Subject: Illinois Workforce Advantage
Purpose of Project: To help make targeted, distressed communities in Illinois into better places for parents to raise children.
Approach: Governor's Office led steering committee of senior officials from fourteen state agencies. Project staff, with assistance from agency staff, convened forums in communities where high priority projects already garnering community support had been identified. State agencies were challenged to find resources to "add value" to community efforts, especially those that showed promise of getting people employed, improving school outcomes, creating business opportunities, and improving health outcomes.
State agencies on steering committee:
Dept. of Public Health
Dept. of Human Services
Dept. Children and Family Services
State Board of Education
Development Finance Authority
Housing Development Authority
Community College Board
Environmental Protection Agency
Dept. of Commerce and Community Affairs
Dept. of Employment Security
Office of Banking and Real Estate
Dept. of Natural Resources
Dept. of Agriculture
Dept. of Corrections
Dept. of Aging
Capital Development Board
Target areas:
North Lawndale, Englewood, Humboldt Park, and Little Village in Chicago; Harvey; Maywood; East St. Louis; Rock Island; and the Southern Seven Counties.
Project Initiated: Sept. 2000. Dr. Kordesh directed the project from Sept. 2000 through October, 2002.
Examples of Lessons Learned from Illinois Workforce Advantage:
1. Getting agreement on what constitutes a targeted place can be very difficult. Federal, state, and local governments often contribute to the fragmentation of places. Local ward boundaries often do not conform with the boundaries that residents would identify as indicative of where their communities are located. For example, in Englewood, there are eight different aldermanic districts. Moreover, there are three different Congressional districts that divide the same place. Many state and federal agencies define their target areas differently as well. IDHS regions do not conform to DCCA planning regions, for example. Workforce Investment Act regions do not conform to community boundaries; in Illinois the 26 WIA regions are much larger than municipalities or Chicago neighborhoods. Federal Empowerment Zone overlap at times with state enterprise zones, and neither necessarily follow the boundaries of the 76 community areas recognized historically as distinctive places in Chicago.
2. It isn't only government that contributes to the fragmentation of places. Sometimes for very legitimate reasons, local leaders from the nonprofit sector will be not as invested in places as they are in causes, population segments, or target groups that transcend considerations of place. Some groups will propose to serve a targeted place in order to get funding from a place-based initiative, but will open the services funded by the initiative to whoever can get to the place. There can be slippage on what really constitute the boundaries of the place. Many churches might be community-based, but not necessarily place-based; they will define their communities of focus by demoninational memberships, racial groupings, or ethnic identifiers.
3. A value-added approach builds stronger state-local partnerships than a prescriptive approach when state government enters a local community. A value-added approach says to the community leaders that the state has particular outcomes it wants to help the community achieve, and a few, core practice principles it is seeking to emphasize (co-location of services, productive family involvement, preventive orientation, for example), but that the state would like to know how the community is already moving in these directions, and would like to identifiy strategies jointly with community leaders on how to add value to those efforts. This contrasts with the approach in which the state issues an RFP with all of the programmatic details defined, and the community organizations "screw themselves into the prescribed model" in order to get the funding.
In every case with IWA, good value-adding opportunities already existed in the communities. For example, in Humboldt Park, the Near Northwest Neighborhood Network was already organizing local elementary schools to create community learning centers (which conformed to IWA's vision of family resource centers). IWA then made a grant to NNNN, which NNNN used to disburse funds to the nine schools to build or strengthen such centers.
Moreover, a value-added approach does not only mean providing grants. It can deliver technical assistance, information, or relocated staff. IWA made 77 AmeriCorps positions available for communities to use as value-added resources. Community leaders determined how best to use them, staying within the programmatic priorities of IWA.
4. It takes the authority and leadership of the governor's office to get state agencies to cooperate with place-based community development. Focusing on communities of place is a very different approach for state agencies. Traditionally, agencies focus on relationships with grantees and regional administrative offices rather than communities. But, they can do it, and if held to the task over time, they can adjust their thinking to find creative ways to bring value-added resources to the table. Agencies also tend to get in the habit of funding the same grantees over and over again. This habit usually has to be broken in order to adopt a place-based focus. Indeed, the habit itself has sometimes inadvertantly stalled the revitalization of particular communities.
5. Communities with the capacity to develop their own development plans and bring them to a multi-agency group at the state level will do better than communities who have not acquired that capacity. North Lawndale, Humboldt Park, Little Village, and the Southern Seven counties were the most capable of the nine target communities in this regard. Humboldt Park had a comprehensive development plan with broad community acceptance already in place when IWA began. This accelerated the creation of a good partnership between the state and community. For this reason, IWA made community capacity building a major priority.
6. Funding matters. It can be tempting to a state facing fiscal problems to seek partnerships with localities when funds are tight. However, for the sake of building credibility, it's critically important that when a state opens an initiative in a community, it brings resources to put on the table. Community leaders have seen many empty promises from state government, and they will inevitably -- and justifiably -- ask where are the resources. Communities are very willing to work in partnership and to make changes if a state project is able to leverage resources in a flexible manner. IWA did not really move forward until it acquired a modest budget allocation for FY2001.
