Like every social impact organization, we recognize there are limitless community challenges, and we can only bring finite resources to address them. To maximize our impact, we focus on ‘multipliers’:
We are like a nonprofit version of private equity: we recognize great ideas in the community and assemble the resources necessary to scale, improve and sustain it. Our Healthcare Workforce Capacity program is an example.
Our workforce capacity program was not our idea. Our hospital, skilled nursing facility and health center partners identified the need—workforce shortages and the need for a multilingual and multicultural workforce that mirrors the communities they serve.
The American Muslim Senior Society (AMSS) had also seen a need for more culturally and linguistically diverse healthcare workers to serve their population. They had identified populations of working-age adults within their community who were un- or under-employed. AMSS had already piloted a supply solution that was working well; connecting these work-seeking adults with certificate programs in healthcare careers. This brings economic empowerment to their families and communities, fills much-needed workforce gaps, and creates a workforce that is linguistically and culturally attuned to the clients of AMSS.
There was no reason to re-invent the workforce intervention wheel. There was every reason to make it bigger. In fact, that’s a core part of the PCC philosophy: We don’t duplicate services; we focus on the areas where our specific expertise can do the most good. We focus on where our tools and expertise are most appropriate for the job—or the scale—and find ways to partner with other organizations on what they do best.
- We build programs that provide clear value on multiple levels: improving the health or wellbeing for program clients, while strengthening service providers or systems, and proving outcomes or return on investment for funders.
- We find ways to leverage partnership among complementary organizations for the whole to be greater than any single organization could do on its own.
- We run lean programs, learning and improving as the model scales up.
We are like a nonprofit version of private equity: we recognize great ideas in the community and assemble the resources necessary to scale, improve and sustain it. Our Healthcare Workforce Capacity program is an example.
Our workforce capacity program was not our idea. Our hospital, skilled nursing facility and health center partners identified the need—workforce shortages and the need for a multilingual and multicultural workforce that mirrors the communities they serve.
The American Muslim Senior Society (AMSS) had also seen a need for more culturally and linguistically diverse healthcare workers to serve their population. They had identified populations of working-age adults within their community who were un- or under-employed. AMSS had already piloted a supply solution that was working well; connecting these work-seeking adults with certificate programs in healthcare careers. This brings economic empowerment to their families and communities, fills much-needed workforce gaps, and creates a workforce that is linguistically and culturally attuned to the clients of AMSS.
There was no reason to re-invent the workforce intervention wheel. There was every reason to make it bigger. In fact, that’s a core part of the PCC philosophy: We don’t duplicate services; we focus on the areas where our specific expertise can do the most good. We focus on where our tools and expertise are most appropriate for the job—or the scale—and find ways to partner with other organizations on what they do best.
What did PCC bring to the table?
In the immediate term, people in our community need decent jobs, and our healthcare system desperately needs qualified workers. In addition, our U.S. healthcare system lacks adequate representation at multiple levels of care, and our county includes some of the country’s most diverse communities. Our current program is not the final word on workforce innovation. It is a way to address immediate needs as we, together with our partners, learn and work toward more ambitious longer-term goals.
Our workforce programming is a ‘multiplier”. We started with a working idea that needed more resources but could reasonably scale, then brought a collection of institutional investors to support that existing model.
We have a practical program and a business case for today’s problems; we have an ethical imperative to work on tomorrow’s challenges too. The bottom-line win, the “compound impact,” if you will: We are creating a workforce development portfolio that offers multiple pipelines to entry-level healthcare jobs, with a focus on turning those pipelines into meaningful career pathways. That is how we multiply the investment of funders for compound impact: on the economic resources of communities, the wellbeing of families, and the pipeline of multicultural employees for our local health care providers.
- Hospital partners (through the Nexus Montgomery Regional Partnership) who are major employers in the region and greatly impacted by healthcare staffing challenges,
- Partnerships with more community organizations serving additional groups of un- or under employed residents with various cultural and linguistic skills,
- Capacity building for Montgomery College, to expand the number of health care certificate cohorts the College can offer each year, as well as
- Amplified program management and fund-seeking capacity.
In the immediate term, people in our community need decent jobs, and our healthcare system desperately needs qualified workers. In addition, our U.S. healthcare system lacks adequate representation at multiple levels of care, and our county includes some of the country’s most diverse communities. Our current program is not the final word on workforce innovation. It is a way to address immediate needs as we, together with our partners, learn and work toward more ambitious longer-term goals.
Our workforce programming is a ‘multiplier”. We started with a working idea that needed more resources but could reasonably scale, then brought a collection of institutional investors to support that existing model.
We have a practical program and a business case for today’s problems; we have an ethical imperative to work on tomorrow’s challenges too. The bottom-line win, the “compound impact,” if you will: We are creating a workforce development portfolio that offers multiple pipelines to entry-level healthcare jobs, with a focus on turning those pipelines into meaningful career pathways. That is how we multiply the investment of funders for compound impact: on the economic resources of communities, the wellbeing of families, and the pipeline of multicultural employees for our local health care providers.
RSS Feed