Cara Plus: Let's Get (Back) to Work!

There are 17.8 million unemployed adults in the U.S., and those with barriers to employment have the hardest path back into the labor market. Cara, a nearly 30-year-old workforce development organization, runs training bootcamps and social enterprises to mobilize adults experiencing poverty into gainful employment. And it works: since inception, Cara has helped 7,300+ people secure 11,500+ jobs at 70% same-firm, one-year retention rates.

To address America's mounting unemployment challenges, Cara is scaling through Cara Plus, offering: 1) an affiliate model, which enables organizations in other cities to adapt Cara's approach to different populations, contexts, and needs, thereby creating inclusive employment pathways in different communities; and 2) an immersive bootcamp for workforce practitioners that provides tactics, tools, and approaches to help increase their impact and reach. Both strategies will enable Cara to move more people with barriers to employment into quality jobs, disrupting poverty in communities hardest hit by poverty.

Of the 17.8 million unemployed adults in the U.S., nearly 40% lack a Bachelor’s degree. Additionally, Black adults are 5.9 times more likely to be convicted of a crime than their White peers, and Latinx adults are 3.1 times more likely, making it harder for them to access employment.  

While COVID-19 catapulted the unemployment rate to new highs, many of these individuals faced significant barriers to employment prior to the pandemic as well - including compounding factors like incarceration, homelessness, addiction, or all three, leading to a loss of hope and or a community to help them maintain stability. While there are many incredible technologies to help those higher on the stability ladder get matched to jobs, helping individuals who have faced sustained barriers to employment gain, obtain, and advance in quality jobs, often requires personal and professional coaching to help them unlock their talents for long-term success. Cara’s method focuses on these individuals: those who – without the training, ongoing wraparound support, job placement services, and one-year retention coaching to succeed in the workplace that Cara provides – are those who are and will continue to be left behind. 

Cara provides two distinct ways to expand employment opportunities to those with barriers to employment - both of which have been successfully piloted through its expansion arm, Cara Plus:

Affiliation - For organizations in different cities that want a way to move people experiencing poverty to self-sufficiency, Cara Plus provides hands-on assistance, tools, and support to co-develop a workforce development program based on Cara's methodology - customized for each organization's context and population needs. We have two affiliates - LSSI Work in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Atlanta Mission @Work in Georgia, which have created a combined ~200 jobs for people with barriers to employment.

Cara Institute - For workforce organizations that are already in operation but are looking for a community of other practitioners to help them enhance their existing model, Cara Plus' training bootcamp, Cara Institute, provides them with digital and in-person trainings to equip them with actionable tools, resources, and a community to help them strengthen their results. This program has a net promoter score of 9.6, has grown 200% each cohort, and 50% of organizations that have attended have sent additional staff to future cohorts, demonstrating its ability to help workforce programs grow effectively and sustainably. 

Cara targets workers experiencing homelessness and poverty. Here's a snapshot of participant demographics:

• 20% lack a high school diploma or GED
• 55% have been justice-involved
• 88% are Black or Latinx

To address participant needs, Cara's model meets participants where they are - understanding their housing, health, childcare, conviction history, and finances, along with their future goals. This comprehensive approach enables us to route them into one of four portals (full-time or part-time programming, or to one of our two social enterprises, which provide transitional jobs) based on their specific needs.

Regardless of the portal, we help participants develop five key workplace competencies, including: communication, conflict resolution, professionalism, team building, and time management. While these competencies are universal, each person learns and applies them differently. As such, participants are matched with individual coaches to help absorb the learning in a way that will be most effective for them. With Indeed.com reporting communication, teamwork, and interpersonal skills among the top 11 skills employers look for in candidates, these competencies are crucial to helping people who have struggled to obtain or keep jobs, retain and advance in them over the long term.

It is this model that Cara Plus is working to scale.

Cara's solution strongly aligns with two Challenge dimensions:

• Increase access to high-quality, affordable learning, skill-building, and training opportunities for those entering the workforce, transitioning between jobs, or facing unemployment.
• Implement competency-based models for life-long learning and credentialing.

