Designing for Young Adults Moves Everyone Forward: JobsFirst NYC Expands a Proven Model to New Communities

What does it take to move a city forward? At its recent Strategic Plan Partnership Briefing, JobsFirst NYC answered that question by unveiling a roadmap rooted in Movement by Design—a shared framework for aligning partners, strengthening local systems, and scaling what works across communities. This was more than a formal introduction of our new strategic direction; it was a defining moment with clear implications for the future of New York City’s workforce.

More than 60 partners—from workforce practitioners and educators to philanthropists—gathered in Lower Manhattan, reflecting the ecosystem JobsFirst NYC has spent two decades building. The program opened with an emphasis on community and connection, led by welcome remarks from Stephany Garcia, Director, CommunityINC. The energy in the room made one thing clear: this was not just a briefing. It was the start of something bigger.

A Strong Foundation, A Bold Future

Systems change does not happen through isolated efforts. It requires alignment, persistence, and partners moving together.

Marjorie Parker, CEO and President, JobsFirst and JobsFirst NYC, made that case directly, grounding it in two decades of work to move a fragmented system toward alignment. Founded when more than 200,000 young adults were out of school and out of work, JobsFirst NYC has worked to connect workforce, education, community, and policy into something that functions as a system, not a set of disconnected efforts.

She pointed to that progression, from early proof points like the Young Adult Sectoral Employment Project to today’s Sector Networks and place-based Community Solutions, as evidence of what it takes to build systems that move, adapt, and scale with the people they are meant to serve.

Marjorie Parker, CEO and President, JobsFirst and JobsFirst NYC

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“What began here in New York… has grown into something much larger. The past twenty years have shown us that real change does not come from isolated programs. It comes from partnerships, persistence, and systems that evolve with the people they are meant to serve.” 

– Marjorie Parker, CEO and President, JobsFirst and JobsFirst NYC

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But the morning was about more than looking back. It was about the momentum of the road ahead. Marjorie introduced Movement by Design—not as a concept, but as the way this work grows, carrying what has been built in New York City into new communities through aligned partners and shared infrastructure.

“What began here in New York… has grown into something much larger,” she shared, a message that resonated with the partners across the room who continue to shape that very movement. “The past twenty years have shown us that real change does not come from isolated programs. It comes from partnerships, persistence, and systems that evolve with the people they are meant to serve.”

Introducing the Strategic Plan

   

David Charron, Executive Vice President, guides an engaging workshop at the Strategic Partnership Briefing.

With the vision of Movement by Design established, the focus turned to how this work scales. David Charron, Executive Vice President, outlined a roadmap already in motion to carry this work into new communities. This trajectory centers on five transformative priorities designed to scale impact and redefine the workforce landscape:

• Building new intermediaries in five communities across the United States
• Strengthening and scaling JobsFirst as a national organization
• Leveraging AI to accelerate impact
• Investing in JobsFirst NYC as a Center of Excellence
• Mobilizing resources to bring this vision to life

The message was clear: while JobsFirst NYC began as a local response to a fragmented system, it is now positioned to scale this work into new communities.

Leveraging AI to Accelerate Impact

   

Keri Fauhlaber, Senior Vice President, presents on JobsFirst NYC’s technology and AI strategy.

Building on more than a decade of work at the intersection of technology and workforce development, the briefing also spotlighted how artificial intelligence is reshaping hiring, skills, and entry points into the labor market. Presented by Keri Faulhaber, Senior Vice President, the session outlined JobsFirst NYC’s approach to navigating this shift.

JobsFirst NYC’s strategy focuses on three areas: advancing workforce practices through AI, translating real-time labor market changes, and strengthening system capacity to respond.

The influence of AI on hiring, skills development, and access to opportunity was then examined through a workshop led by Malia Darby, Manager of Work Solutions. Together, partners identified how these shifts are already showing up across their organizations and where the field is looking for more structure, clearer standards, and shared direction.

