Two Crises, One Solution

A free short-term job training program in Kentucky bets that recovery from substance abuse can be an asset for jobseekers who want to help others who face addiction. Also, Futuro Health goes national with its novel take on philanthropy-backed, tuition-free training for jobs in allied and behavioral health.

From Addiction Recovery to Employment

Demand for human services has skyrocketed in the U.S., and the sector’s staffing shortages are reaching emergency levels in many regions. For example, half the nation is living in an area without enough behavioral and mental health workers, including addiction counselors.

Meanwhile, 2.7M Americans are out of the labor force because of addiction. Kentucky is working on a coordinated solution to both of these problems, with a program that seeks to turn addiction recovery into a career pathway.

Government and education officials in the state, where opioid addiction is a public health crisis, view recovery from substance or opioid abuse as an asset for a jobseeker in the field, rather than an obstacle, veteran reporter Erin Strout writes for Work Shift. The goal is to provide people with training so they can tap their experiences to help others confronting addiction.

“The jewel of this program is that it takes a really hard time in someone’s life and it uses that entry point to allow people to gain higher education and make a good living,” Leslie Sizemore, associate vice president of workforce and economic initiatives for the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, told Strout.

The Details: Career Ladders in Mental and Behavioral Health (CLIMB-Health) is a joint project of the Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) and the Kentucky Healthcare Workforce Collaborative. In its first year, CLIMB-Health was offered at nine two-year campuses located in counties with the highest overdose mortality rates.

Participants enroll in a 30-hour noncredit certification course, with the tuition fully covered by a state scholarship for residents without associate degrees. Completers can then apply for jobs as peer support specialists at nearby treatment and recovery facilities.

Where Apprenticeship Failed: The short-term certification program replaced an attempt to create an apprenticeship pathway in eastern Kentucky, Strout reports. Addiction counseling centers are small operations, and they lacked the capacity to train new specialists themselves. 

Click on over to Work Shift to read more about CLIMB-Health, including how the program uses AI to help students improve their skills. And keep an eye out for more coverage of how Colorado is tapping digital wallets as part of a project aimed at helping to curb the state’s severe shortage of behavioral health workers.

Free Training for Healthcare Jobs

Futuro Health is bringing its unusual healthcare workforce training model to more regions of the country, with new programs for jobs in both allied and behavioral health.

With a $10.2M grant from the Elisabeth C. Deluca Foundation, the training hub is expanding its reach into Connecticut and three heavily populated counties in Florida. The plan is to provide tuition-free training to 2K residents of those regions, building on the roughly 8,900 students Futuro has served since it was created in 2020.

The nonprofit so far has focused mostly on California, where it’s based. But Futuro recently began offering a customer service paraprofessional program with its training partners in Oregon, Washington, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., as well as in California. It also has moved into Wyoming and Colorado.

Futuro had to retool its structure for the multistate approach, says Van Ton-Quinlivan, its CEO, who says philanthropy is a key part of how the model works. Kaiser Permanente and the Service Employees International Union–United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) backed the organization’s creation with an initial $130M investment. And Kaiser Permanente, the huge healthcare consortium, last year re-upped with another $100M to support Futuro’s national footprint. 

“We can activate when there’s a sponsor for the scholarships,” says Ton-Quinlivan. “You have to have some level of capital investment.”

Futuro began moving into behavioral health during the tail end of the pandemic, as mental health issues and substance abuse spiked around the country. The organization worked to ensure that most of the competencies embedded in its training programs for community health workers apply to behavioral health roles as well, to help give students more career options.

Futuro has had success with student recruiting, in part because it offers a debt-free path to stable careers for working learners. The jobs completers land after finishing their training pay well, says Ton-Quinlivan. And the credentials students earn stack seamlessly into degrees, so graduates can move up without losing time and money.

Futuro also has been offering durable-skill training as part of its onboarding process for students. “The scholars arrive more polished and more ready to learn” thanks to those on-ramps, Ton-Quinlivan says.

As its national ambitions grow, she says, Futuro will continue to tweak its approach to short-term healthcare training based on what it’s learning around the country.

The Kicker: “We’ll continue to push the frontiers,” says Ton-Quinlivan, and to “see what works for diverse adult learners.”

Open Tabs

AI Skills
Microsoft is backing the National Applied AI Consortium, a group of three large community colleges that seeks to provide guidance to the two-year college sector on AI skills and credentials. The company is joining the U.S. National Science Foundation in funding the consortium and will support AI skills training for faculty members. Microsoft also is supporting the group’s efforts to create an industry-aligned curriculum.

Manufacturing and Immigration
With an additional 3.8M U.S. manufacturing jobs projected to become available over the next decade, future presidential administrations will need to depend more on foreign-born workers in an anti-immigrant climate, Rebecca Patterson, an economist, writes in The New York Times. More manufacturing roles will require college degrees, she writes. And even with the projected growth, the sector will employ 3M fewer workers than at its peak in 1979.

AI and Government Jobs
Google’s philanthropic arm announced $15M in AI training grants aimed at the government workforce. A grant of $10M will back the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and the creation of the Center for Federal AI, a hub that will seek to develop AI leadership and talent within the federal government. The remaining $5M will help to expand the reach of InnovateUS, a foundation-supported nonprofit that offers free, self-paced training on data, digital, and AI skills.

Degrees and City Jobs
Philadelphia is spending $10M to create the City College for Municipal Employment, a program housed at City College of Philadelphia that will offer free training to community college students to prepare them for a broad range of jobs in city government. The project is a top priority for Cherelle Parker, the city’s mayor, reports Anna Orso for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Earlier this year, Parker removed four-year-degree requirements for some city jobs.

Dual Enrollment
Colleges and states should work to broaden the benefits of dual enrollment, particularly for low-income, Latino, and Black students and other groups that are underrepresented in early-college programs, concludes a report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The analysis of national and state-level data found that dual enrollment is widespread and growing, particularly at community colleges.

Skills First
A new documentary from Workday encourages corporate America to adopt inclusive talent strategies. The film was produced with SpringHill and is available on Netflix in the U.S. It features interviews with several CEOs, including JPMorganChase’s Jamie Dimon. “The new world of work is about skills, not necessarily degrees,” Dimon said in a news release. “We must remove the stigma of a community college and career education.”

Win-Win Workplace
Corporations with employee-centered workplace policies have higher profitability, growth, and valuation than companies that don’t, according to a report from the Future Forward Institute. The analysis produced with JUST Capital and the Burning Glass Institute looked at workplace policies of 355 Fortune 500 companies, with an eye toward strategies like centering worker voices and reimagining employee benefits.

Thanks for reading. Catch you next week. —PF