Our approach relies on mastering five, widely applicable workplace competencies that enable individuals to be successful in a variety of roles. Through this approach, workers have been trained and retained in far-reaching industries, such as: financial services, property management, healthcare, hospitality, and manufacturing. Top employers include: East Bank Club, The Habitat Company, Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants, Northwestern Medicine, Rebuilding Exchange, and Securitas. 

Cara Plus has 3 full-time staff, and is supported by Cara's enterprise of 85 staff.

We are committed to strengthening diversity, equity, and inclusion internally, as well as how we show up to the outside world. To achieve this, we are actively focusing on three levers:  

• Amplification: We are seeking to better amplify the work of our community and corporate partners that are championed by Black and Latinx individuals. 

• Representation: We are examining the representation of our Black and Latinx colleagues at different levels of the organization, including in rooms where decisions are made, how they are compensated, and the composition of our Board of Directors – which, by January 2021, will be 50% female, 25% Black, and 35% people of color.  

• Consumption: Finally, we are examining how we use the power of our purse to ensure that we are thoughtfully finding and selecting vendors that are run by or benefit our Black and Latinx community members.  

There are two elements that make our program unique - our results and our scaling model.

When it comes to results, there are 37,000+ workforce development organizations in the U.S. While many of them are able to help people with barriers to employment get jobs, many of those individuals are unable to retain those jobs because they have not built the skills needed to succeed in the long term.

Through Cara's competency-based workforce training model, we've moved people with barriers to employment into  11,500+ jobs at 70% same-firm, one-year retention rates, by focusing on universal workplace competencies like communication, conflict resolution, professionalism, team building, and time management. By focusing on transferable skills (ones that, if absent, often lead to job loss), our participants are equipped to retain employment and advance in their careers, and be nimble should there be shocks to specific industries - like we're seeing right now with hospitality. 

When it comes to scaling, we stand apart, as well. Organizations working in the same space as Cara include the Center for Employment Opportunities, Cincinnati Works, and Per Scholas, among others. While in pursuit of similar goals, our dynamic approach to scale through an affiliate-based model is unique, as it enables us to co-develop workforce development models with existing organizations, whereby we work together to adapt our model to their specific context, population, and needs. By working with existing organizations, we're able to build on a community's existing assets, strengthening cities' native infrastructure to sustainably adapt and grow.

After nearly 30 years of establishing best practices and growing from failures, Cara is committed to sharing and cultivating cross-learning opportunities for workforce organizations - especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when many are being forced to adapt with fewer resources. In 2019, we piloted our first Cara Institute, which brought cohorts of workforce development programs together for immersive workshops and learning opportunities around recruitment, socio-emotional training, job placement and retention, with the aim of strengthening their impact and building a community from which they could learn.

In response to the pandemic, we recognized the need to be able to support organizations in a virtual environment, so we quickly pivoted to a virtual setting. Because so much of the impact of our in-person trainings was the experiential component, we adapted footage from a documentary filmed at Cara (The Road Up, Siskel/Jacobs Productions) to showcase our effective methodologies, coupled with real-time Q&A with experts to unpack and adapt different techniques to their models. Our first virtual Institute broke our attendance record, and interest for our upcoming virtual Institute has exceeded any other - with eight paying organizations intending to join our January cohort.

Furthermore, our affiliates were able to successfully leverage technology to both train people with barriers to employment for jobs, and assess the five workplace competencies using videoconferencing. While our affiliate in Atlanta had to pause programming to focus on emergency services, our affiliate in Fort Wayne saw strong success adapting experiential content to Zoom (see success measures below).

As our first virtual Cara Institute was piloted in September 2020, it is too early to collect outcome results with regards to increased jobs and job retention rates - especially with the impact that COVID-19 has had on job placements and retention. That said, we did an anonymous post-survey to assess if participants of that Institute planned to implement changes to their existing program based on what they learned. In post-survey results, 100% of respondents said that use of the experiential teaching - such as simulations from our recruitment and coaching teams, and classroom footage from the documentary - gave them the tools to adapt a new practice at their organization. 

