Economic Mobility Program
In December 2019, Imagine LA launched the Financial Wellness Pathways Initiative, now called our Economic Mobility Program, with funding from the Carl & Roberta Deutsch Foundation. The initiative, under the guidance of its remarkable Taskforce*, explored three critical factors related to how families build economic mobility and ultimately financial independence: living-wage careers, viable and accessible childcare, and financial fitness.
Today, EMP is a robust network of partnerships between Imagine LA families, case managers, employers, and community partners, to ensure that families can access opportunities and services – and succeed! – in all four components of the program:
Pathways to Living-Wage Careers
Viable Childcare Access
Financial Fitness
Navigating Public Benefits
Pathways to Living-Wage Careers
The beacon of our Economic Mobility Program is a targeted workforce development programs that leads to living-wage careers for families. The initiative began with extensive labor market analysis and family surveys to identify high-growth, high-demand, living-wage careers in the Los Angeles area that would be appealing and viable for Imagine LA families. Since then, we have identified eight EMP career pathways: (1) Healthcare, (2) Social Services, (3) Logistics, (4) Administrative Work, (5) Tech & Media, (6) Early Childcare & Childhood Education, (7) Hospitality, and (8) Construction & Maintenance.
Living-Wage Career Pathway programs include training, continued education, or paid apprenticeships, and last 2 to 12 months. All partners support with job placement, professional development, or other supportive services to their students.
Training and Employer Partners:
Careers for a Cause is an eight-week employment training program hosted at Los Angeles Southwest College, East Los Angeles College, Compton College, and Pierce College. It supports individuals with lived experience in homelessness and/or the justice system build skills and connect to career pathways in the homeless services and social services field.
CodeTalk is an intensive and rigorous 16-week web technology job training program designed to prepare low income, underemployed and underserved women for entry level careers in coding, UX design, digital content management web development or similar.
UPS is an employer partner providing immediate part-time and seasonal employment in transportation and logistics.
ManifestWorks provides training that prepares families who have been impacted by foster care, homelessness and incarceration to be production assistants on film and TV sets. Their curriculum 12-week curriculum physically follows the flow of production.
JVS SoCal provides four 8-week training programs to prepare families for careers in the growing banking, healthcare, and apartment maintenance industries through the following programs.
Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) offers opportunities to continue education and certifications through a traditional higher education model in Administration, Healthcare and Childcare. In partnership with LA Valley College CalWorks’ team, families will receive the support needed to enroll in credited courses or career technical, continued education, and access student aid and resources needed at any of LACCD’s nine colleges.
Los Angeles Unified School District, Division of Adult Career Education (DACE) is a network of 10 occupation centers throughout LA county that provide continued education, technical training and industry recognized certifications in Administration, Healthcare and Childcare.
Hire LAX is a comprehensive 8-week apprenticeship preparation program providing training and certification for careers in the construction trades, linking graduates to jobs at Los Angeles World Airports construction project through its contractors and local craft unions.
Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI) offers an 8-week Green Jobs Workforce Program. Their programs provides technical training, industry-recognized certifications, career coaching, case management, and job retention services to help underrepresented groups succeed in the green economy.
NPower, provides an 18-week live, virtual IT training program for young adults 16-26 and veterans or veteran spouses to master the basics of IT networking, troubleshooting, infrastructure to prepare for entry level employment as an IT help Desk technician, systems, desktop, or cloud administrator.
Hospitality Training Academy Los Angeles provides a selection of workforce development, apprenticeship, and training programs varying from 18 hours to 8 weeks to attain certification and careers in hospitality, food service, and tourism workforce.
Viable Childcare Access
For many families with children, a key for achieving real economic mobility is accessing reliable, affordable, and accessible childcare so that parents can take full advantage of EMP.
Through our partnerships with members of the Child Care Alliance Los Angeles, we facilitate connections between families and their respective childcare organizations. Once connected, the organization works directly with each family to determine their childcare options, identify childcare subsidies eligibility, and help them securing appropriate COVID-19-safe home- or center-based care for their children.
Financial Fitness
Imagine LA has long focused on fostering financial acumen and wellness among participants to ensure they have the skills and information to make sound financial decisions, develop a savings habit, and establish lasting financial stability. Our enhanced finance fitness programming, which launched in January 2021. It includes:
Holistic financial wellbeing assessment
Learning-based financial workshops and coaching by Operation HOPE
Financial Assistance via our Family Emergency & Investment Fund
Matched family savings up to $500
Navigating Public Benefits
Imagine LA’s Financial Education Program Landscape Analysis revealed a concerning lack of information and strategies for families to navigate the complex and intersecting social safety net benefit streams flowing from different non-coordinating agencies/sources. More specifically, we found that families are often hamstrung by the earned income-driven “Benefits Cliffs” – when a family’s earned income increases and benefits fall more than the income increased – creating a potential disincentive to take opportunities to increase earned income through additional work hours or better-paying job opportunities.
