Category: Pathways to Economic Opportunity

Five Minutes with… the Northern New Mexico Pathways to Opportunity Strategy Table

Posted on by Brianna Provenzano

As funders look to move from isolated grants to systems-level impact, the need for durable, place-based models that communities can shape — not just receive — has never been clearer. In northern New Mexico, the LANL Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation are collaborating with twenty other funders to pioneer the next frontier of place-based funding with the Northern New Mexico Pathways to Opportunity Strategy Table: a 15-member collaborative that brings philanthropy, public agencies, community leaders, and young people themselves together to align resources for those too often left out of education and workforce pathways.

What began as a listening process and a fund-mapping exercise has since evolved into a distinctly ambitious model that blends pooled philanthropic, corporate, and public dollars; youth-led participatory grantmaking; and capacity-building designed to help nonprofit  and tribal organizations grow stronger over time. The result is a more community-rooted way of thinking about how grant funding moves, who helps shape it, and what long-term success looks like.

For this installment of Five Minutes With…, NationSwell spoke with Alvin Warren, Vice President of Policy and Impact at the LANL Foundation, and Tomi Hiers, Vice President of Center for Civic Sites and Community Change at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, about what it took to move this work from convening to action, why the Strategy Table built youth voice into the model from the start, and what other funders around the country can learn from this effort. 

NationSwell: What is the Strategy Table, and what challenge was it built to address?

Alvin Warren, LANL Foundation: From our side, it’s important to understand that we’re a 100% place-based foundation based in Española, New Mexico, and we serve a predominantly rural and tribal region across north-central New Mexico. We were created to address a very specific geography: a seven-county, eighteen-tribe region of northern New Mexico.

One thing I knew from my time at Kellogg was that when national funders looked at New Mexico, they often focused only on Albuquerque, and there are understandable reasons for that, especially when funders are trying to meet numerical targets. But what struck me were the many opportunities to invest in good work in rural New Mexico — including work aligned with Casey’s Thrive by 25 framework — and yet that work often wasn’t visible or accessible to larger funders. Sometimes it was happening at a smaller scale; sometimes there were structural barriers that made it difficult for national funders to support smaller, rural organizations or tribes.

So we realized a mechanism might be needed to both draw attention to the opportunities and needs in Northern New Mexico and also make it logistically possible for funders, especially national funders, to invest in a way that felt informed, respectful, and shared. That’s really the blueprint for what the Strategy Table became.

Tomi Hiers, Annie E. Casey Foundation: At the Annie E. Casey Foundation, we made the decision to dedicate roughly 50% of our grantmaking to improving access to opportunity for young people ages 14 to 24 through our Thrive by 25 commitment, and we wanted to begin implementing that work in three places: our hometowns of Baltimore and Atlanta, and also Albuquerque, New Mexico — a place where the Foundation had already been active for about two decades, particularly around systems impacting justice-involved and child welfare-involved youth.

As we started thinking about a place-based strategy in Albuquerque and about working in deep partnership with nonprofits helping young people connect to education, training, employment, youth leadership, and financial stability, we knew it was important to understand the local philanthropic landscape. As a national funder, there can sometimes be tension around how national philanthropy shows up in a place, so we wanted to be a strategic co-investor; we wanted to know who the local funders were, what their priorities were, how those priorities aligned with ours, and how they wanted national philanthropy to support their work.

That’s how we began building relationships with local funders, and with Alvin, who was then at Kellogg and later transitioned to LANL Foundation. Those early conversations about what was important in the broader community, and what kinds of partnerships could help address barriers facing young people, were really the building blocks that eventually led to the Strategy Table.

NationSwell: What makes this different from a traditional workforce or economic development effort?

Warren, LANL Foundation: Northern New Mexico has one of the highest rates of disconnected, or “opportunity,” youth in the country: nearly one in four. For some populations, including Native youth and young parents, that number can be even higher. And this is happening in a region that also has real deserts of opportunity — places where access to paid internships, career training, or youth development programs are limited or uneven. So the goal isn’t simply workforce development in the conventional sense, it’s about transforming the landscape of opportunity so that young people, regardless of where they live in the region, have access to meaningful pathways.

What makes this model distinct is that it’s a pooled fund with three important differences. First, it’s designed to pool philanthropic, corporate, and public dollars, which is relatively unusual. Second, the grantmaking is done through a youth-led participatory process. And third, the model includes dedicated capacity-building support through a Regional Resource Hub, so grantees aren’t just getting one-off dollars, they’re also getting technical assistance, peer learning, and support to become more competitive for larger public and philanthropic funding over time.

Hiers, Annie E. Casey Foundation: What was attractive to us about the Strategy Table was that it offered leverage, sustainability, and scale. We rarely go it alone as a funder; we think a lot about how to use philanthropic dollars to leverage public funding or to bring other philanthropic partners into the work. We’re always asking: how do we have impact beyond a few hundred young people served directly? How do we influence policy and practice?

So part of what was exciting here was that there were already strong efforts underway, and a number of the funders at the table were supporting that work, including state agencies. The question became: how do we scale the best and most promising practices around education, training, and employment for young people, especially those who are often left behind and locked out of opportunity?

NationSwell: How have the Annie E. Casey and LANL Foundations helped move the work from convening to action?

Warren, LANL Foundation: We formally launched in 2021, and the first major step was a fiscal map. We partnered with the Children’s Funding Project and used the Thrive by 25 framework to do a five-year lookback on philanthropic investments in the region. Initially, we were only going to look at philanthropy, but the Casey Foundation pushed us to include public investments as well, and that was transformational; it would have been a huge missing piece otherwise.

