Initiatives

Boston University's new 'Launch Your Career: Job Search During a Pandemic' initiative is a self-paced Blackboard-based course designed to provide seniors, recent alumni, and interested juniors with career-search skills, tools for resiliency, finance and time management tips, resources for succeeding in the virtual world, and advice about connecting to BU alumni and others for mentoring, career development and potential internship opportunities. As the pandemic alters professional opportunities and learning experiences, and heightens student and young alumni concerns about their future, this initiative will connect students with timely resources to help shape and plan for their career.

Keep Exploring is an initiative designed to create connections, facilitate learning opportunities, and foster professional experiences among current Duke students and recent graduates. Originally a response to the impact of COVID-19 on the job market, the initiative has evolved into a long-term engagement plan, matching students with alumni and parent sponsors for professional opportunities in their areas of interest. Post-pandemic, the Keep Exploring initiative will continue connecting students to professional mentors, as well as begin to build a structure of financial support for unpaid work experiences.

The Career Alliance @ Georgia Tech is an initiative designed to ensure full and equal access to career readiness experiences for all Georgia Tech students.  This program augments existing efforts to prepare students for careers by providing focused support to students who have not received sustained career preparation support or have faced historical institutional barriers that hindered their full participation and preparation for success in today’s competitive job market. 

"Going to college" is more than just the aggregate of a student's experience in the classroom, and therefore official academic transcript records are an incomplete record of achievement. At Michigan State University, the co-curricular record is designed to allow students to share their college experiences and accomplishments with future employers, positioning students to compete for meaningful and rewarding jobs.

Achieve Career Excellence (ACE) is designed to make professional credentials accessible to students through building “career” bridges, while offering coaching, mentoring and counseling services. Over the past decade, demand for industry-recognized certifications among employers has greatly increased, and NOVA workforce has identified and examined in-demand validated credentials that will ensure students get hired. To alleviate the burden of cost, as students often can't afford to take those credentialing exams, ACE fills that need by subsidizing the exam fees required by professional certifications for qualified students. This will give students a leg up in the hiring process by ensuring they are both academically prepared and professionally credentialed as they enter the job market. NOVA will be committing over $1 million towards launching this effort to ensure that students are employment ready.

In partnership with CommonSpirit Health, Rio Salado College will design stackable, micro-credential pathways and short-term skills training to reduce unemployment, underemployment, and high turnover rates in frontline roles across seven geographic locations of the organization. These work-based learning opportunities will serve to attract and retain minority populations and primarily new-to-college/first generation adult learners. Long-term success will create social mobility by bridging new students and graduates with internship and career opportunities in healthcare.

The $10 million Beyond Completion Challenge partners with Taskforce institutions and provides vital funding to launch, test, and scale innovations that improve career and life opportunities after graduation for more students, especially for those who have faced the greatest barriers to success.

Fast Track will aim to address inequities in immediate career outcomes, or the time between graduation and being hired and assigned a starting salary. The initiative will benefit first-generation college graduates and members of underserved minority groups that experience income disparity in any academic discipline or career field. The initiative will also be opened to any interested student planning to graduate in majors other than Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Nursing or other career-specific majors. Fast Track success will include increasing the number of students who graduate with specific digital and people skills in-demand in the entry level employment marketplace.

Recognizing the growing demand for short-term credentials among employers and education consumers, the Texas Credentials for the Future initiative will facilitate the expansion and development of industry-recognized credentials offered by UT’s eight academic institutions. Recent college graduates, particularly those among minority communities, as well as workers without credentials beyond a high school diploma have faced unusually high unemployment rates due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This initiative is designed to bring credentialing opportunities to current students, recent alumni, and displaced workers, making them more competitive in this tight and evolving job market and enhancing their value to employers statewide.

Aggie Launch is designed to advance the promise of a college degree – a career utilizing that degree through full employment – for all undergraduates. UC Davis is home to many first-generation students and students of color, both of whom are disproportionately impacted by college graduate underemployment. Aggie Launch will work to correct this disparity by integrating career and professional experience into undergraduate life, engaging 100% of the UC Davis student body in experiential learning, meaningful mentorship, and early career search support to propel a successful launch into post-graduate employment.

