--particularly Black and Latinx youth and young people who are experiencing poverty. These four principles are imperatives for how staff members at intermediary organizations can design strategies for guiding and engaging with youth.

This report examines community feedback to shed light on the impact technical assistance (TA) has on place-based programs for people in disadvantaged communities. Focusing on how TA can shape practices, expand stakeholder knowledge, and enhance stakeholder networks, it offers guidelines for future TA investments.

For generations, Americans have known what to expect from their high schools. Teenagers in cities across the U.S., like their parents and grandparents before them, could expect to go to a large high school with as many as three or four thousand of their peers. They could anticipate a day segmented into 45 minute blocks, each devoted to a different subject, and a year punctuated by predictable rituals from the annual Thanksgiving day football game with the arch-rival school to the periodic honor roll assembly. They could expect to hear at graduation the names of those going on to college and those receiving special scholarships and honors. The rest (many not unhappily) saw high school as the end of their formal education. The "one-size-fits-all" assumption of the large comprehensive high school is giving way to increased choice for young people and their parents among a variety of schooling designs, some of which look quite different from the regularities and rituals of the past. In just a few short years, the landscape of high schooling in Boston and a number of cities has been redrawn--a development that is beginning to attract the attention of educational, community, and philanthropic leaders in many other urban areas throughout the country.