As far as our affiliates go, we had strong results in Fort Wayne, as well. After switching to a virtual setting (which reduced geographic barriers for program participants), not only did they nearly double the size of their cohorts, but they were able to achieve an 84% employment rate among graduates, as well, despite the impact that COVID-19 has had on economic opportunities. 

Our theory of change is built on the belief that individuals experiencing poverty already have the intrinsic talents they need to be successful, but oftentimes have barriers that prevent them from moving forward. Some of these barriers are real (e.g., low educational credentials that have precluded them from jobs in the past), while others are perceived (e.g., they've been told that they can't get or keep a job, so have low self-esteem). These individuals are our inputs.

Once they come through Cara, we help them break those barriers through programming and transitional jobs, where we help them unlock their belief in themselves by shifting their perspectives on what they can achieve, and provide them with the skills to be successful on the job through mastery of our five workplace competencies. While these activities are most often applied to our job-seeking participants, we believe that they apply to our practitioner and employer partners, as well: that as we show them what this untapped talent pool looks like, it will also shift their perspectives and build their skills to hire and retain more people with barriers to employment.

The number of people we've placed into jobs and our retention rates demonstrate that these activities lead to our direct outcomes. Additionally, the fact that we have 70 active employment partners that regularly hire from Cara - and practitioners that have continuously come back to learn at our Institutes - demonstrate that their perspectives have shifted, as well, influencing their role in the participant journey.

Our most immediate outcome is helping job seekers attain and retain gainful employment. If they - and others in their community are able to do that - we can achieve the long-term impact of disrupting poverty and strengthening families and communities across America.

Through Cara Plus' two-pronged strategy (affiliation and Institute), we are able to take a one-to-many approach, since we focus on capacity building vs. trying to impact each job seeker directly. Through affiliation, we anticipate moving ~120 people into new jobs over the next year (which is lower than usual due to the disproportionate impact COVID-19 is having on people with barriers to employment) in addition to the nearly 800 jobs we'll achieve in Chicago. Over the next five years - with plans to launch three new affiliates and continue to grow our existing ones - we anticipate moving people into more than 1,000 jobs, with one-year, same-firm retention rates exceeding 70%.

With regard to Cara Institute, we anticipate significant growth, as well. To date, we've seen 200% growth at each convening we've held. Based on current projections, we will reach more than 100 organizations over the next five years. As a result of the capacity-building support they will receive, this engagement will open up a minimum of 10,000 new jobs for people with significant barriers to employment in that timeframe, with compounding effects for years to come.

Affiliation 

• Sector capacity. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations that were looking to expand services are now focused on survival. Since we take a partnership approach to affiliation, this will likely slow the process of finding our next affiliate as organizations focus on stability over growth.  

• Awareness. Cara’s affiliation model is still relatively new and there is limited knowledge of it among organizations that may be a good fit. 

• Funding. To maintain a robust civil society that can respond to the many needs coming out of the pandemic, many funders are doubling down on their existing grantees vs. investing in new programs.  

Cara Institute 

• Funding. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on non-profit budgets, and many professional development budgets have been zeroed out. As a result, fewer organizations may be able to pay to attend Cara Institute.

Affiliation 

• Sector capacity. We are using our networks to break into new circles. For example, both Atlanta Mission and Lutheran Social Services are part of broader membership networks, so they are making introductions. We are taking a similar approach with our national funders – working with them to identify strong organizations in cities where they are present to help us prospect new partnerships.  

• Awareness. We have hired a PR firm to help us with earned media and to help us think through thought leadership opportunities to increase awareness among our target market.  

• Funding. We have been lucky, in that many of the funders we have spoken with in other cities are interested in bringing our model to their cities. As the sector moves from relief to recovery – which will require a strong workforce component – we've been given signals that we’ll be a strong prospect for new funding. To maximize sustainability, we will continue to charge affiliates a launch and ongoing subscription fee to help cover costs.  

