[An excerpt from the Executive Summary of the report:]

New Paradigms Consulting (NPC) was hired to develop recommendations for improving employment opportunities for New Haven residents that Mayor Harp’s leadership can bring to fruition. Mayor Harp is particularly interested in learning about the state of workforce development in the city and the region, and identifying 2-3 strategies that will make a difference for jobseekers. Much of the information in this report comes from state data, and a scan of New Haven-based nonprofits that offer employment services ranging from basic education skills to occupational training. The focus of the report was to understand the level of resources that exist, and recommend ways to improve coordination and collaboration among the providers in order to increase their impact as a group for the specific purpose of connecting more people to quality jobs and training opportunities. Among the questions New Paradigms was asked to address are:

• What resources exist in New Haven to provide employment services, and what services are offered?
• How effective is the network of workforce development providers and can they scale up their services to serve more people?
• Where are the opportunities to promote better coordination, stronger collaboration, and otherwise improve the impact New Haven service providers have on job seekers?
• What will it take to “move the needle” on unemployment among lower income city residents, and what are the 2-3 strategies that could us there?

New Paradigms estimated over $37 million flowing into New Haven to support employment programs from adult basic education to occupational skill training. Half that funding comes through the Workforce Alliance, the regional workforce investment board, which serves over 5,300 New Haven residents, and helped 2,238 find a job in 2014 (one third of all placements). The Workforce Alliance is by far the largest service provider; all other providers combined account for perhaps a third of the volume that comes through the Career Center. The scale of services offered by the other nonprofit providers are low, and in need of improvement for more impact so that twice as many more program completers are prepared for a job, placement in an occupational training program, or pursue a credential at Gateway Community College.

This report recommends two core strategies for improving employment opportunities, and three goals as follows:

• Create a workforce intermediary who can work with providers, employers and the public system to better coordinate services, and will work with providers to improve service quality, coordination and impact;
• Mobilize the New Haven community around a campaign to “Skill UP New Haven” by focusing on reducing adult literacy as measured by increasing the number of adults who are proficient in math and literacy at a minimum 11th grade level
• Establish a target to increase New Haven’s adult literacy rate by 5% — or 2,500 people – over the next five years, and connect those individuals to employment, college or training.
• Establish a target to increase the employment rate among New Haven residents by 8%, or 4,200 people by 2020.
• Re-establish a Workforce Roundtable for local service providers as a starting point to meet regularly, share information, and begin the process of better communications and collaboration.

The job market reality is that educational levels of available jobs has increased over the past decade, and the educational skills of the jobseeker have not kept pace such that a significant gap exists between literacy levels of New Haven adults and those required by available jobs. Increasingly, these jobs require some level of post-secondary education; either an Associate’s Degree, or at minimum, an industry-recognized credential. Creating different pathways to improved literacy will open employment options for those who want those skills and make them more competitive job candidates. Putting those pathways in place will require service providers to work in new and different ways. Then these pathways have to produce literate adults at a pace far better than is currently the case. Today, at most there are 1200 adults in New Haven pursuing Adult Basic Education and/or a GED program, either at the Continuing Education Center, or at one of its satellite programs. The net result of this effort is 44 persons prepared through the Continuing Education Center passed the GED test in 2014. In order to close the gap and “begin priming a basic skills pipeline”, New Paradigms estimates New Haven’s service providers will need to produce a minimum of 632 adults each year that become proficient at a minimum 11th grade level!

The recommendations in this report align with the work of the New Haven Promise Zone (NHPZ) / City Transformation Plan planning teams that is currently underway and lead by Martha Okafor, the City of New Haven’s Community Services Administrator. 

Click the link below to view the main report page.

Commissioned by The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, DataHaven analyzed the recent demographic, social, and economic impact of immigration in the region.  

Click the link below to view the main report page.

Measure of America, at measureofamerica.org, is a tool for understanding the distribution of well-being and opportunity throughout America. The American Human Development Project provides easy-to-use yet methodologically sound tools for understanding the distribution of well-being and opportunity in America and stimulating fact-based dialogue about key issues: health, education, and living standards.

This document is the successful Waterbury, CT FY 2014 TIGER Capital Project Grant Application, submitted by the City of Waterbury. The project is now underway.

From the application: The Waterbury Active Transportation and Economic Resurgence (WATER) project is potentially the biggest catalytic project to be undertaken by the City of Waterbury in the past 50 years. WATER is a multi-faceted mobility enhancement project that will revitalize Waterbury’s river/rail corridor neighborhoods and downtown center and drive the economic resurgence of the City and region. This bold project proposes to construct an integrated system of “active transportation” improvements including: a downtown riverfront trail, a reconstructed and expanded network of local streets, and a comprehensive array of pedestrian/bicycle safety improvements and linkages, all designed to better connect downtown to the historic McKim, Mead & White designed train station and riverfront. These improvements will serve to complement on-going City and State investments in downtown revitalization, brownfield reclamation and provision of expanded transit options at the train station. WATER will benefit all of Waterbury’s 110,000 residents by improving connections between neighborhoods, jobs, schools and green spaces.

This document presents data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), a product of the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. The LODES dataset combines wage records, employer reports, administrative and demographic information, and records from the U.S. Census Bureau. The most recent dataset was available for the year 2011. The LODES dataset offers an unprecedented level of geographic and demographic detail compared to other economic datasets. Employment locations are aggregated to the Census Block geography to protect privacy and are for general planning purposes only. LODES data was supplemented with data from the Connecticut Department of Labor and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Statistics from the different data sources do not match up perfectly due to differing data collection methods. For example, the Connecticut Department of Labor data classifies all government employees into one category while the LODES dataset separates them by function (public school teachers would be considered “educational services” employees). These discrepancies were marked in the report with an asterisk.

Findings include:

• The Central Naugatuck Valley Region (CNVR) had a total employment of 98,453 in 2011, a loss of 5,100 jobs (-4.9%) from 2002.
• Comparatively, there were 130,968 employed persons living in the region, a net export of over 32,500 workers.
• Half of all CNVR residents now work outside the region and over 40 percent of all CNVR workers live outside the region.
• Recovery from the 2007-2009 economic recession has been slow, particularly for goods-producing sectors.
• Regional employment peaked at 104,492 in 2007 and declined to a low of 96,423 in 2010. Employment has grown slowly since 2010 but only education and health services has exceeded pre -recession employment levels.
• Service-producing sectors now make up nearly 80 percent of the region’s total employment. The service sector contains a mix of low paying jobs (accommodation and food services, retail trade) and high paying jobs (finance and insurance, management of companies and enterprises).
• The region has high concentrations of manufacturing, retail trade, wholesale trade, and health care and social assistance employment compared to other parts of the state.
• The region has very low concentrations of employment in the finance and insurance, arts, entertainment and recreation, management of companies and enterprises, and information sectors compared to other parts of the state.
• The wholesale trade sector was identified as the strongest major sector of the CNVR economy. It saw employment growth from 2002-2011, has a high job concentration relative to the state and nation, and has seen positive regional trends. Much of the wholesale trade employment in the region is found in Cheshire Industrial Park near the I-84 and I-691 interchange.
• After decades of decline, manufacturing employment is projected to stay relatively stable from 2010 to 2020. Manufacturing subsectors such as plastics and rubber product manufacturing and chemical manufacturing are projected to add jobs statewide.