Career Pathway Initiative Creates Alignment Around Prosperity

The Challenge

In 2019, when YWCA Kalamazoo (Michigan) began planning to open Michigan’s first comprehensive 24-hour childcare center—The Dreamery—in the diverse, historical neighborhood of Edison, it faced significant staffing hurdles. While the neighborhood clearly needed higher quality jobs and more childcare options, YWCA Kalamazoo questioned the feasibility of hiring and maintaining the necessary workforce of 15 Early Learning Professionals (ELPs) to operate the center.

The region’s early childhood education (ECE) providers were in short supply and had high turnover rates due to certification requirements, low wages, and stressful work environments. The current providers could only serve 25% of the neighborhood’s childcare needs. Before it could assist in the community’s childcare shortage, YWCA needed a solution to its own staffing problem.

• 80%

  overall retention rate

The Solution

YWCA Kalamazoo partnered with the Kalamazoo Literacy Council (KLC), a community-based organization with extensive roots in Edison, to build a career pathway initiative helping Edison residents launch ECE careers at The Dreamery. Led by Michael Evans, executive director at KLC, the initiative leveraged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Talent Pipeline Management® (TPM) framework to provide a structure for the initiative, increase the number of employers participating, and scale to additional neighborhoods.

The KLC, in collaboration with YWCA Kalamazoo and other community-based organizations, launched the Edison ECE Career Pathway in January 2021 with a goal of filling the 15 ELP positions at The Dreamery. Once it gained traction, they used the TPM® framework to expand the number of employers participating to eight collaborative members (i.e., those working together to solve a common talent challenge). By 2023, KLC’s ECE Career Pathway had not only fulfilled YWCA’s need for 15 ELPs, but it had also connected more than 60 participants with ECE jobs paying at least $15 per hour while reducing turnover for ELPs by 20%.

The KLC also collaborates with other wraparound service providers, such as Goodwill Industries of Southwestern Michigan, Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency, and Michigan Works Southwest! to help remove barriers to employment, credential attainment, and education. Adopting a more comprehensive approach, the Edison ECE Career Pathway is meeting residents “where they’re at”, solving a key workforce problem that enables organizations like the YWCA Kalamazoo to address high-impact community needs.

Key Partnerships

YWCA Kalamazoo in collaboration with Kalamazoo Literacy Council (KLC), partnered with critical wraparound service providers, including:

• Goodwill Industries of Southwestern Michigan
• Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency
• Michigan Works Southwest!

Building a Foundation for Future Problem Solving

Edison faces myriad challenges related to lower economic opportunity. Almost 30% of households earn less than $25,000. Six percent of residents 18 years and older are not employed and 34% do not participate in the labor force. As part of the Shared Prosperity Kalamazoo plan, the City of Kalamazoo and its partners identified an estimated 1,427 residents 18+ who could receive training and support leading to higher-quality jobs. Shared Prosperity Kalamazoo targeted place-based strategies toward these opportunity populations, planning to (1) promote the healthy growth, development, and learning of children; (2) increase access to good jobs; and (3) promote strong families.

YWCA Kalamazoo and KLC built the foundation for the ECE Career Pathway by combining their established community connections alongside the business opportunity created by The Dreamery. KLC had deep roots in Edison, having operated in the neighborhood for almost 50 years empowering adults to reach their full potential by providing free adult literacy services. In turn, while serving their clients, KLC had built extensive relationships with organizations like YWCA Kalamazoo that helped with wraparound services including childcare, financial planning, health, and housing security. The Dreamery brought all those pieces together for a high-impact workforce program.

The Edison ECE Career Pathway seeks to solve the lack of qualified ELPs by making those jobs more accessible, improving job quality, and providing ongoing support in the early stages of the career path. At the same time, the initiative creates value for the community and wraparound service providers such as KLC by increasing the availability of quality childcare, increasing employment, and ensuring that the neighborhood has the capacity to meet childcare needs. Those impacts contribute to the larger goals set forth by Shared Prosperity Kalamazoo.

That does not mean that it was easy getting started. According to Evans, “ECE employers are heavily burdened and meeting for the sake of meetings is not something they are keen to do. We had to work hard to prove the Edison ECE Career Pathway and ECE TPM Employer Network were a benefit to them individually and to the communities they are invested in.” Luckily, the initiative had The Dreamery as its foundation. As the initiative provided ELPs for YWCA’s The Dreamery, the other employers saw that it was worth their time to join. That gave the Edison ECE Career Pathway the critical mass of employers that the TPM framework encourages.