Key findings from the session:

• Automated hiring and access: Automated systems are playing a growing role in hiring, but partners are still working to understand how these tools are shaping access and how jobseekers navigate them.
• Human skills remain central: As technical tasks evolve, partners consistently point to the continued importance of communication, social capital, and relationship-building in how individuals access and advance in work.
• AI readiness is not yet defined: There is a clear need for a shared understanding of what AI fluency looks like—for both staff and jobseekers—and how it should be applied in practice.
• Pathways are shifting: Partners raised questions about how entry-level roles are changing and what that means for career pathways, training models, and long-term mobility.

Across the discussion, one theme stood out: moving from individual experimentation to coordinated practice will require shared standards, clear direction, and sustained leadership.

Advancing Economic Mobility in New York City

   

Jeremy Greenfield, Vice President, leads a discussion on NYC and the Future of Economic Mobility.

The focus then shifted to the practical implications for New York City, as a discussion on advancing economic mobility through four strategic pillars was led by Jeremy Greenfield, Vice President, and Jenny Zhou, Director, Education Solutions:

• Partnership Development
• Solution Innovation
• Knowledge Sharing
• Resource Mobilization

This session brought the strategy closer to home, helping partners answer two essential questions: What does this mean for my organization and what’s in it for me?

Key findings from the session:

• Strategic Ecosystem Alignment: Break down silos by formalizing partnerships with city agencies and local employers. This ensures that training pipelines directly match industry needs while simultaneously stimulating the local economy.
• Holistic, Youth-Centered Solutions: Prioritize “wraparound” wellness services and integrate authentic youth leadership. Success depends on early career exposure—such as in-school internships—that leads to industry-recognized credentials.
• Integrated Infrastructure & Funding: Move toward shared technical tools and joint financial models. By acting as a centralized grant holder or lead on collaborative RFPs, partnerships can secure the “financial connectivity” needed to sustain long-term work.
• Codified Knowledge Sharing: Shift focus from just reporting results to documenting the “how” (the process). JobsFirst can play a vital role by translating specific case studies into scalable learning agendas and multi-platform communications tailored to diverse audiences.

The throughline: Shared ownership. Advancing economic mobility in NYC will require coordinated action, sustained collaboration, and a willingness to think differently about how systems work together.

The Path Forward, Together 

This next phase focuses on scaling what has been built in New York City and carrying that work into new communities. Having built a strategy where work, education, and community move as one, JobsFirst NYC is now scaling nationally, bringing diverse regions together through a shared, intentional design. Grounded in Movement by Design, JobsFirst NYC is building Local Drivers like JobsFirst NEPA and JobsFirst Southern Nevada to lead locally while learning collectively. The result is a shift from a single-city model to a broader effort to strengthen systems and expand access to economic mobility.

One partner captured the opportunity:

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The ideas generated, the takeaways, the questions are truly applicable to ALL youth — disability-focused orgs are grappling with the same… There is so much potential for cross-pollination and collaboration.

-Partner

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To learn more about this next phase and how you can be part of it, visit The Movement page on our website.

How JobsFirst NYC and the Scranton Area Community Foundation are Closing the Gap between Collaboration and Change

Laura Ducceschi faced a dynamic that many regional leaders would recognize: collaboration can spark great ideas, but sustaining momentum for those ideas requires more than just collaboration.

As President and CEO of the Scranton Area Community Foundation (SACF), her team spent years bringing partners together and supporting others’ convenings — and those conversations were consistently productive because of the Foundation’s strong reputation and trusted relationships. 

Over the past several years, NEPA Moves, NEPA Thrives, and other SACF-led initiatives have built durable collaborations that continue to drive meaningful coordination. These efforts demonstrated not only strong alignment and shared purpose but also a clear readiness for the next step: establishing regional infrastructure that could help accelerate implementation and deepen long-term impact. 

Yet once the collaborative meetings ended, the work often needed a dedicated owner to carry it forward. As Laura Ducceschi reflected, the opportunity ahead was not to fix collaboration — because collaboration in NEPA is strong — but to complement that strength with the added capacity, coordination, and accountability needed to sustain and scale the work over time. Convening created alignment; building the mechanisms to act on that alignment was the opportunity ahead.