At that point, the table had grown from an initial group of four funders to about ten. When the fiscal map was completed, we made what turned out to be a very important decision: instead of releasing the report publicly right away, we paused and took the findings out to our community first. We held a series of community gatherings, including a tribal-specific gathering, across the region, including in very rural communities. We also ran a survey and held focus groups, including one focused on underrepresented youth and another for policymakers and public funders. That process took about a year, and it was all about listening to how community understood the data and what they believed should happen next.

The other major shift from convening to action came when Casey helped us recognize that if we were serious about this, we needed infrastructure. Casey was the first funder to commit real resources to support the backbone and operations of the collaborative. Without that early investment, we would not have been able to grow the table or move toward implementation.

Hiers, Annie E. Casey Foundation: We think a lot about leverage. There’s power in bringing other funders to the table and in aligning philanthropic dollars with public systems. For us, this was an opportunity to support a table that was already rooted in a particular place and to help build something that could influence systems, not just fund isolated programs.

Once the fund mapping report came back, it became easier to think strategically. It helped us understand both where resources were flowing and where they weren’t. There was one county, for example, where the lack of investment was striking. That allowed the table to ask: What problem are we trying to solve, and what can a pooled set of more nimble philanthropic resources actually do?

From there, it was about planning carefully and building toward a model that could invite local partners into a meaningful, well-designed process for competing for and receiving resources.

NationSwell: What does the most helpful philanthropic support look like in a collaborative like this?

Hiers, Annie E. Casey Foundation: Flexibility is really important. In the early days, there was some willingness from other funders to include Albuquerque because Casey was doing work there. But we took the position that even though we were active in Albuquerque, this table was focused on northern New Mexico, and that was okay. We didn’t want our partners to contort themselves to make something work for us just because of how we had originally framed our priorities.

So for other funders or strategic partners joining a table, I think one of the biggest lessons is: if there are places where you can be flexible in service of the broader effort, you should seriously consider that.

Warren, LANL Foundation: I’d add that impact comes from infrastructure. Funders often want as much money as possible going directly out the door, and of course that matters. But if you under-resource the infrastructure it takes to do something complex like this, you undercut the impact. That means staffing, facilitation, evaluation, communications, support for the youth advisory members, and all the connective tissue that makes a collaborative actually function. Those investments may not always feel as exciting as direct grants, but they’re what make the grants more effective.

The other thing is: lend a hand. This doesn’t work if one organization is doing all the labor. Casey and other funders have actively helped make introductions, bring in new partners, and expand the pool, and that’s part of how we’ve grown the number of contributing funders. 

And finally: show up. It matters when national funders come in person, meet grantees, and participate face to face. That presence builds trust and changes the quality of the relationship.

NationSwell: What’s one anecdote or example of progress you’ve seen that shows the model is working?

Hiers, Annie E. Casey Foundation: One sign is simply that partners are still there, and new partners keep joining. My understanding is that this kind of table is something relatively new for northern New Mexico: funders coming together in this way with each other, with public systems, and with the broader community. The fact that the table has held together and continued to attract interest is itself a meaningful sign that the model is offering something valuable.

Warren, LANL Foundation: We’ve now been able to make 19 grants, almost all at the $100,000 level, with a couple slightly smaller based on what grantees requested. Based on grantee data, we anticipate reaching at least 800 young people by the end of the first year.

What’s especially exciting is the growth in participation in the pooled fund itself. As of the end of last week, we had 21 corporate and philanthropic funders either contributing or engaged in supporting the youth fund in some way, including 17 philanthropic funders and four corporate funders. And our largest state agency partner, the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions (essentially our Department of Labor), has committed a $1.5 million match for our second grantmaking round.

NationSwell: What’s been your biggest challenge in standing up this work, and what have funders needed to understand about that complexity?

Warren, LANL Foundation: One of the biggest challenges was the tension between moving thoughtfully and moving quickly. We spent what I think was an appropriate amount of time doing shared analysis and relationship building. That meant bringing funders together repeatedly, defining terms, developing guiding principles, and getting clear on what success actually meant across organizations with very different strategies and metrics.

That took time — a couple of years, really. And during that period, there were certainly people saying, “We’ve been in this space too long; we need to move to action.” That pressure is understandable. But if you don’t spend time building shared understanding, you can end up with a collaborative that looks aligned on paper but isn’t actually aligned in practice.

Hiers, Annie E. Casey Foundation: I think it also helps to have a broader definition of success. To me, the table being formed was a success. Having diverse philanthropic and public partners at the table was a success. Conducting the fund map and having honest conversations about what the data told us, and what it didn’t, was a success. Those things matter. And then, yes, the grants and the impact on young people are the “cherry on top,” but the process that led there matters too.

NationSwell: What felt important about building youth voice and participatory grantmaking into the Strategy Table’s design from the start?

Hiers, Annie E. Casey Foundation: Youth leadership is one of the pillars of Thrive by 25, and our Foundation has also been doing a lot of work around intergenerational engagement. It’s one thing to talk about youth voice or youth development. It’s another to think seriously about how adults and young people actually sit together, share decision-making, and govern together.

That was part of what made this model so intriguing to us. I’ll be honest — I didn’t know exactly how it would play out. I had questions: How would the youth advisory group be structured? Who would support them? How would adults and young people sit alongside each other in a real decision-making process? But when you’re part of a collaborative, you also have to trust the design process and the partners at the table. This was a chance to see what meaningful youth leadership and intergenerational governance could actually look like in practice.

Warren, LANL Foundation: We were very intentional about making sure the young people involved actually reflected the populations the work is designed to serve. The original members of the Regional Youth Advisory Council represented Native youth and Opportunity Youth, among others. In fact, two of the most active members are young parents.

We also didn’t just bring in young people who had never been exposed to philanthropy or leadership spaces. We recruited young people who had already participated in youth development efforts and were ready for this to be the next step in their leadership. And the reason we were able to do this well is because we had already spent so much time developing shared guiding principles that became a touchstone for the table. They made it much easier to say: if we really believe these things, then youth leadership and participatory grantmaking aren’t optional — they’re part of the model.