 Cara Institute 

• Funding. We have significantly reduced the price to attend Cara Institute, taking into account non-profits' reduced budgets and the fact that it’s moved from in-person to virtual. We are also offering generous scholarships to: (a) ensure that cost isn’t a barrier for interested organizations, and (b) to get a sense of organizations’ ability to pay in this new environment, so that we can better calibrate pricing in the future. 

At present, we have been able to collect outcome data for our affiliates, including number of people getting transitional jobs, permanent jobs, and their one-year retention rates.  

For Institute attendees, we’ve been able to collect leading indicators – such as if they plan to make programmatic changes following Cara Institute and what changes they have made. In the future, we will look at how we can accurately capture different outcome metrics, such as how Cara Institute increased their job placements, increased their one-year retention rates, reduced the amount of time it takes their job seekers to find work, and/or how they’ve been able to leverage additional funding from the impact they’ve achieved through Cara Institute. As we start collecting this data, we want to be sure to strike the balance between accurately capturing our impact, and being thoughtful about contribution vs. attribution.  

N/A

At Cara, we have strong representation of those we serve, as 30% of our staff graduated from our program and have persevered through many of the challenges our participants face, like having a criminal background, a history of addiction a/o homelessness, and less than a Bachelor’s degree. In addition to those who bring their lived experience to the program, our Managing Director of Expansion (who is overseeing this work), has successfully managed, measured, and scaled social impact programs in Nigeria, Congo, Zambia, Kenya, Canada, and the U.S. - including launching Cara Plus’ second affiliate in Atlanta and the Cara Institute model.  

Affiliate partners who have adopted our model and receive ongoing technical assistance: 

• Atlanta Mission 

• Lutheran Social Services of Indiana

Cara Institute registrants and alumni, who we continue to engage with by providing resources and technical support: 

• Catholic Charities of Wichita 

• Coalfield Development Corporation 

• Forge City Works 

• The Grooming Project

• Mercy Home for Boys and Girls 
  

• Mercy Housing 

• Rush University Hospital 

• Salt and Light Coalition 

• Storycatchers 

• Thistle Farms

• United Against Poverty 
  

• UpRrise Nashville 

• Willis Dady Homeless Shelter 

• WorkFaith Connection 

Affiliation is a high-touch, contractually bound model with a partner organization, in which we:  

• Spend eight months co-developing a workforce development model ($50k):  

• Adapting the partner organization’s service delivery model to integrate a vocational component, 

• Working with them to adapt Cara's program to fit their model and population needs 

• Developing a staffing model and training staff 

• Providing access to all of our intellectual property 

• Helping them develop a data infrastructure to track and report metrics 

• Assisting with internal and external change management 

• Provide ongoing technical assistance ($15k annually, for a minimum of four years) 

• Providing ongoing in-person and virtual training opportunities with Cara and other affiliates 

• Sending updated materials 

• Troubleshooting new problems 

• Securing press and other opportunities for exposure 

Cara Institute is a low-touch capacity building opportunity in which we: 

• Provide an immersive training experience to help organizations enhance their recruitment, socio-emotional training, job placement and job retention (three days in-person $750/pp, or 14 hours virtually ($250/pp) 

• Provide ongoing one-on-one technical support to help them implement new practices 

• Provide exclusive continuing education opportunities to enhance engagement and impact 

In both models, the value to our customers comes in the adaptability and hands-on support they receive to adapt different practices learned at Cara or through the Cara network to their own model. The strength is not taking a one-size-fits all approach, but one that is highly customized to each organization, to maximize its ability to strengthen job outcomes in a contextually relevant way.  

In addition to private philanthropic and sponsorship investments, Cara Plus currently generates income through fees from services to affiliate partners and non-profits that attend Cara Institute. Starting in Fall 2020, we will also earn revenue through trainings provided to employers (not part of this grant proposal). Ultimately, we anticipate being 70% philanthropically funded in 2020, with 30% of our funding coming in as earned-revenue. Over time, we will work to increase earned revenue opportunities to maximize long-term sustainability. 