How It Works

The Edison ECE Career Pathway targets opportunity populations, which it defines as:

• Youth ages 16–24 who are out of school or work;
• Refugees and immigrants;
• People with limited English proficiency or literacy skills;
• Individuals who lack a GED or high school diploma;
• People who have been impacted by the criminal justice system;
• People with mental or physical disabilities;
• Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC);
• LGBTQ+ populations; and
• Veterans.

Outreach occurs through the existing activities of wraparound service providers and employers. For example, KLC actively engages with opportunity populations at the local food pantry, missions, libraries, and nonprofits. It refers people to navigators who can make connections to opportunities such as the Edison ECE Career Pathway. Similar processes occur through other wraparound service providers. For employers, if a potential employee comes to them who lacks the necessary credentials or needs additional support, they can be referred to the initiative.

A strength of the initiative is that participants can start work immediately as an ELP, receive on-the-job training, and participate in apprenticeships. They begin in entry-level positions, receive formal training from Southwest Child Care Resources, achieve their Child Development Associate (CDA) certificate, and enroll in a Department of Labor ECE Registered Apprenticeship program, which enables eligibility for promotion. KLC is also currently evaluating a small pilot project that pays $1,250 to participants upon achieving the CDA. This uninterrupted process and the wraparound support available throughout, make for an easier decision to transition from other jobs, even as they are initially offered higher wages.

The Edison ECE Career Pathway ensures that employers pay at least $15 per hour. This is a substantial cost to employers, some of which originally paid closer to $12 per hour for entry-level employees. Whereas members of the employer collaborative do not contribute financially to the Edison ECE Career Pathway’s operational costs, this is considered a major financial and programmatic contribution that the initiative would not be successful without.

Once participants have their initial jobs, training, and certification, they begin their promotion within or between employers. With more time, the employer partners plan for successful participants to provide peer support to future participants. One such example of a successful participant is Lawonda White, who said the Edison ECE Career Pathway “has been a wonderful road for me. I immediately was able to get wraparound services, food assistance, help with childcare, financial literacy, and housing. There are a lot more wraparound services depending on what you need. It helped me advocate for myself and my child. It helped me to get an apprenticeship where I got paid for completing training. After I got my job, I got promoted within 6 months. (This initiative) helped me to get to that next step in my life.”

Building Upon and Learning from Success

Since its successful launch in Edison, the Edison ECE Career Pathway has been scaled to two other priority neighborhoods targeted by Shared Prosperity Kalamazoo. After securing around $800,000 over the first three years to launch the program, it has begun identifying and securing funding for long-term sustainability. Evans notes that he has had progress tying into existing funds and activities, rather than the time and resource intensive process of seeking new funding sources.

As the initiative has grown with participants and employers, early success came from starting small. Even though childcare providers could only serve 25% of Edison’s needs, the initiative focused on the 15 positions The Dreamery needed. In turn, it created 17 and celebrated its success. “Our current target is 53 annually for our nine employer partners,” Evans said. “We added more employer partners based on what we learned from our efforts to recruit talent for The Dreamery. If we had attempted to meet the needs of all the employers in the beginning, we most likely would not have met our goal. A key lesson learned is to start with the capacity you have and go from there.”

Finally, Evans credits the TPM framework for giving structure and a common approach to the Edison ECE Career Pathway. The employer collaborative modeled the number of employees and participants needed, the skills required to be successful, and the barriers faced. It created a process for employers to interface with wraparound service providers and solve problems to elevate community members. Evans plans to continue leveraging the framework and to have more staff trained on the TPM framework to create commonality in the TPM experience, supporting structure and sustainability for the initiative.

For Edison residents like Lawonda White and for all the children served by new ELPs, this initiative has generated substantial impact. As the Edison ECE Career Pathway continues to achieve success and scale, it not only helps opportunity populations in Edison and other neighborhoods in Kalamazoo, but it also serves as a model for problem-solvers around the country.

To learn more about the Edison ECE Career Pathway, visit kalamazooliteracy.org/ece-career-pathway/.