NationSwell: What can other funders and regional leaders take away from this model?

Hiers, Annie E. Casey Foundation:  Flexibility is one of the biggest takeaways. If you’re joining or building a collaborative, there may be places where you can loosen your grip on your own preferences in order to strengthen the broader effort, but that doesn’t mean losing your priorities, it means being willing to support something bigger than any one organization.

Also: time matters. If you want to build something durable, you have to resist the urge to rush to visible outputs before the foundation is there. Build intentionally, document what matters, and be prepared to adapt as the work evolves. The goal is not speed for its own sake — it’s sustainability.

And finally, I advise folks to define success broadly. The process of building alignment, doing the analysis, surfacing the data, and creating a real table with diverse stakeholders is not just pre-work, it is part of the impact.

Warren, LANL Foundation: If I had to put it in bullet points, I’d say:

  • Be willing to learn together. We wouldn’t have this table, or this success, without the Casey Foundation, our other Strategy Table partners, and other contributors. In particular, if Casey had gotten a year in and said, “Actually, it’s been great, see you later,” I honestly don’t know where we’d be. 
  • Stay the course. Philanthropy is often too quick to pivot just as things begin to work. When you stay the course, you begin to build capacity and move towards long-term impact. 
  • Recognize that impact comes from infrastructure. You don’t win by undercutting the resources it takes to do something this complex. Funders have to invest in the infrastructure, too — staffing, evaluation, communications, facilitation, the support it takes to manage and train the Regional Youth Advisory Council. All of that is what makes the impact possible, alongside the dollars going into the fund itself.
  • Lend a hand: Don’t assume one backbone organization should do all the labor.
  • Show up, especially in person. National funders, in particular, need to remember that their presence matters. It matters when they come to the community, meet grantees, and participate via relationships, not just transactions. That can make all the difference.

The Northern New Mexico Pathways to Opportunity Strategy Table is made possible by a collaborative of 15 members: Anchorum Health Foundation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, The Cricket Island Foundation, LANL Foundation, Los Alamos National Laboratory Community Partnerships Office / Triad National Security, LLC, Las Vegas (New Mexico) Community Foundation, Marshall L. and Perrine D. McCune Charitable Foundation, New Mexico Foundation, Regional Youth Advisory Council, Santa Fe Community Foundation, Taos Community Foundation, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Thornburg Foundation, United Way North Central New Mexico, and W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Pathways to Economic Opportunity: MassMutual Foundation and Opportunity Finance Network

Posted on by Brianna Provenzano

In the Pathways to Economic Opportunity interview series, NationSwell is taking a closer look at how companies are pursuing remedies to disparities that exist in vulnerable communities that lack access to financial opportunity and prosperity. In spotlighting these partnerships, this series hopes to uncover the “secret sauce” that makes these solutions successful.

NationSwell recently sat down with Dennis Duquette, president and CEO of the MassMutual Foundation to discuss their newly-announced partnership with Opportunity Finance Network to launch the CDFI Innovation Initiative — a new effort designed to drive innovation, scale impact, and build new infrastructure for the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) industry.

Here’s what he had to say:

NationSwell: To start, what is the theory of change behind CDFIs — how do they work to expand economic access and provide financial stability in low-income communities?

Dennis Duquette, president and CEO of the MassMutual Foundation: CDFIs are financial institutions dedicated to delivering responsible, affordable lending to disinvested communities that are often underserved by other lenders and banks. By their very nature – certified by the Treasury Department to be prioritizing community development, serving underserved markets and providing wraparound support services – CDFIs seek to fund the needs and dreams of businesses, housing providers, schools, and community facilities that other financing providers deem to be too risky.

NationSwell: What challenges in the CDFI space is the MassMutual Foundation looking to help solve, and what positions the Foundation to do so?

Duquette, MMF: As it turns out, the biggest challenges facing the CDFI space have a lot to do with their own success – there’s been incredible growth in the visibility and recognition of CDFIs’ unique positioning in addressing community needs in the last few years.

The industry stepped into extraordinary visibility and expanded scale as it supported small businesses and economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic, including deploying more than $30B through the Paycheck Protection Program. The Barber of Little Rock, an Oscar-nominated short documentary that the MassMutual Foundation helped fund, highlights the work of a CDFI called People Trust and further contributes to public awareness of CDFIs as effective, community-centered providers of the financial capital and personalized support communities need to achieve financial health and resilience. And most recently, the EPA’s $27B Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) includes one of the most significant new flows of capital to the CDFI space anticipated over the next six years.

This success and opportunity to scale brings many new challenges, as CDFIs often have limited internal resources and too often face major challenges in deploying capital to meet their communities’ needs due to infrastructure challenges. Solving these challenges will help both better utilize the existing capital available to CDFIs and help attract further investment in the industry by institutional investors.

NationSwell:  What made Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) stand out as an ideal partner for the MassMutual Foundation?

Duquette, MMF: We always strive to make investments that can unlock opportunities that may otherwise not be fully leveraged – as we were just discussing, CDFIs stand at a major juncture of opportunity, and we want to ensure that it’s not missed. OFN is an ideal partner for us due to a number of reasons. They are themselves a CDFI and have been the leading CDFI support network for forty years, offering the critical capacity building, relationships, and loan capital that members across the country (over 430 member CDFIs and counting) need to fulfill their missions. Their role as convener and capacity builder for such a wide swath of CDFIs means that they have an incredible view into the challenges and opportunities facing the ecosystem. They also have a proven track record of executing visionary partnerships and, perhaps most importantly, share our view that collaboration and cooperation between funders and community partners is an important attribute for maximizing impact. Together, we aim to attract additional partners to the table to help fund the many innovations that this initiative will spur over the next five years.