Funder 

Type of Funding 

FY21 Amount 

Stand Together Foundation 

Grant 

$90,000

Kadens Family Foundation 

Grant 

$50,000

Cara Plus  

Earned Revenue 

$42,300 

TOTAL 

$182,300 

Our budget represents our current capacity, in which we have 1.5 staff members providing time to these efforts. While this level of capacity has been effective for our current size, in order to scale, we will need an additional FTE who can dedicate her/himself to prospecting and partnerships, as well as additional marketing dollars to be able to increase our exposure. The additional annual costs for these efforts will be $150,000, which will include labor, benefits, travel, and marketing/advertising. Given the nature of the model, we are seeking grant dollars – with a goal of raising the funds by our next fiscal year (July 2021). As a significant portion of these dollars would go to a new staff member, our goal would be to find multi-year gifts to sustain the role, until we’re able to fully fund it through earned-revenue (anticipated in our fourth year).  

Affiliate 

Travel 

   Due Diligence 

$6,940 

   Co-Development 

$10,410 

   Ongoing Technical Assistance 

$2,673 

Other Direct Costs 

$150 

Other Costs 

$8,998 

Labor 

$62,000 

Affiliate Total 

$91,171 

Cara Institute 

Direct Costs 

  In-person Institute 

$0 

  Virtual Institute 

$60 

Other Costs 

$13,497 

Labor 

$93,000 

Cara Institute Total 

$108,897 

TOTAL COSTS 

$200,068 

This Challenge is a strong fit because: (1) our solution is closely aligned with two dimensions, and (2) the partners' contributions are uniquely aligned to the barriers we are working to overcome. As we discussed why our solution fits with the dimensions previously, we'll focus on the latter.

The three barriers we identified were sector capacity, awareness, and funding. Conducting a validation pilot addresses all three. Because we take a partnership approach to scale, sector capacity has recently become a challenge due to the strain that the pandemic has placed on non-profit programs and budgets. Partnering with a workforce board will be a strong match, as it will enable us to leverage their strength as a knowledge hub and matchmaker for workforce development programs and businesses to help us identify ideal partners for both our affiliate and Institute opportunities. Deploying both our high- and low-touch models will enable us to meet the needs of different non-profits, ensuring that the pilot will maximize our impact in the local ecosystem. In doing so, it will address the challenge we have with awareness, as well.

From a funding perspective, the Challenge will also provide a boost. Because our affiliate model is customized for different communities based on their population, context, and needs, we spend a significant amount of time co-developing the model to adapt to the locale. This funding will cover the cost for the co-development phase, ensuring that the model is set up for success.

Two principles undergird our expansion approach: (1) that there are strong, existing assets in different communities that have the interest and ability to strengthen job outcomes locally; and (2) that Cara can impact more job seekers through partners vs. trying to impact each job seeker directly.

Because of these principles, we take a one-to-many approach by focusing on capacity building. Doing so makes us ripe for partnership with workforce development boards because it will enable us to work collaboratively with multiple organizations in ways that are contextually relevant to different cities to help them strengthen job outcomes for people with barriers to employment. Because a large part of Cara's model is working directly with employers, workforce development boards are also a natural fit as we can help organizations better show how hiring this talent is an act of strategic advantage, helping to strengthen the bonds between practitioners and employers nationally.

We are looking for two different types of organizations with whom we can partner. 

For our affiliate expansion efforts, we are looking to partner with organizations that serve adults affected by poverty that have a demonstrated track record of direct service and external partnerships in their communities, who are looking to help their clients move towards self-sufficiency. Some types of successful organizations include: homeless shelters, recovery homes, domestic violence, shelters, social enterprises, social service agencies, and nascent workforce development programs that operate in an urban environment where there is access to entry- and mid-level jobs. Partnering with these organizations represents the most direct way we create inclusive employment pathways in new communities, and open up employers to hiring different sources of talent. 

For our training institute, we look for partnerships with any emerging or existing workforce development program looking to strengthen how they recruit, train, place into employment, and/or help their clients retain jobs for the long-term. This model has successfully been implemented across a range of geographies, demographies, and organization maturities, so provides flexibility for any workforce program looking to enhance their impact.