Solid Advice for Erik Walsh: Talk to the Nun
Back in 1992, she was an organizer for COPS/Metro Alliance when the powerful community organization designed and persuaded the City to financially back Project Quest, which early on and to this day has been recognized as one of the most successful job training programs in the country. In 2011, when Project Quest was plagued with controversy from failings due not to corruption but to incompetence, Sister Pearl was brought in to turn it around. She did and ran the organization for six years.
Now the City of San Antonio is embarking on SA: Ready to Work, a program approved by the voters last November that will spend $154 million over five or six years in an effort to train the city’s working poor for good-paying jobs that the city is now generating.
[Photo Credit: Nick Wagner/San Antonio Report]
Solid Advice For Erik Walsh: Talk To The Nun, San Antonio Report [pdf]
Catholic Labor Network Credits IAF Leaders with Establishing Effective Long-Term Job Training Programs
[Excerpt]
....Quest has "the largest, sustained earnings impacts ever found in a rigorous evaluation of a workforce development program," writes Mark Elliott of Economic Mobility Corporation.
How does Quest succeed? It emerged as a project of two community organizations affiliated with Industrial Areas Foundation. With skillful discipline those organizations, starting in the mid-1970s, formed extensive public relationships, including several with area businesses. in the early 1990s the IAF leaders decided to use their social capital on behalf of the underemployed. Job training should match the actual needs of known employers, the IAF leaders thought. Plus the trainees deserved sustained ancillary service, including financial planning. Quest's employer- driven model of training as been exported to other Texas communities, plus to Tucson and Monroe, LA. Recently, another IAF group, DuPage United, launched a Quest-like job training program.
Taking the Initiative In Job Training, Initiatives in Support of Christians in the World