CHANGING SYSTEMS
A living wage. Benefits. Opportunities for advancement.
We believe these should be standards, not perks. By advocating for more equitable policy, we aim to improve how the various laws and systems within the workforce ecosystem can more thoroughly benefit the job seeker. Our work focuses around four key foundational issues:
Public Budgets. Sustainable public resources are needed at the federal, state, and local level to ensure employment opportunity. We work to secure progressive revenue solutions for Illinois’s budget crisis.
Criminal Justice. A criminal record of any kind follows individuals for too long and creates unnecessary barriers to employment. We work to reduce these barriers.
Job quality. We support efforts to improve work conditions — safety, wages, benefits, and paid time off — to make sure that employment leads to economic stability.
Work supports. When a job pays only poverty wages, additional supports like SNAP benefits, unemployment insurance, and TANF payments help make a family’s budget work. We support programs that keep people out of poverty when employment can’t.
Learn more about specific initiatives below.
IL Skills for Good Jobs Agenda
The COVID recession has left the Illinois economy at a turning point. Our state has a choice about how to rebuild our economy to address both long-term economic inequalities, and new economic crises. Illinois must invest in creating family-sustaining jobs and funding inclusive skills training, subsidized employment, supportive services, and career-focused education.
If Illinois does not act swiftly to invest in good jobs and increase equitable access to opportunity, this recession will set women, younger, and BIPOC workers back generations, businesses will struggle to fill open positions, and talented Illinoisans will continue to struggle to pay their bills.
In response, our Skills for Good Jobs Agenda includes the following Four Workforce Pillars for Illinois:
Dedicate state funding for workforce training with a racial and gender equity lens.
Promote policies that eliminate structural employment barriers disproportionately faced by people of color, foreign-born workers, and women in Illinois.
Ensure that no Illinoisan – regardless of race, gender, age, or nationality – lives in poverty by promoting good jobs and a strong safety net.
Increase research, data sharing, and transparency across state agencies that touch education and workforce training to identify and address equity gaps in our public investments.
For more information, download the full report here.
Illinois General Assembly Skills Agenda Bills
Illinois General Assembly Workforce Bills
Thank you to the organizations supporting the Skills Agenda:
Alternatives · AMBE · Cannabis Equity Illinois · CBO Collective · Center for Changing Lives · Chicago Area Project · Chicago Women in Trades · Community Assistance Progress · Defy Ventures · Economic Security for Illinois · Growing Home · Health & Medicine Policy Research Group · Hicks-Wright Organization · Illinois Partners for Human Service · Illinois Aging Together · Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago · Jane Addams Resource Corporation · Kenwood Oakland Community Organization · LISC Chicago · Manufacturing Renaissance · New Moms · North Branch Works · OAI · Per Scholas · Poder · Rebuilding Exchange · Revolution Workshop · Safer Foundation · Scalelit · Shriver Center on Poverty Law · Upwardly Global · Young Invincibles · Women Employed
Homelessness
Employment services often don't align well with the needs of people experiencing homelessness. We work with Chicago's homeless-response system to make jobs more accessible.
With Heartland Alliance, Inspiration Corporation, and Center for Changing Lives, we co-lead the Employment Task Force of the Chicago Continuum of Care.
We advocate for both the workforce and homeless-response systems to collect better information about both the housing and employment status of the people that they provide services to.
We are working to create navigators for individuals in housing programs who need assistance getting workforce services.
We develop new tools and resources for frontline staff of the homeless response system to better work with their job seeking participants.