“We kept asking ourselves: what comes after the task force?” Ducceschi recalls. “We needed something capable of not just coordinating conversations, but sustaining solutions.”

The answer came from an unexpected partnership: a guest faculty advisor for the 2023 Northeastern Pennsylvania Aspen Institute Workforce Leadership Academy that SACF was hosting.

Marjorie Parker, President and CEO of JobsFirstNYC, was invited to share insights from her organization’s two decades of experience building workforce solutions in New York City. But as Parker listened to NEPA leaders describe their hard work along with their challenges — fragmented programs, misaligned investments, collaboration fatigue — she recognized something familiar but also promising.

What they had were all the ingredients for change! Dedicated leaders, trusted institutions, real momentum. What they needed and were asking for together was regional infrastructure to hold the process and keep it moving forward.

That single engagement has now sparked a two-year partnership that’s now creating a replicable model for regional workforce & economic mobility interventions, one that is officially set to launch in the first quarter of 2026 in the form of JobsFirstNEPA and the NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative.

The Gap Between Collaboration and Change

The problems Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) faces aren’t unique from a national perspective, but they are regionally long-standing and complex. Across the country, similar regions struggle to move beyond well-intentioned collaboratives and partnerships toward a more permanent combination of partners and processes that creates lasting change. To the credit of SACF and regional partners, they have built unusually strong, durable collaborative structures through initiatives such as NEPA Moves, NEPA Thrives, and other cross-sector partnerships. These collaboratives have created alignment, strengthened relationships, and advanced meaningful shared strategies.  The challenge is always that as collaborative tables form, strategies get discussed and drafted, but if dedicated capacity and resources to implement and sustain that work are not in place, long-term progress can become uncertain.

NEPA, which as partners have initially defined as Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, and Wayne counties, is home to nearly 800,000 residents. In this region, some of the major problems were clear:

• Nearly 12,000 young adults (about 12 percent) are out of school and out of work
• Average wages are 22 to 27 percent below Pennsylvania’s own state average, let alone the national average.
• The region has lost ~39,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in wages over two decades.
• Workers and employers remain disconnected despite overlapping efforts to help them among the largest industry sectors of healthcare & social assistance, retail trade, and transportation & warehousing. 

A 2019 workforce study funded by the Weinberg Foundation had even gone so far as to diagnose some of the core issues and proposed possible solutions: NEPA needed a regional workforce intermediary to align efforts, strengthen coordination, and sustain focus. The question wasn’t what to build—it was how.

Building the Solution: JobsFirstNYC Invited into NEPA

JobsFirstNYC brought more than expertise to the partnership—it brought a proven framework. The organization’s CommunityINC initiative was designed specifically to build the infrastructure that helps communities like NEPA move from collaboration to coordination to systems change.

CommunityINC works by adapting JobsFirstNYC’s successful New York City approach for different regional contexts, providing:

• Partnership development and technical assistance
• Workforce development research and labor market data
• Resource Development
• Access to a national network of practitioners
• Strategic community convenings
• Project management support

But the key insight? Local leadership has to drive the work.

“When we were invited to consider NEPA, it was clear the region already had the foundation for change,” Parker explains. “At JobsFirstNYC, we know that local partnerships matter. That’s why we took on this challenge—to support the development of a workforce intermediary that is rooted in place, led by local voices, and designed to create economic opportunity.”

In June 2024, SACF and JobsFirstNYC formally launched the planning process with NEPA Thrives leaders. In the months that followed, local partners worked within the CommunityINC solutions framework—supported by SACF—to surface shared priorities, examine regional data, and explore potential pilot strategies. This phase focused on understanding NEPA’s unique challenges and opportunities, laying the groundwork for pilots that could later be tailored to the region’s specific needs.  