NationSwell: What are the goals behind the MassMutual Foundation’s partnership and $25 million investment in OFN? How does the CDFI Innovation Initiative fit into your larger impact strategy as an organization?

Duquette, MMF: OFN and the MassMutual Foundation are in alignment that building and scaling resources and capacity of financial intermediaries like CDFIs is critical to achieving key shared outcomes, including income and wealth creation, financial resilience of individuals, and new jobs and small businesses nationwide. This partnership represents a natural evolution of our giving and is an outgrowth of all the things we’ve seen and learned through our local grantmaking focused on financial resilience across our recent focus communities (Springfield, Boston, Memphis). We’ve learned that the neighborhoods with the greatest need for affordable and accessible financial products and services are the very ones that most often lack them. More specifically, pathways to homeownership for first time homebuyers, small businesses loans & support, and access to quality jobs are consistently top needs expressed by residents and nonprofit leaders. This opportunity allows us to extend those lessons nationally to other communities and potentially engage like-minded funders to join us in this work.

NationSwell: What’s the special sauce behind the initiative – the novel or innovative elements that you’re most excited by?

Duquette, MMF: This initiative is structured to ensure that a strategic mix of voices, expertise, and resources are continually at the table to identify how to best innovate and invest in the infrastructure needed to help CDFIs grow, evolve, and scale into the future; with three core pillars designed to drive new strategies and innovations:

o   Creating an Innovation Advisory Council with investments in thought leadership and data-driven insights into scalable innovations.

o   Establishing an Innovation Center, an action tank that will take insights and promising solutions and seed them with capital and support.

o   Launching an Innovation Fund, a blended capital pool that will help take innovative and promising solutions to scale each year.

NationSwell: What impact are you intending to achieve through this initiative, and what are your metrics for success? How will the initiative measure the long-term impact of innovations on underserved communities?

Duquette, MMF: The CDFI Innovation Initiative aligns with the MassMutual Foundation’s goals of building and promoting the use of critical networks, fostering financial health and resilience, fulfilling basic economic needs, and expanding employment opportunities for low-income households and communities. The initiative will help advance new systems, and develop solutions needed to support scale and impact in the following areas:  capitalization innovations, new financing products, technology platform innovations, operational efficiencies, and data analytics and research. The complexity of this overall project means that we’ll be evaluating success on multiple levels, including increased growth rates in overall assets under management, financing closed from OFN members, number of housing units developed, small business loans closed, and jobs created or retained. We’ll also track specific outcomes for each individual innovation that is piloted.

NationSwell: How do you see this initiative evolving in the future? What’s your longer-term vision for the work with CDFIs?

Duquette, MMF: We have a long-standing history of supporting CDFIs in the cities where we live and work and we’re excited to grow that investment commitment with this initiative. We, along with OFN, are confident that the structure, approach, and impact of this initiative will really lay the groundwork and make clear the case for sustaining this initiative beyond the next five years.

NationSwell:  Finally, do you have a call to action for leaders at peer organizations who have opportunities to help advance this work forward? 

Duquette, MMF: We would absolutely love to connect with anyone at any peer organization who may have a shared interest in any element of this work and initiative. We think there is a very compelling case for collaborative funding here, and as I just mentioned, we see shared investment as part of the longer-term goal of sustaining and growing the impact of the CDFI Innovation Initiative long into the future!

Pathways to Economic Opportunity: Extern

Posted on by Brianna Provenzano

As wealth and income inequality continue to climb in the United States, some employers are developing innovative models and catalytic partnerships designed to bring new skills, job access, and ultimately economic opportunity to financially vulnerable and historically marginalized individuals.

With our Pathways to Economic Opportunity interview series, NationSwell is taking a closer look at some of the solutions companies are pursuing in service of leveling the playing field and expanding their talent pipelines. In spotlighting these partnerships, this series hopes to uncover the “secret sauce” that makes these solutions successful for the benefit of other employers and their leaders.

NationSwell recently sat down with the team at Extern — a mission-driven organization empowering students with hands-on professional experience while creating meaningful pathways to economic mobility for historically underserved talent. Extern developed the Externship – a new form of professional experience that its students say is a more flexible and accessible alternative to internship or co-op programs. Companies like PwC, The Home Depot, AT&T, HSBC, National Geographic, and The Nature Conservancy have leveraged Extern’s tech-enabled platform to deliver Externships to tens of thousands of young people.

Here’s what they had to say:

NationSwell: In your own words, can you describe the high-level problem that Extern is solving for? 

Matt Wilkerson, Founder and CEO, Extern: The challenge is clear: employers increasingly value work experience over credentials, yet most students don’t have access to the professional opportunities they need to succeed. Internships are shrinking, and career centers aren’t equipped to meet the demand for real-world preparation.

At Extern, we create new opportunities for students to gain professional experience while helping companies broaden their talent pipelines. Our team has a mix of tech, education, and corporate DNA which allowed us to develop a platform so companies can deliver Externships at scale. Externships go beyond traditional internships by offering accessible, structured work experiences that meet the needs of both students and employers.

As of this publication, we’ve officially served 50,000 students with six to eight week externship experiences since 2020; about 25,000 of those have been year to date, and we’ve worked with about 45 companies at this point. 

Extern works by standing up programs that connect students seeking real-world experience with companies seeking to recruit from diverse, underrepresented talent pools. The companies pay us to organize and run these experiences, and in exchange we absorb much of the recruiting, training, and management work that they would have had to do in a traditional internship.

For hiring managers, the professional experience section of a resume is often the most critical factor in recruitment decisions. Yet, systemic barriers leave millions of students—especially those from underrepresented communities—without access to these resume-building opportunities. Extern’s solution is to create and deliver new experiences that wouldn’t exist otherwise, ensuring more students are equipped to step into the workforce with confidence.