The Employer Survey initiative seeks to improve job readiness among students and institutional engagement with employers across Minnesota by reviewing a wide array of employer data and making it easily available to students. The survey will take a cross-industry approach, focusing on diverse leadership representation and providing critical information on the COVID-19 job market. This data will be used in outreach efforts to students seeking employment and by career counselors at UMN, detailing the hiring needs, trends, and cycles of a variety of industries.

The Portland Internship Experience initiative provides undergraduate students with summer stipends to pursue internships with pre-selected internship sites, promoting career readiness for students while supporting local employers in the process. Access to internships, particularly unpaid work experiences, is often skewed, excluding students who cannot pay or need to work over the summer. The initiative addresses this disparity by funding student work in at-need organizations, providing a broad coalition of students with real-world job experience and employer connections that often prove key in finding post-graduate employment.

The University of Rochester is building a stronger career network among members of the University community to help students and graduates find internships and jobs. Focusing on key populations (i.e., BIPOC, First Generation, Graduate and professional students), the University is aiming to enhance integrated career education programs, reduce social capital and financial barriers for students, offer future of work skill development, and connect students with local organizations. These efforts will be supported by  the Together for Rochester (TFR) fundraising and engagement campaign, a special one-year initiative to make life better for the University of Rochester community.

Building upon UVU's existing efforts, the Big Den Initiative promotes intentional outreach and support for First-Generation, Adult Learners, and Latinx students to help improve retention and graduation rates.

Through targeted student outreach and retention and completion efforts—like summer bridge programs, purpose-first career development, digital literacy—the initiative aims to increase apprenticeship engagement among current students in the target population, as well as support the matriculation and graduation of more First-Generation, Adult Learner, and Latino students.

WakeWorks encompasses two innovative collaborations—WakeWorks Apprenticeship and WakeWorks Propel—to enable adult students of all ages to reap the benefits of skills-focused, community college applied degree programs. WakeWorks Apprenticeship provides students, including those from under-represented groups, the option to earn while they learn through apprenticeships, while WakeWorks Propel offers low-cost accelerated training programs that lead to professional credentials (certifications/licensures) to equip Wake County residents as they handle job transitions during the pandemic and beyond.

Given Baylor’s position within the local community of Waco, it began a multi-pronged strategy to drive COVID awareness and vaccinations within the local community. As part of this effort, Baylor created an open and transparent COVID dashboard to detail real-time information on COVID cases and vaccination rates (students & employees), transformed into a mass testing and vaccination site for the community, using its own facilities to administer tests and vaccines, and built its own testing lab to process PCR exams to drive 100% testing of the student body each week during Spring 2020.

The economic shutdown has displaced many workers in Southern Nevada, an economy which is heavily reliant on hospitality and tourism. Many minority communities in Southern Nevada have been significantly impacted by the pandemic, and the College of Southern Nevada's (CSN) Ability to Benefit program will facilitate serving students that have historically been underserved or do not have the resources to access short term training through Workforce Education and Training programs, either for lack of resources to cover tuition costs or due to having minimal resources to continue their career pathway that leads into a credit program and credentialing.

Georgia Tech's new strategic plan sets the university's ambition to "Be an anchor institution, partner, and catalyst of sustainable development in our city and our state." Central to amplifying impact as an anchor partner in the community are relationships with the PreK-12 community. This initiative will expand on Georgia Tech's existing PreK-12 STEM programs to amplify the university's impact by identifying, engaging, and developing PreK-12 students (and their educators) to cultivate early interest and aptitude in STEM. This effort will help to elevate the socio-economic status of local communities by measurably increasing the number of Pre-K-12 students from financially vulnerable situations who strengthen their knowledge and skills in STEM.

Envision Green is a joint program of Michigan State University (MSU) and Lansing Community College (LCC) designed to help students start at LCC and finish their bachelor's degrees at MSU. As LCC's former President Knight said early in the planning process for Envision Green, "The leap across Michigan Avenue [the street that separates MSU and LCC] is fraught for LCC students." This is especially true for first generation and Pell-eligible students and for students who identify with minority groups. Envision Green addresses the roots of these challenges in order to maximize access, equity, and opportunity for mid-Michigan students and increase the number of Michigan citizens with college degrees.

