Basta: Bridging the College to Career Gap for 1st-Gen Grads

Basta bridges the gap between college and careers for first-generation college graduates of color. Through partnerships with employers and development programs for graduates, Basta equips first-generation graduates to secure and thrive in their first jobs while supporting employers to embrace talent practices that increase workforce diversity.

First-generation college students of color are graduating with limited access to jobs of the future. Black college graduates have the same unemployment rate as white high school dropouts and 60% of recent Black and Latinx graduates are underemployed. These graduates often have skill gaps around self-advocacy and navigating a job search.  These gaps coupled with the pervasiveness of biased employment practices are leading to an employment crisis amongst non-white first-generation college graduates. Basta’s solution focuses on the bridge between college and work; equipping graduates to secure and thrive in first jobs while partnering with employers to adopt more inclusive practices.

A confluence of forces is creating a first-generation employment crisis; thus we pull from many disciplines - HR, education, college persistence and workforce development - for our solution. Using research, we prepare graduates for hire by our employer partners, who increasingly recognize the value-add of Basta hires and thus adopt more inclusive talent practices. These evolved practices allow them to hire and keep more diverse talent, creating transformational changes to workforces (versus incremental improvements that a supply only model supports). The impact of evolving HR policies and Basta professionals rising into leadership will ultimately change the face of workforce leadership.

Basta’s ultimate goal is changing the face of workforce leadership by building a bridge to employment for first-generation graduates of color.  The results from our pilots show the model is working, with 90% of job-eligible graduates securing degree-equitable employment within 3 months.  The most immediate beneficiaries of our solution are the graduates. Through hiring and placement, our ultimate beneficiary will be employer partners whose evolving practices will create a reinforcing cycle.  Through a blended learning model and online platform, we strive to create every opportunity for graduates and employers to engage with us virtually.

Track program finishers

Track employer job offers to Basta participants

- 1000 graduates served by 2021 with 80% placement within 3 months of program end

Measure graduate retention in roles through graduate surveys & employer partner data - Graduate rate of retention in roles above industry benchmarks

Track customer satisfaction and retention - 80% YoY customer (employer) retention

Historically, employment solutions focus on increasing supply - through education - ignoring that education-only solutions have not led to transformational career outcomes for first-generation graduates.  Basta is unique because we're committed to creating a bridge solution with employers as critical partners. We're obsessed with collecting relevant data on employers and graduates to democratize candidate selection - a process currently skewed by subjectivity and bias. Collecting strategic data, informed by employment and education research, we will create a data-informed matching algorithm. This solution will get more efficient over time as we expand # of graduates and employers on our platform.

We developed our pilot solution with, rather than for, our target audiences from the beginning. Our first cohort joined us as “co-pilots” providing feedback on programming, and we have built our employer offerings in partnership with early customers. Our matching tool would be developed based on real data and evidence from our work with graduates and employers, not hypotheses. We will test each iteration of any externally-facing components of our tool with both audiences to ensure it resonates.

Graduates currently access our solution through twice-yearly programs offered through a blended-learning model.  Our go-to-market is through an ecosystem of partners and direct referrals from alumni. Employers can also access all graduate information using our online portal; however the back-end matching is currently conducted manually through a mix of data and our HR-expertise. Through a technology investment, we hope to use data to automate the matching process. We offer this service to graduates without charge and use a fee-for-service model with employers that will eventually be self-sustaining. We’ve conducted market research and can confirm that employers pay for similar solutions.

Basta has developed a 5-year financial model and built a corresponding funding model. We are actively fundraising from foundations, individuals and corporate partners to secure the funds we’ll need to execute our 5-year plan. We have raised nearly $200,000 (mix of philanthropy and individual giving) with a strong pipeline of prospects.

We also have a robust earned revenue strategy and expect to be fully self-sustaining by 2021 through a fee-for-service model with our employer partners. In addition to placement fees, we are pursuing other business lines with employer partners, including manager trainings, data benchmarks and talent consulting services.

While we initially anticipated no revenue during our pilot year, we are now forecasting $12k in earned revenue from placement fees and talent consulting services by Sept 2017.

The primary factors limiting our success are hiring the FTEs needed to expand our model to serve more graduates and partnership to build the technology we need to ultimately scale our solution. With an immediate injection of additional FTEs, we can quickly grow to serve the critical mass of graduates and employers it will take to have sufficient data to build a technology solution. With technology that automates and improves the matching process, we can dramatically increase  our ability to grow at-scale. All of this requires immediate funding.

https://www.instagram.com/project_basta/

Basta hopes to engage the Solve community, first and foremost, in developing the technical aspect of our solution. Our team has a deep understanding of the subject matter of our solution and is excited to engage others with the technical expertise necessary to take our solution to the next level. Additionally, we have been intentional from the beginning of Basta’s founding about engaging thoughtfully with a variety of communities (education, workforce development, economic inclusion, etc.) as we built our solution and look forward to ways in which the Solve community can push our thinking and inform our solution.

We partner with more than ten college access organizations, as well as a wide range of employers, including consulting firms, international nonprofits and financial services firms. CUNY - the NYC college network - recently wrote Basta into a career readiness grant thus solidifying our relationship with a premier higher-ed institution.

MLT, Braven, Coop, Year Up, SEO, Code2040, Jopwell