NationSwell: What are the primary differences between externships and internships, and what are the unique benefits of each for companies?

Wilkerson, Extern: Externships make professional experience more scalable and accessible. Unlike internships, which are often limited in number and require significant HR resources, Externships are designed to create flexibility and minimize the logistical burden on companies. 

The number of available internships is currently about 4 million each year, compared to about 20 million college students. So there’s a supply and demand issue to begin with, and part of the reason is that internships are hard to get set up on the employer side — it’s laborious to train students, to give them feedback, to manage these programs. The really big programs require enormous amounts of employee resources — many, many hours supporting individual students. At Extern, we take most of that load off of the employers.

NationSwell: Could you tell us a bit about how the program actually works, in practice?

Wilkerson, Extern: Over six to eight weeks, students work on real-world projects remotely with company support, removing geographic and logistical barriers to gaining work experience. For companies, externships reduce training and management overhead while delivering meaningful engagement with a diverse talent pool.

Take a head of consumer insights launching a customer research project: they may not have time to recruit, train, or manage interns on frameworks like survey design or ‘Jobs to Be Done.’ With Extern, they can launch projects quickly, spending just an hour every other week mentoring students while Extern handles the rest—recruiting, training, managing, and ensuring deliverables meet professional standards.

Extern streamlines the entire process: recruiting students through a single application, preparing them with targeted training on project-specific tools and methodologies, and managing daily operations like answering questions and reviewing work. By the time deliverables are presented, students have been guided to produce high-quality, professional outputs, freeing managers to focus on high-value mentorship instead of oversight.

For companies—whether or not they aim to hire college grads at scale—this creates a rewarding way to share expertise, connect with emerging talent, and build brand recognition.

NationSwell: How does your current funding model work?

Mike Eng, Senior Director of Partnerships, Extern: We’ve been fortunate enough to find some corporates who have been paying us to run these programs; that is predominantly where our funding comes from right now. Some of our biggest partners believe from a CSR perspective that they have a commitment to society — and to different stakeholders — to invest in initiatives like education and upskilling, and have funded programs where they want to create better career outcomes for specific demographic groups. They’re not necessarily looking to hire the students, and they are happy if the students go and work at different places. 

Other corporates work with us from the perspective of a pre-internship funnel, where some strategic leaders have recognized that they need to improve and find ways to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. By launching Externships with large cohorts they expand their brand recognition in competition with peers or different companies. They’re able to engage students a little earlier on and give them exposure to different career opportunities within the organization.

For example, we created a National Geographic and the Nature Conservancy externship that’s managed by us. These organizations want to bring young people into the field of conservation as part of their mission to inspire others to protect the natural environment, and so we’re running this program where students come in and get support and guidance toward careers at all these different places doing conservation work. 

NationSwell: How would you describe your theory of change?

Wilkerson, Extern: At a societal level, we’re addressing the disconnect between education and employment. For decades, the focus has been on earning costly degrees without ensuring job readiness, disproportionately affecting underrepresented students who face greater economic barriers.

At an individual level, Externships act as a catalyst for economic mobility, embedding future-ready skills through structured, real-world experiences that enhance education and give students a competitive edge. For example, we’re investing heavily in Generative AI training—covering prompt engineering, identifying hallucinations, and building chatbots—because we see it as a key skill for helping young people leapfrog the job market over the next few years.

This has a direct impact on learners from underrepresented populations, who ultimately have gotten left behind by this big push over the last few decades to go through higher education, take on more and more student debt to do so, and come out the other end with some kind of credential that’s supposed to mean something in the marketplace. 

NationSwell: What is the call to action for other leaders at other organizations who would hope to establish their own programs to improve either educational attainment or economic mobility?

Wilkerson, Extern: If you’re a company that has been thinking of standing up some sort of impact program, but you’re struggling with how to connect it to business value, the Externship model offers a powerful solution. If you have a corporate foundation or CSR team that wants to tie into business goals around recruiting, building employer branding, and engaging your employees, that’s where this program really shines. That’s our big call to action. 

NationSwell: Tell us a little bit about your learning curve — what have been the stumbles you’ve faced, or anything you’ve learned as you’ve grown this program? 

Wilkerson, Extern: One of our biggest hurdles has been convincing companies that externships are as effective as we claim. Employers are often skeptical that students can deliver high-quality work with minimal oversight. It sort of flies in the face of your intuition about how the world works. However, once the employees and managers experience the program firsthand, they see the value—and that’s why we’ve maintained such strong retention among our partners.

Degrees alone aren’t enough anymore. Employers need to prioritize real-world skills, and students need more opportunities to build them. Extern is uniquely positioned to address both sides of this equation.

NationSwell: Is there anything else that feels really important to mention here?

Wilkerson, Extern:  An Externship becomes this ability to train young people on future-ready skills. My current thesis is that companies aren’t going to embrace Generative AI fast enough — they’re dabbling in it, but employees actually need to be able to experiment and play with those tools. We’ve started to build out modules that can be delivered within the Externship that train students on this — we’ll teach them how to do something the regular way, and we’ll teach them how to use Generative AI to do it more efficiently, at higher quality — or do something that wasn’t possible before. 

Over the next few years, you’re not going to have enough candidates in the market who have developed these skill sets in a real professional experience. We can help students from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds essentially leapfrog the talent pool with these skill sets. So I’d say companies that believe in that, that want to invest in that, that want to run experiments, this is also a way to do that with a talent pool that’s hungry, and in many cases, actually knows more about how to use technologies like Generative AI better than the average employee. 

Pathways to Economic Opportunity: Barclays and COOP Careers

Posted on by Brianna Provenzano

As wealth and income inequality continue to climb in the United States, some employers are developing innovative models and catalytic partnerships designed to bring new skills, job access, and ultimately economic opportunity to financially vulnerable and historically marginalized individuals.

