Allison Gerber: Designing Economic Opportunity Around the Lives of Young People and Families

Allison Gerber, Vice President of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Center for Economic Opportunity, discusses what it takes to expand economic opportunity for young people and families, and why so many existing programs and systems fall short. Allison walks through the Center’s three interconnected bodies of work around education and employment, income stability, and financial health, and explains why the pandemic forced a reckoning with how these strategies had long operated in silos. She shares striking data on young parents, roughly 9 million people ages 16 to 30 in the United States, most of whom are working but not getting ahead, and explores what it would take to design education and workforce systems around the reality of their lives. The conversation explores the promising role of community colleges as a connective tissue across these systems, the potential of technology and predictive analytics to reach struggling students before they disengage, and what educators, employers, and policymakers can each do to become true forces in expanding opportunity for young people and families. Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning. Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation, and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so, with that, let's dive in. Julian, in our work and on this podcast, we talk a lot about what economic mobility truly requires. Access to a quality job or a training program is one piece of the puzzle, but to build financial stability over time, young people and families need more holistic and sustained support. And the more we dig into this, the clearer it becomes that many existing programs and related systems were not originally designed with that holistic approach in mind. Julian Alssid: And the stakes get even higher when you add parenting into the picture. The data is striking. It's very difficult for young people who are raising children to get ahead economically. There's just not enough time in the day for students who are also parents, and the pathways we have built rarely account for that reality. Kaitlin LeMoine: We are looking forward to digging into these challenges and possible ways forward in today's conversation. In this episode, we're speaking with Allison Gerber, Vice President of the Annie E. Casey Foundation Center for Economic Opportunity. Allison leads efforts to create pathways to financial stability and economic mobility for children, youth, and families across the United States. Before joining the Casey Foundation, Allison served as Executive Director of the District of Columbia's Workforce Investment Council and as a Senior Associate with the Aspen Institute's Workforce Strategies Initiative. Allison, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us today. Allison Gerber: Well, thank you both for having me. I'm so glad to be here. Julian Alssid: Yes, Allison, it is great to have you here. So, if you will, in your own words, tell us about your background and the path that led you to your current role at the Casey Foundation. Allison Gerber: Absolutely. I mean, no good conversation around a career pathway would be good if we don't talk about our own career pathways, right? Julian Alssid: Exactly. Allison Gerber: So, I've spent my career working at the intersection of education, employment, and other sort of levers for economic opportunity. I went to law school and have worked very little as a lawyer over the course of my career, which I think is interesting when we think about young people and how their education sets them up for their future job path. But I, as you said, Kaitlin, I come to this work from several different vantage points, including program management, research and evaluation, local government, and now philanthropy. My first job in workforce development was for a national nonprofit that prepared job seekers for registered apprenticeship in construction, and then from there I went to work on research and leadership development. Led the public workforce system in D.C. and now I'm here as a grant maker at the Casey Foundation. I've been at the Casey Foundation since 2013, and I've held three different roles for the foundation. First, as a Senior Program...