The result: JobsFirstNEPA, a regional workforce intermediary to advance solutions for economic mobility in the region, is set to launch in January 2026.

What JobsFirstNEPA Actually Does

Unlike traditional workforce interventions, JobsFirstNEPA does not provide direct services to job seekers or employers. Instead, it will function as the connective tissue the region has been missing—building local capacity, promoting shared accountability, and maintaining the infrastructure needed for effective collaboration over the long term.

The incoming Executive Director will work closely with SACF, JobsFirstNYC, and regional partners to implement strategies already co-designed through this extensive process. Think of it as a permanent resource dedicated to aligning strategies, data, and investments to expand economic mobility for young adults and their communities.

More Than Members and Money, But a Movement: The NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative

Infrastructure such as this requires coordinated investment. That is why SACF and JobsFirstNYC spent the past year building something equally critical for this region, through the development of the NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative.

This coalition of eleven founding funder organizations—formally committing in October 2025 supported with an award by Marci Hunn at the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation —represents a significant shift in how workforce development will be advanced in the region. As the first collaborative of its kind locally, these funders are coming together to work and learn collectively, building a coordinated, pooled approach that complements their individual portfolios. The Steering Committee is currently composed of co-chairs Danielle Breslin, President & CEO of the Moses Taylor Foundation, and Laura Ducceschi of the Scranton Area Community Foundation, along with fiscal agent the AllOne Foundation leadership, John Cosgrove, and Jesse Ergott. With JobsFirstNYC serving as the Technical Assistance & Advancement Agent, we help ensure funders have access to high-quality learning and experts, research on how best to leverage collective resources, and strategic advice as they position themselves to be a vehicle for impact and investment in the region.

Their shared vision is “a thriving and equitable Northeast Pennsylvania where collaboration and inclusivity drive innovation, ensuring all individuals have equitable access to family-sustaining jobs and the resources needed for sustainable economic stability.”

The NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative will officially launch in the first quarter of 2026.

Two Pieces, One System

JobsFirstNEPA and the NEPA Workforce Funder Collaborative are distinct entities, but they are designed to work in tandem—much like the infrastructure that created JobsFirstNYC nearly two decades ago.

Together, they create lasting regional impact by:

Building capacity: JobsFirstNEPA strengthens coordination, drives data-informed strategies, and maintains cross-sector partnerships.

Ensuring sustainability: The funder collaborative aligns public, private, and philanthropic investments for the long haul.

Modeling systems change: They demonstrate how well-organized infrastructure can address complex regional challenges that no single organization can solve alone.

This is the core of this work: transformation happens when communities invest in the infrastructure to hold collaboration intentionally.

Why This Model Matters Beyond NEPA

For Ducceschi, this initiative represents years of regional partnership finally reaching critical mass.

“In Northeastern Pennsylvania, workforce challenges are part of a larger ecosystem of barriers—transportation, housing, childcare—that demand connected solutions,” she says. “That’s why true cross-sector collaboration is essential. Through NEPA Thrives and our work with JobsFirstNYC, we’re laying the groundwork for long-term, region-wide impact.”

But the implications extend far beyond one region. NEPA is proving that the gap between collaboration and change can be bridged—not through better meetings or more task forces, but through deliberate investment in permanent infrastructure.

Through local leadership, bolstered by national strategic partners and experts such as Robert Sainz at New Ways to Work and John Martinez at MDRC, Northeastern Pennsylvania is demonstrating what becomes possible when communities stop treating collaboration as the end goal and start treating it as the foundation for something more permanent.

The 2026 launch will mark the beginning of that next chapter—not just for NEPA, but for the JobsFirst approach that other regions are already watching closely.

Because when infrastructure works, it doesn’t just create change, it makes change last.

About the Partnership: JobsFirstNYC and the Scranton Area Community Foundation are working together through the CommunityINC initiative to expand economic mobility for young adults by incubating and accelerating place-based workforce intermediaries and funder collaboratives. To learn more about bringing this model to your community, contact info@jobsfirstnyc.org.