In a new interview series, Pathways to Economic Opportunity, NationSwell is taking a closer look at some of the solutions companies are pursuing in service of leveling the playing field and expanding their talent pipelines. In spotlighting these partnerships, this series hopes to uncover the “secret sauce” that makes these solutions successful for the benefit of other employers and their leaders.

The first installment featured the Dow Last Mile Fund for Manufacturing & Skilled Trades. Here, in the second installment, NationSwell sat down with members of the teams at Barclays and COOP Careers (COOP) — a nonprofit that aims to provide training, job skills, and peer connections in order to help vulnerable populations overcome underemployment — about their partnership and newly-launched Financial Services track.

Here’s what they had to say:

Bird’s Eye View: Through its partnership with COOP, Barclays aims to equip the next generation of finance professionals with the abilities and networks they need to overcome underemployment while developing a robust network of diverse talent in the financial sector.

In 2023, the partners announced a new Financial Services track designed specifically to help participants find careers in data analytics and finance. The partnership’s pilot semester, which kicked off in August 2023, welcomed 35 students through two separate cohorts, and a spring semester began in mid-February.

Fast Stats: 

  • Every spring and fall, COOP convenes peer cohorts of 16-18 diverse, low-income college grads in New York, California, Illinois, and Florida, focused on three distinct areas: data analytics, digital marketing, and financial services. 
  • In addition to virtual training and skill-building, the program matches motivated first-generation college graduates with alumni coaches to support them in building the professional tools and networks they need for the careers they deserve. 
  • Within 12 months of program completion, four-in-five COOP alumni are fully employed, earning a median of $52,000 per year (median pre-program earnings are $12k (inclusive of both folks that enter the program under or unemployed).
  • COOP’s “head-heart-hustle” approach to curriculum design is 200-hours long and focuses on providing a mix of hard and soft skills, as well as near-peer guidance, social capital, and industry connections.

The Secret Sauce: 

“That’s what it’s all about for us: building social capital. We believe it’s the connections that make a difference in finding that first — or next — great job.” – Patricia Malizia, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications, COOP Careers

1. NationSwell: What’s the origin story of the relationship between Barclays and COOP?

Sarah Wessel, Managing Director of Partnerships at COOP Careers:

The relationship started as a partnership brokered through Robin Hood. The first couple of years were mostly focused on philanthropic support from Barclays, with some volunteer engagements mixed in.

As we got to know each other better, the Barclays Citizenship team approached us to discuss a more formalized partnership between our two organizations, which began maybe three or four years ago. 

Over time, given Barclays’ role in the sector, we realized it was a great opportunity for Barclays to become the lead partner for a new financial services track just as they were thinking deeply about how to diversify their talent pipeline and help more individuals launch careers in financial services.

The partnership has just grown immensely over the last 18 months.

John Kenny, VP, Citizenship team at Barclays:

At Barclays, our Citizenship strategy is focused on employability. Through our LifeSkills program  we’re really focused on how we can help upskill individuals who have historically faced barriers to work and help create pathways into meaningful employment. 

So we look to work with the most impactful partners in this space, and we’ve been so impressed by COOP’s completion  rates, placement rates, and with what COOP participants have gone on to do post-program. 

2. NationSwell: It sounds like the Financial Services track was born out of a trusting partnership and an unmet need. Who were the key stakeholders involved in the early formation of the new curriculum, and what was the critical piece of information that signaled that this was the right time in both programs’ relationship together to launch something new? 

Sarah Wessel, COOP Careers:

It was less about one moment and more about how all of these things converged: strong early partners in the finance sector like Barclays, and a lot of knowledge from our alumni due diligence across the industry. We told ourselves that if we want to scale 10x in New York, we must find a way to access the financial services industry because it is the largest upwardly mobile employer market here. 

And the COOP theory of change is all around social capital and alumni peer mobilization. So everything we do is focused on what our alumni can come back and teach students, and how they can help provide them an entry point into upwardly mobile careers. We view trends in our alumni community as a barometer for how we should be approaching program evolution.

The impetus for this belief that we could help others with entry into the field was when our existing alumni were finding some success in finance jobs. There is a real need, and the talent we were already training was obviously a good fit for the roles that financial institutions are looking to fill. 

If we give our participants more context on the cultural environment in finance and the types of roles they would be applying for, that would really help them feel more confident about  applying for these roles at a larger volume.

3. NationSwell: Sarah, you described a particular need you discovered through all the learning you just walked us through. How is that now reflected in the experience that a participant has in the program? What are the key elements of that journey for them? 

Sarah Wessel, COOP Careers:

Our 200-hour curriculum is oriented around three pillars: head, heart, and hustle.

Head covers the technical skills, and we were able to add quite a number of modules specific to the analytics skill set that they will need going into roles very specific to banking and finance — hard skills such as Excel, SQL, and Tableau 

Heart helps to strengthen soft skills, such as communication, conflict resolution, and time management.

Hustle is about growing job-hunting skills like resume and cover letter writing, email etiquette, and collective networking to start their job search with a plan, a portfolio, and support from peers — and connections.

4. NationSwell: What sort of fingerprint does Barclays have on the curriculum or on the experience program participants are having in the financial services track? 

John Kenny, Barclays:

We’ve brought together leaders from different businesses and functions across Barclays to share their view on what types of skills are important to learn and refine, and then we’ve collaborated with the COOP team to inform the curriculum. That level of collaboration speaks volumes to how COOP is hyper-focused on equipping grads in the program.

We’ve also created guest lecture opportunities, where we have members of our team give seminar-style talks to COOPers, others have taken part in career chats, and dozens have help the COOPers prepare through in-person mock interview sessions held at our office. 