Diving deeper, we discovered that a comprehensive resource summarizing how all of the social safety net benefits available to families intersect with one another simply did not exist in Los Angeles.
We reached out to the USC Sol Price Center for Social Innovation with this challenge, and under the leadership of Gary Painter and Soledad De Gregorio, they agreed to take on a research project to examine the intersecting social safety net benefit streams and identify the key “benefits cliffs” and other barriers to economic mobility and financial independence.
We are currently running a Partner Expansion Pilot, offering all of the Economic Mobility Program components to like-minded agencies and their families. We hope to continue scaling the utilization of all the Economic Mobility Program components by agencies throughout Los Angeles to reach more families, foster their financial independence, and create widespread change.
We are thrilled by our families’ progress and excited to continue building our EMP partnerships, enrolling more families, and providing ongoing support. We are collecting and tracking data on the program and its impact on participants, including training completed, jobs secured, and income growth.
Taking Action
The USC research provided the following recommendations:
Promote increased participation rates in benefit programs.
Create a technology tool that can simplify the complexity of the safety net. The research findings support the idea that that with sufficient information, families could estimate the points where they lose benefits and plan ahead to navigate through the bumps and bypass situations in which the additional earned income is less than the benefits lost.
Take actions to coordinate, align, and streamline major benefit streams. To help ease access and use of benefits, to encourage earned income growth, and to eliminate benefit cliffs and poverty traps.
Innovation is needed in housing support benefits. Because housing assistance is critical to provide sufficient support for families to pay living expenses, advocates should focus on promoting affordable housing options and alternative models of housing subsidies that provide more families assistance and do not fall off so dramatically when a family hits the income eligibility limit.
The report’s findings and recommendations are clear. Acting upon them would promote economic mobility and financial independence for families, drive down costs for nonprofits and at the federal, state, and local levels, and reduce the frustration, stress, and inequity experienced by millions of families every day.
Imagine LA is taking action by:
(1) Creating a Social Benefits Navigator App. As part of the social benefits research report, algorithms were built that calculated how increases in a family’s earned income affected each of the benefit streams, depending on the size and age make-up of the family. Imagine LA is now creating a Social Benefits Navigator to be used by families and case workers.
Imagine LA is currently testing this web-based tool to better navigate the social safety net benefits and ideally avoid benefit cliffs. Our goal is to release this tool to the public for use by families and social service providers.
(2) Disseminating the report findings to agencies and policy makers to foster knowledge and build a coalition of change-makers who will advocate for streamlining the social benefits system and creating alternative housing subsidies that work in conjunction with the system, not at odds with it.
Learn More
For information about enrolling yourself or a client in Imagine LA’s program, or for general questions or for information about becoming an Employer Partner, contact workforce@imaginela.org.
* Taskforce Members
Jill Govan Bauman, Imagine LA President & CEO (Taskforce Chair)
Elizabeth Ben-Ishai, Principal Analyst for the Homeless Initiative CEO, County of Los Angeles
Ellen Cervantes, Vice President and COO at Childcare Resource Center (Taskforce Lead for Childcare)
Leticia Colchado, Principal Analyst for the Homeless Initiative, County of Los Angeles
David Crippens, Board Chair at LA Trade Tech, member of Workforce Development Board, Child 360, and Imagine LA Master Mentor
Evelyn Garcia, Senior Program Officer for Economic Stability at the United Way of Greater Los Angeles
Brit Moore Gilmore, Former President, Giving Keys (Taskforce Lead for Workforce Development)
Yvette Gonzalez, Vice President for Community & Employee Engagement at City National Bank
Que'Ron Hildreth, MAT, Imagine LA Consultant
Teddy M. Kapur, Imagine LA Board Chair and Graduate Mentor
Katy Mazzara, Imagine LA Graduate Financial Wellness Mentor
Sasha Morozov, Imagine LA Associate Executive Director (Taskforce Manager)
Jessie Mosqueda, Executive Director, Miguel Contreras Foundation
Lorie Nguyen, Lead Family Team Manager, Imagine LA (Taskforce Lead for Financial Wellness)
George Phillips, Imagine LA Board Member and Current Mentor
Michelle Roberts, Program Director, Imagine LA
Lisa Salazar, Director of Workforce Development & Economic Opportunity under Mayor Eric Garcetti and Member, Workforce Development Board
Jon Vein, Entrepreneur, chair YPO Homeless Summit
Sylvia Castillo, Director, External Affairs Manager, Corporate Social Responsibility for the Americas, MUFG Union Bank, N.A.
Jacqueline Chun, Chief Programs & Operations Officer, The Carl & Robert Deutsch Foundation
Hayley Firestone, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist
Brian Rosenbaum, Imagine LA Community Engagement Director
