Together, the Century Foundation and the Urban Manufacturing Alliance have assembled a cohort of eight leading urban workforce development organizations forging inclusion in manufacturing training, businesses, and communities – called Industry & Inclusion 4.0 (I&I).

These are organizations seizing on seismic changes in technology and manufacturing, as a wedge to push for an inclusive future for the production economy and as a source of good paying jobs and wealth for Black and Brown communities. These organizations are in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Buffalo, Baltimore and Cleveland, and half serve youth and half serve adults. All have deep partnerships with industry, and all have a commitment to equity and inclusion as a key part of their organization.

Our cohort’s first learning and discussion topic was Organizational Scale and Impact. To help our cohort members grapple with what scale means to them, I&I hosted a webinar where we explored ways leaders of color and organizations serving people of color are rising to these challenges of scale. We discussed how these organizations can effectively train, place, and support dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of clients, while thinking about their scale and overall impact. 

In this conversation, Tracie Neuhaus from Monitor Institute by Deloitte provided a set of guiding questions to consider when scaling and illustrated multiple scaling strategies. Samra Haider from Center for Employment Opportunities talked about the process of scaling from one site in one state to 29 sites in 10 states. Emily DeRocco from E3: Engage Educate Employ shared methods for bringing nationally distributed resources to regional and local networks.

Below are a few takeaways we picked out from the discussion:

There is no one size fits all strategy for scaling workforce development initiatives. Strategies can range from expanding existing in-house, direct support to building affiliations with aligned organizations, to publishing and distributing IP to advocating for policy change. Scaling isn’t always an easy or smooth process; organizations must take into account the skill set and resources necessary to scale. From our discussion, when developing a scaling strategy, each organization needs to explore, among other things: program fidelity, budget for expansion, if it is important to pursue policy change, and whether or not it is possible to motivate others to adopt programming. Organizations will often find after this exploration process they will best achieve their goals by implementing more than one strategy, allowing them to scale their impact both in the number of people being impacted and the magnitude of the impact on the individual.

Before scaling it is important to know what problem you are trying to solve. It is difficult to evaluate which scaling strategy to implement without a deep understanding of the problem beyond your existing center of attention. If an organization can illustrate the context of the problem in multiple locations and show that it cannot be solved through the actions of just one site, one company, or one resource then it supports the need to increase efforts. Knowing where the same problem exists in other parts of a city, state, or across the country can also help identify where to target scaling efforts. Identifying these two elements will also aid in generating clarity on which scaling strategy(ies) to invest in.

The scaling process has multiple stages regardless of the strategy. For example opening an office in another city first requires getting to know that location’s communities, leaders, and existing resources. Then there is relationship development, staffing, and then delivering services. This then starts another set of stages growing from proof of concept to learning and adjusting to increasing services. It is important to have an awareness of the development stages and a strategy for managing the growth. 

Infrastructure can be key to successful scaling. In the context of scaling workforce development, infrastructure can include, among other things, capital (social and financial), a data sharing platform, intellectual property, and staff training. The infrastructure needs to be both dependable and flexible to be in alignment with the multiple stages of growth. Many organizations may shy away from focusing energy, resources, and effort on infrastructure development in fear of it taking away from delivering support and services. However a lack of infrastructure can become a barrier in itself preventing dependable services and having the opposite effect, leading to a false belief that a strategy isn’t working. 

Partnering with government can align efforts, together. Amplified by the COVID-19 crisis, but present long before, are the estimated 2.4 million manufacturing job openings that will be needed in the next decade, in the U.S., partnering with government will be an effective way for local organizations to scale their efforts and contribute to the response. While the “ground game” of workforce development is local, the government can act as a convenor and create context and an argument for programs’ return on investment. They can also deploy strategies regionally and nationally, developing, scaling, and sustaining models around demand-driven innovations in workforce development.