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Email Workforce Advocacy & Support Initiative (WASI)
The Community Service Society recognizes the need for innovative solutions to help New Yorkers enter into and remain engaged in employment that pays a living wage. This need is even more critical for the more than 220,000 16-24 year-olds currently disconnected from traditional educational services and/or the workforce. Based on CSS research documenting the needs of NYC’s disconnected youth, the most successful programs to re-engage youth are comprehensive, utilizing a youth-development approach and offering a wide range of services from basic literacy to workforce readiness, advancement in employment, and other life skill-building case management activities. While most workforce programs attempt to provide assistance with these needs, many have neither the expertise nor the capacity to offer high-quality case management, and funders do not typically support these activities. In response, CSS is piloting a program that provides intensive and comprehensive wrap-around support services to participants, helping them manage the transition to viable employment.In this innovative new approach, the Workforce Advocacy and Support Initiative, CSS developed partnerships with community-based organizations that operate workforce programs. Highly trained CSS case managers are placed in the partner organization and work with participants up to 18 months, helping to eliminate barriers to employment and employment retention. Case managers assist participants in addressing personal and family problems, negotiating the child care system, receiving work supports - including food stamps and health insurance - facilitating receipt of tax credits, and providing financial education. In the first year of the demonstration project, case managers have become integrated in their host programs and assisted over 200 participants in securing affordable child care, utilizing preventative health care services, opening checking accounts and repairing credit, earning GEDs through volunteer based tutoring and program retention services, and in becoming employed.
This model will allow CSS to add considerable value to the field while focusing on its traditional areas of expertise -- providing effective case management to individuals and families in need. The Workforce Advocacy and Support Initiative offers a solution to the challenge of building capacity in a fragmented field while improving program outcomes in a cost-effective way.
Lisa Tomanelli
Director Workforce Advocacy and Support Initiative
212.614-5459
ltomanelli@cssny.org