5. NationSwell: How do you select participants? What are the criteria that you’re using? 

Sarah Wessel, COOP Careers:

Any participant interested in applying for COOP fills out a form on our website. From there, they sign up for an info session, which is held in a group format and typically virtual. During that info session, all interested applicants learn about COOP and different career tracks, and they hear alumni that speak about their experience in the program and what they’re doing now so folks can start to understand what they might be interested in pursuing.

The eligibility requirements are that candidates have to make less than $50,000 a year; they have to be able to commit to our program, which is four months long, Monday through Thursday, at night; and then they have to meet two out of the three other requirements to be considered: identify as a first-generation college graduate; have been Pell Grant eligible while they were going through college; or identify as a person of color. 

Over 95% of our participants identify as people of color, and around 85-90% identify as first-generation college graduates. 

If everything looks good and it seems like they’re still motivated to apply, they go forward to a group interview. In this interview, they are given an assignment they have to complete ahead of time and then talk through their process live.

We have a long waitlist, but if you get through the process, we have a pretty high acceptance rate.

There isn’t a second layer of screening that we’re looking for, but there are some personality traits that we’re interested in, because our model is built upon paying it forward. So when looking at who’s really interested in being a part of our program for the long haul, we strongly consider whether they are ready to make the time commitment. 

What I think is really special about COOP is the relationship between the alumni near-peer coach and a cohort member and how they pull them into their industry and help them build their career for the first few years. 

6. NationSwell: What happens after someone completes the program — what sort of support are they receiving on a go-forward basis to take that big step into a career path? 

Sarah Wessel, COOP Careers:

Our program is designed to follow people forever. Folks end up feeling like they can lean on each other throughout their career, which I think is really special.

But in terms of official support from the organization, every single one of our alumni is assigned an alumni manager who is responsible for supporting them with getting their first good job. They meet one-on-one with their alumni manager as many times as they want to do mock interviews, resume reviews, job searching, and talk through any challenges they might be facing. The alumni manager also helps them with negotiating their first offer if they need help with that.

Our alumni managers recently hosted a workshop on overcoming rejection and keeping your motivation high in the job search, which is something that, especially this past year, has been really pertinent to a lot of our participants.

Patricia Malizia, Senior Director of Marketing and Communications at COOP Careers:

We also send an alumni email newsletter every month, which we recently restructured to better serve our alumni. We created a job resources page to ensure all alumni know about the jobs that are open and available. 

We also have a whole section on our website dedicated to supporting our alumni, which we just relaunched to serve our alumni even better. And we have blogs on our website about some of the things that Sarah mentioned, like developing your  resume and cover letters.

Matthew Snitkey, Director, Barclays

We have had the opportunity to hire 11 COOP alumni into Barclays across several teams, including Global Markets Operations. The support and preparation COOP provides is evident and tangible. We’ve been so impressed with how COOP alumni have hit the ground running and have brought diversity of thought and positive results in our process, workflows and controls.

7. NationSwell: What do you think is most helpful for other leaders to know about the DNA of this partnership?

John Kenny, Barclays:

We so often hear people on the Barclays side — including senior leaders and hiring managers — saying how impressed they are with the drive of COOPers. These are folks who have gotten their degrees, many of whom are working full-time, and then dedicate several hours each night to additional intensive learning for extended periods of time. And I think that, in and of itself, exemplifies a level of commitment and a level of interest in the sector that they’re building on at COOP. 

Sarah Wessel, COOP Careers:

The relationship-driven way we’ve built this partnership is a missing link for first-generation college students. Yeah, there’s a need for some skills and aptitude, but as John said, many participants have the drive and the ability to do any number of things — what they need is access. And what Barclays has really done is find a way to provide that access.

Barclays has been open to believing talent can come from anywhere, and that it’s part of their responsibility as corporate citizens to find ways to get all of their staff involved in different communities and provide that access. These students have the ability already — they just need somebody to vouch for them and give them that first good opportunity to succeed. Finding meaningful work is hard. Why should it be lonely?

Pathways to Economic Opportunity: Dow Last Mile Fund for Manufacturing & Skilled Trades

Posted on by Brianna Provenzano

As wealth and income inequality continue to climb in the United States, some employers are developing innovative models and catalytic partnerships designed to bring new skills, job access, and ultimately economic opportunity to financially vulnerable and historically marginalized individuals.

In a new interview series, Pathways to Economic Opportunity, NationSwell is taking a closer look at some of the solutions companies are pursuing in service of leveling the playing field and expanding their talent pipelines. In spotlighting some of these partnerships, this series hopes to uncover the “secret sauce” that makes these solutions successful for the benefit of other employers and their leaders.

For the first installment of the series, NationSwell spoke to Ruthe Farmer — founder & CEO of the Last Mile Education Fund — and Fabio Mendes, Global Citizenship Manager at Dow — about their talent pipeline partnership, the Dow Last Mile Fund for Manufacturing & Skilled Trades. 

Here’s what they had to say:

Bird’s Eye View:

The Last Mile Education Fund works to identify students in the “last mile” of their education journeys and provide them with no-strings-attached, grants to help them overcome any financial hurdles standing in the way of the finish line. Through its partnership with Dow, Last Mile recently expanded its scope to include grants of up to $5,000 for low-income students specifically nearing completion in manufacturing and skilled trades programs at institutions in Dow communities.

Fast Stats: 

  • Launched in 2023, the Dow Last Mile Fund for Manufacturing & Skilled Trades currently services talent populations in ten key markets: California, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.
  • On average, the grants Last Mile awards are less than $4,200. Unlike traditional education grants, Last Mile’s investment model specifically incentivizes the use of the money in any area a student needs it, including groceries, gas, childcare, or anything else serving as a roadblock to completing their education.
  • Founded in 2019, Last Mile has awarded more than 5,132 grants to date. Grantees are 42% Black, 19% Hispanic or Latinx, 12% Asian, 16% White, and 1% Indigenous.
  • Last Mile awards three types of core grants, all of which manufacturing and skilled trades students are eligible for: rapid-response emergency financial assistance (mini-grants); bridge grants; and larger Last Mile grants.

