Project Overview
Third Sector is facilitating a design process with the Healthy Marin Partnership (HMP), a collaborative of Marin Country health care stakeholders, and training partners to develop an action plan for workforce system improvements. Through this initiative, the HMP and training partners will investigate challenges in achieving well-paying health care jobs and design solutions in collaboration with jobseekers and workers.
Everyone should have the opportunity to have a job or career that pays them a wage that helps them support their families. But today, there are too many people who don't have access to these kinds of job opportunities because some government officials and employers have created and maintained barriers based on what we look like, where we live, or how much money our parents may have. As a result, industries like health care often need help finding enough workers to fill open jobs. Under- or unemployed workers often don’t know where to find jobs that pay living wages or even which industries pay living wages. In Marin County, California, a longstanding multi-sector collaborative, the Marin Health Partnership, has been working hard to remove these barriers and connect people to job opportunities in health care to ensure that everyone in the county can achieve their dreams.
In 2023, The Healthy Marin Partnership launched the HMP Health Workforce Initiative dedicated to improving Marin County residents' ability to get well-paying health care jobs. The HMP is a longstanding group of Marin County hospitals and clinics, government agencies, and community organizations dedicated to helping everyone in the county live healthier lives.
Developing responsive and equitable workforce solutions requires engaging with the people who often do not have advantages in the workforce, like people of color and immigrants from Novato, Marin City, West Marin, and the Canal section of San Rafael. The collaborative selected Third Sector to facilitate a process that utilizes human-centered design principles to ensure that the plan they develop meaningfully connects all jobseekers, no matter their race, background, or circumstance, to well-paying jobs and can generate greater diversity and cultural responsiveness in the health care system. The collaborative begins by exploring challenges in recruiting, training, and retaining workers in nursing, medical assistance and management, counseling, and social work positions. Partners will then develop and commit to solutions that they want to address over the course of the project.
Currently, the project is in the early stages of recruiting jobseekers interested in these fields and health care industry employers to join working groups that will help identify barriers preventing Marin County jobseekers from getting jobs in the healthcare field. These working groups will ultimately co-design solutions to open up or create pathways to employment in this growing industry in the county.
By Fall 2023, Third Sector will support the HMP in developing an Action Plan and commitments to create solutions that help the health care industry engage, hire, and retain employees of color and immigrants.
For more information about Third Sector's work with Marin Health Partnership or Economic Mobility efforts, please contact Jess Praphath at jpraphath@thirdsector.org.
Economic Mobility
| Project Name | Scope | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Better Careers Design Group: Using Human-Centered Design to Advance Equitable Economic Outcomes in California | County | CA | Closed |
| The Better Careers Design Group was a multi-year initiative across four California counties that brought together government agencies, nonprofits, and local community members to design human-centered and outcomes-oriented solutions for systemic workforce challenges and to advance the equitable economic outcomes in California. Third Sector led the group of 20 participating organizations through each phase of the human-centered design process so that local teams could apply lessons learned to engaging members of their local community. | |||
| Advancing Economic Mobility for MA DTA Participants | State | MA | Closed |
| Beginning in 2018, Third Sector worked with the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) to make large-scale systems changes toward becoming a public agency that invests in family-centered approaches to catalyze economic mobility for TANF recipients in the Commonwealth. Third Sector provided ongoing technical assistance that enabled MA DTA to strengthen its capacity to prioritize and achieve outcomes. | |||
