Leading Practices

Leading Practices

• Since 2014, the California Workforce Development Board’s High Road Construction Careers project has allocated more than $20,000,000 to labor union and workforce development board partnerships to diversify and expand building and construction trade union membership. The project is expanding union approved pre-apprenticeships that use the Multi-Core Craft Curriculum (MC3) and includes a statewide database of the union validated programs. The initiative is funded by revenues through California Senate Bill 1: The Road Repair and Accountability Act, the Clean Energy Jobs Act Program and carbon market cap and trade revenues administered by the California Air Resources Board. Funds have been used to support local partnerships among workforce boards, unions, community colleges and other partners in East San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles and Orange County and the Central Valley.

• In 2016, Travis County purchasing offices adopted the Better Builder Certification that defines job quality standards for public construction projects. These standards were defined by workers themselves through grassroots organizing with low-income construction workers of color, many of whom spoke limited English.

• In 2015, voters approved “Best Start for Kids” levies, with the most recent local measure generating $800,000,000 to expand access, affordability and quality of the region’s childcare system, including a childcare worker wage-increase demonstration project. The King County Department of Community and Human Services is leading implementation focused on increasing access and affordability for high-quality childcare for working families and for job quality for childcare workers.

• In 2020, the San Diego Workforce Partnership, the local workforce board, set aside $10,000,000 of funding over four years through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Title I youth funds to serve youth with the highest rates of youth disconnection, including Black youth, based on the results of local research and public input.

• In 2020, the mayor’s office of Providence, Rhode Island, issued an executive order to set the stage for gathering and analyzing the necessary data to understand the current state of inequities in the community.

• The Racial and Social Justice Initiative of Seattle, Washington, published this toolkit in 2012 and is advancing a 2022 strategic plan to help city programs and agencies set goals and measure progress to advance specific racial equity goals within government agencies.