1) NationSwell: What helps to differentiate Last Mile’s approach from some of the existing investment models designed to support educational attainment? 

Ruthe Farmer, Last Mile: 

I sometimes refer to our model as universal basic income for students. Scholarships are typically for tuition, housing, maybe some books, but there are other parts of life that require financial resources, too. I just approved a Dow grantee who has been on a long journey of trying to cross the finish line in her education, but the cost of living — medical bills, insurance, all the things that are not part of the scholarship landscape — had just become too much.

She also shared that she had an old laptop from 2017 that was barely functioning and needed a better device. Those are the kinds of gaps that Last Mile fills — the same gaps that are sometimes filled by a student’s parents. 

The other thing we do differently is that there are no deadlines; the application is rolling, and students can apply any day, all year. We’re not comparing the students against each other, we’re looking at them as individuals. 

We’re also very fast. If a student is facing a housing or a food crisis, they cannot wait months to hear back from a scholarship. Many scholarships can be really wonderful, but it takes months of process to get selected — they’re not designed to address immediate, pressing, basic human needs, which is what we’re doing. 

2) NationSwell: Adaptability, open communication — are there any other key lessons that you’d like to impart on other nonprofits or companies hoping to form a similar type of synergy? 

Ruthe Farmer, Last Mile: 

There’s been tremendous participation and engagement by the local Dow team members. We’re not physically on the ground in all of those communities, but they are, and they have relationships with, you know, the local colleges and institutions. They have relationships with the local chamber of commerce and the local media, and they also have relationships with the folks that are already in their apprentice pathways.

Fabio Mendes, Dow:

Like Ruthe said, we took an existing model that was initially for computer science graduates and we said, “Hey, maybe this could be a fit for skilled trade students, which are completely different.” 

When working with four-year graduates, Last Mile usually works with them on the last two years of their educational journey. So initially we were working with that same mindset for skilled trades, but along the way we realized those audiences had very different needs, so we switched to supporting students from the very beginning. That openness to adapting the program to a different set of needs in real-time — that has been one of the great successes of this partnership so far. 

3) NationSwell: What are some of the biggest roadblocks you’ve encountered?

Fabio Mendes, Dow:

I think one of the things we realized early on is that a lot of times the students don’t necessarily think this program is for real.

Ruthe Farmer, Last Mile: 

We’re so different from what students understand scholarships to be that they can sometimes be very skeptical. I remember one grantee told me that she had let that application sit on her desktop for three weeks because she was ashamed to ask for help, she didn’t think we would say yes. And then when she finally did, we were like, oh, absolutely, yes, here’s the money. Four months later, she’s graduated and she’s in a full-time job.

We don’t have any kind of GPA gatekeeping, your grades are not a factor in whether or not we say yes to you. The only thing we’re interested in is, are you enrolled and are you on track to get this program finished? 

We’ve had to re-train the educators, too, because they’ve been taught to only send their select best students for these opportunities. We want every student who is striving to have the resources they need to finish; we see value in every striving student. Getting over that hump has been a really big challenge. 

4) NationSwell: What have been some of your most significant learnings or unlocks in the course of doing this work?

Fabio Mendes, Dow:

I think one of our biggest learnings from Last Mile has been the perspective that a life-changing investment in a student doesn’t need to be gigantic — it can be a $200 grant that you promote to someone because they don’t have food for the day, and that alone could lead to them completing the course that they are on, completing the major that they’re in, and potentially securing a life-sustaining job in the future. 

Ruthe Farmer, Last Mile:

I would say the thesis that we’re trying to prove is that there is better ROI when we invest in what we call “striving students” versus the historically dominant model of rewarding outliers for prior success. If you only pick the students who have the best grades, the best GPA, have never missed a class, then you’re picking the ones who can afford that, and you’re not recognizing the immense value and problem-solving skills of a person who has struggled and persisted. 

I think a company that figures out how to bring that talent into their workforce is going to be building an incredibly strong, resilient workforce, which is what all innovation-based companies need.  

5) NationSwell: What are some of the ways this partnership is mutually beneficial — how do each of your organizations work together to advance a shared goal? 

Ruthe Farmer, Last Mile:

Our partnership with Dow is unique in that we’re specifically targeting students that physically go to school and live in Dow communities, where Dow is one of the biggest employers in the field in which they are studying. This is very specific: Dow is helping you graduate in a Dow community, hopefully into a Dow job. 

It’s not a direct ask for the students, but we do have that expectation that they become at least an available pipeline for the company. That’s one of the reasons we’re geographically focused with this funding. 

It’s a great example of the spirit of our work: It’s local investment to solve local workforce issues, and you’re really investing in your own local economy. It’s really kind of working hand-in-hand to solve this gap in tech and skills, but then simultaneously investing in communities. 

6) NationSwell: What’s one call to action that you’d like other leaders or organizations like yours to heed as they consider their own opportunities to improve educational attainment and economic mobility? 

Fabio Mendes, Dow:

I’d say to be more creative around some of these things. One of the crucial things Last Mile did was immediately ask how they could make the student support process more accessible. They could have just thought, let’s do a scholarship program for low-income students that have struggled throughout their journey. At Dow, we were creative in thinking that if this was designed for one specific audience, maybe we could apply the same mindset to a different audience. 

I also want to say you don’t have to start big, you can just start with a pilot. We started with a small fund in select communities with very different perspectives and contexts, and we said, let’s see if this works out, then we expanded it. 

Ruthe Farmer, Last Mile:

I think my call to action is simply for everyone to please take an abundance viewpoint as to who has the potential to be successful in your organization, and in the field broadly, whatever your field is.

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