COVID impacts on communities of color have been disparate. Disproportionately negative impacts have exacerbated disparities in healthcare, financial equity, employment and access to services. North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University's initiative focuses on inclusive recovery by using our newly developed model of Innovation and Economic Engagement (Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities). The summit is an event and a partnership process to support engagement opportunities and strengthen existing partnerships for economic development.  

Pathways to Opportunity is a statewide initiative being led by PCC that aims to close opportunity gaps and increase economic mobility by expanding the federal, state, and local resources available to low-income students so more individuals can attend and complete community college. The initiative seeks to help students who are experiencing at least one form of basic needs insecurity (food, housing, etc.) access services and braid together funding. Basic needs insecurity is the major barrier to access and completion for a large percentage of our students. These basic needs have to be addressed in order to have a holistic understanding of how to support the most underserved student populations toward degree/credential completion. 

Southern New Hampshire University's (SNHU) upskilling initiative supports unemployed and furloughed workers who were laid off during the pandemic. Through reskilling and upskilling opportunities for underemployed and unemployed workers at Southern New Hampshire University, these students can better prepare themselves for a career in the wake of COVID.

The $10 million Beyond Completion Challenge partners with Taskforce institutions and provides vital funding to launch, test, and scale innovations that improve career and life opportunities after graduation for more students, especially for those who have faced the greatest barriers to success.

Finding Opportunities and Resources to Grow Entrepreneurs (FORGE) is a new unit at the University of Arizona dedicated to cultivating entrepreneurial thinking on campus while simultaneously advancing an entrepreneurial ecosystem in the community. In addition to the devastating health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, local businesses have also struggled to survive and created challenges for those hoping to start new businesses. The Advanced Entrepreneur Program (AEP) responds directly to these community and economic needs by offering early-stage entrepreneurs with an 8-week ‘business bootcamp’ that covers customer discovery, market validation, and team formation with the aim of preparing them for launch or incubation.

UC Davis, the city of Sacramento and Wexford Science & Technology signed the Aggie Square Community Benefits Partnership Agreement (CBPA) that solidified a commitment to neighborhoods around Aggie Square, the university’s new campus-hosted innovation district. Aggie Square is located on the UC Davis Sacramento campus. Central to the CBPA and the public-private partnership is a collaborative effort to bring jobs and job training to Aggie Square. It promotes affordable student housing, better transportation options, and youth education programs. Jobs for local community members are being prioritized, and more than $50 million is being directed to an affordable student housing fund.

University of Minnesota's program aims to increase graduating teachers of color by allowing working professionals in schools to become certified while continuing their employment. This will benefit schools and K-12 students by increasing teachers of color and help address the severe shortage of teachers of color in Minnesota. Participants will receive a graduate degree, and potential for higher income and job security.

Oregon Public Health Corps is the natural successor to the Corona Corps, where the University of Oregon will more permanently develop a program to teach, train, and deploy the next generation of the public health personnel. The program will equip the state and a student workforce prepared to respond to a range of future public health challenges. With an initial focus on Southwest Oregon, the Oregon Public Health Corps will: strengthen Oregon's public health infrastructure through student education, training and deployment; reduce health disparities by providing equitable access to public health support; and expand the entire state’s future public health workforce.

The development and implementation of new anti-racist instruction is currently underway at the Center for Urban Education Success at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education, in conjunction with school districts and community partners. The curriculum continues to be taught in Monroe County classrooms this school year. Local school leaders recognize the necessity to engage students in rich learning experiences about Rochester’s history with issues of equity and social justice. According to a 2020 EdBuild report, Monroe County has the most economically segregated school district border in the nation, walling off the high-poverty education system from its affluent suburbs that surround the city. 

Wake Tech's service area (which includes Raleigh, Wake County, and the Research Triangle) is a talent magnet. But talent magnets do not necessarily serve the needs of locals in need of economic mobility. Through Wake Tech's Ladder Works initiative, the college is taking strategic action to strengthen its role as a talent ladder, reaching out to the under-resourced and under-employed, connecting numerous options for training and higher education, and assembling a seamless ladder from high school to a livable wage.