Honoring the Staff of The Fedcap Group—Serving Our Clients for 35+ Years
Honoring the Staff of The Fedcap Group—Serving Our Clients for 35+ Years
Combating Situational Poverty Caused by COVID-19
Combating Situational Poverty Caused by COVID-19
September 28, 2020
The Fedcap Group is committed to removing barriers to long term economic well-being for the vulnerable and disadvantaged. This includes people with disabilities, the chronically or structurally unemployed, people in recovery, veterans, individuals with mental illness, youth leaving foster care, or people leaving prison or jail. This has been our mission since our founding in 1935.
Over our 85 years, the profile of the people we serve has changed. In the beginning, it was wounded veterans and others with physical disabilities shunned by employers. Some of the individuals we have served were from families who have experienced generational poverty—having been in poverty for at least two generations. Others struggle due to very specific life circumstances—a disability or mental illness that results in a reduced opportunity to obtain and/or maintain living wage jobs. Some experience the stigma associated with having been involved in the criminal justice system.
As we face the impact of COVID 19, we are seeing a new group of individuals struggling with economic well-being—those experiencing “situational poverty”—a lack of resources due to a particular set of events, such as a pandemic. These individuals lost their jobs due to a global health crisis that closed down local businesses around the world. While certainly from time to time we have seen individuals struggling through situational poverty due to a death in the family or unexpected illness, this is widespread and requires a structured response.
Where many of the people The Fedcap Group have served in the past needed to develop both work readiness and entry level career skills, the individuals we are starting to see, as a result of the pandemic, are skilled and have a steady work history. These individuals mirror the characteristics of the unemployed as described by the US Department of Labor—unable to shift to telework, gig workers with no postsecondary education. (Recent job-level analyses from the Department of Labor show that while 2 in 3 workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher could work from home; however, only 1 in 10 workers with less than a high school diploma and 1 in 4 workers with only a high school diploma held jobs that supported teleworking).
As workforce development organizations around the country prepare to serve the new population of individuals in need of job support, we will need to change our approach. As opposed to entry level skills, according to the National Skills Coalition, “working adults need access to upskilling opportunities—and the wraparound services to support their success. A new report found that many workers looking to change careers say they’d need to reskill in order to do so, and only 4 in 10 workers with a high school diploma or less have access to the education and training they want to pursue.”
The Fedcap Group is preparing to serve this new cohort of unemployed by positioning our organization to be able to provide a new array of certifications in high growth sectors, including plumbing, welding and construction. And, because we believe that over the next decade the pathway to economic well-being will come through technology, we are ensuring access to critical training in technology.
This is the time for the nonprofit community, already seasoned in developing an entry level workforce, to step up and assist in the recovery by helping the 13 million unemployed individuals in our country become skilled in new, sustainable careers.
Adversity in Early Childhood
For Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
For Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
September 21, 2020
It takes courage to stand for something. And even more to fight for what you stand for. And it takes a remarkable amount of courage to fight in a way that reflects a deep, abiding sense of honor, consistency and fairness.
What I admired most about Justice Ginsburg was the equity in her fight for equity.
Her first big case was a challenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from taking a tax deduction for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the deduction, by statute, could only be claimed by a woman, or a widowed or divorced man. But Moritz had never married. The solution was to ask the court not to invalidate the statute, but to apply it equally to both sexes and she won in the lower courts. When the government petitioned the US Supreme Court, stating that the decision “cast a cloud of unconstitutionality” over literally hundreds of federal statutes (and it attached a full list of those statutes), it became the road map for Justice Ginsburg’s career.
As President Obama said, “Justice Ginsburg helped us see that discrimination on the basis of sex isn’t about an abstract idea of equality; that it doesn’t only harm women; that it has real consequences for all of us. It is about who we are and who we can be.”
That to me was the point of Justice Ginsburg’s lifelong fight against injustice and inequity—the idea that if we as a society treat anyone as “less than,” the entire underpinning of who we are as a people is at risk. Equity has always mattered a great deal to me—the simple (and apparently complicated) fairness in our treatment of people.
And equity has been the foundation for the work of The Fedcap Group since its inception in 1935—where our founders fought against discrimination in the workplace for people with disabilities.
Justice Ginsburg’s life and, possibly even more so, her death, are a challenge to every one of us. “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe,
briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
Maya Angelou
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Why Children Are in Pediatric Nursing Homes, Separated from Family by COVID-19
How Boards Can Plan for the Disasters That No One Wants to Think About
Mitigating Uncertainty by Focusing on Technology and Workforce
Mitigating Uncertainty by Focusing on Technology and Workforce
September 14, 2020
Last week I spoke about the importance of understanding and planfully building a floor load adequate to carry the vision of your organization. I enjoyed the many comments I received by individuals also engaged in the building of their company, sharing what they are doing to ensure that their floor load is sufficient for their vision.
Several people discussed how challenging it is to calculate the required floor load—to fully (or even partially) understand the demands of a yet-to-be-built future.
At The Fedcap Group, we have increasingly focused on two areas to mitigate some of this uncertainty: Technology and Workforce.
The smarter our technology and the more prepared our people, the more capable we are of accurately establishing an infrastructure capable of supporting our vision. We anticipate that 25 years from now Big Data and data analytics will be key factors to bring change to the way we function, including the way that we plan for and deliver services. According to Forbes Nonprofit Council, it is likely that artificial intelligence (AI) will provide better metrics in mental health, enabling us to identify engagement patterns, demographic indicators and healthcare usage among members of community systems of care. AI allows pre-emptive interventions for those with serious mental illnesses by learning patterns that lead to isolation and hospitalizations. We need to prepare for a data driven environment that far surpasses today’s use of data—and our technology needs to support this evolution.
We spend a good chunk of our strategic planning time constructing scenarios—what do we envision the demands of government funders will be 5, 10, 15 years out? Will they have moved fully into a managed care and risk bearing environment? What are the technological demands most likely to accompany changes in government funding? While this might appear a more amorphous discussion, trends in government funding are being explored by national and international think tanks. Triple Innovation, a think tank out of Sydney, Australia, tells us that federal and state governments invest $10Bn+ annually in science and innovation (Ferris, 2017) with government support for incubators and accelerators backed by venture capitalists occupying one end of the spectrum, and on the other end established organizations are collaborating with research partners. Triple Innovation sees this trend continuing with funding requirements becoming more complex.
As it relates to workforce, most business leaders anticipate significant changes in the workforce of the future. The Brookings Institution is leading a Workforce of the Future Initiative that will provide a city-by-city analysis to attract industries that provide good jobs and to support workers transitioning to those jobs. It will help leaders identify which industries are likely to grow and decline, and the necessary occupational transitions necessary to host growth industries. Specifically, the initiative will answer the following questions:
—Given current industrial makeup and knowledge of their labor force, how can cities and regions attract growth and nurture good jobs?
—How can skill-building organizations and policymakers measure and target the skills demanded from emerging local industries to help workers, particularly the most vulnerable, transition effectively?
—How can companies use data on worker transitions to retrain and prepare their workforce for the jobs of tomorrow? How can companies invest in their workforce to benefit their community and bottom line?
Those of us in the process of growing our companies would be well served to pay attention to the results of this initiative and integrate the results into our planning.
While the future is clearly uncertain, and while understanding how to build a company with a floor load capable of withstanding its future demands seems daunting, there is a growing body of information that can support this critical task. It is our job as leaders to find it.
As always, I welcome your thoughts.
Keeping a Love for School Alive
Worlds of Influence: Understanding What Shapes Child Well-Being in Rich Countries
