This is a unique initiative that equips young people, ages 18 to 29, with the skills and abilities that employers want and need. Equally important: It connects participants to emotional and motivational support — like mentoring programs — as well as work supports, such as transportation subsidies and child care. The end goal? Position young people to enter the local labor market and succeed.
Our Pillars
Why a Toolkit?
This toolkit is imagined as a living and immersive digital experience that provides tools for all kinds of adult learners. Some will lean heavily into the data & resources; others will find the narrative stories, video examples, and/or tools to be most helpful. The toolkit fills a need for a training process that uniquely approaches the way we talk about the current generation of young adult workers in a way that is easily understandable by the employer partners being engaged.
How to Use it
This toolkit can be used in a number of ways, and toward the education and development of a number of audiences. Please feel empowered to peruse the toolkit and make decisions about use that best fit your specific needs. Below we have listed some possible uses:
You might work through the entire toolkit, start to finish, with your team as you work to develop their knowledge on Racial Equity, Positive Youth Development, and Worker Voice.
You might choose one module, built around the pillars of Racial Equity, Positive Youth Development, and Worker Voice, and focus your team’s learning around a particular theme.
You might skip right to the tools provided to conduct an evaluation of your organization around Racial Equity or how to conduct a worker voice interview.
Download the toolkit or click through the chapters below
Introduction and How To
Welcome | Our Story
What does belonging look like? Is “community” a buzzword for rallying support, for securing buy-in? Are reciprocal relationships actually possible in the workplace? Are any of these job openings actually right for me? Am I right for ANY job?
Maybe these are questions we can imagine a young Black, Indigenous, and/or Person of Color (BIPOC) person could have as they attempt to find meaningful work. More likely, they’re questions that you’ve had yourself. Maybe that doubt, second-guessing, and anxiety aren’t exclusive to “disconnected youth.”
So if we instinctively recognize and contend with those barriers we erect in our own minds and hearts as we bravely maneuver new spaces, shouldn’t we be vigilantly tearing them down in young BIPOC workers on the edge of new opportunities?
This is our chance to do that. A chance to reposition and reimagine power structures, inequity, social conditioning, and the emotional & physical impact of our assumptions and conduct.
Those opening questions about workplace belonging, sincerity, power, and recognition? We’ll need to address and confront them over and over again. And we should. Because having those conversations and reimagining policy through an empathetic, trauma-informed lens is how we tear down those barriers instead of reinforcing them.
Who is this toolkit written by and who is it for?
KentuckianaWorks partnered with youth serving community partners who are immersed in racial equity work; namely, YouthBuild, Goodwill (the Spot), and Metro United Way. This toolkit is designed to bolster the abilities of employer-facing staff at those organizations to more effectively communicate to potential employers the benefits of hiring, retaining, and investing in the young adults who graduate from their programs. The idea is to provide these staff with current data, narrative stories, and the pertinent rationale proving the benefit of providing a racially equitable, trauma informed, and welcoming workplace. This toolkit is vetted by young adults and employers to ensure that the content resonates in all directions.
Our vision is a Louisville where all BIPOC identifying young people have access to fulfilling job opportunities that allow them to thrive and contribute to their communities, where the workforce is inclusive, diverse, and representative of their communities, and where young people are provided skills, resources, and support needed to succeed.
Our goal is to provide targeted capacity building for service providers and hiring partners to connect youth to work.
Our purpose is to prioritize racial equity and positive youth development in the workplace, create and nourish employment opportunities, and improve overall employment outcomes for young BIPOC workers through trauma-informed care in the Louisville area.
Our objectives are to create the playbook for embedding the pillars of Generation Work into the everyday interactions of developing business relationships, to empower business facing staff to use what their organization knows about youth development to address employers’ need to attract and retain diverse employees, and to be the source for data and resources that workforce development professionals can share with employers who wish to attract and retain young, diverse workers talent.
According to the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, the United States is undergoing an unprecedented generational change. During this demographic shift, the first and possibly last of its kind, we will see over 10,000 baby boomers, and over 73 million more individuals, reach retirement age by 2030. This will have an enormous impact on the available workforce in our country. Simultaneously, the most diverse generations of young adults ever will enter the workforce (48% of Gen Z are POC, 25% Hispanic, 14% Black and 29% either foreign born or born to immigrant parents). We do not yet know what this will mean, in total, for our workforce, but we can be sure that for the first time in many years, the call by employers for an equipped labor force will be answered (or not) by a young, multi-racial, multi-generational workforce that will require ongoing positive development, racial equity, and a voice at the table.
Racial Equity in the
Workforce and Workplace
When perceived racial affiliation no longer influences hiring, retention, and growth opportunities for those entering the workforce we will have moved closer to a racially equitable workplace. Racial equity in the workplace requires not only the absence of discrimination based on perceived race and ethnicity but an active program of policies and changes to workplace culture to root out the systems and behaviors embedded in our businesses and organizations. It’s not enough to be anti-racist, we must perform anti-racism actively in our day to day lives.
Over the course of this project, we’ve developed a few places for the racial equity conversation to begin that are less threatening and more generative for hiring partners. Here are some recommendations:
1. Ask how hiring partners hire and if they collect demographic data on their hires and how they interpret it through a racial equity lens (e.g. rates of hire, advancement, salary, and/or responsibility level)?
2. Ask whether these partners share that data with prospective hires and/or hiring pipelines?
3. Ask if employer partners have a plan to reduce race-based disparities. How might this plan become policy & practice?
How to get there/discussion openers to ask…
(Early relationship) Where do you usually find your applicants? How do they find your job postings?
(Progressing relationship) In what way do you see your talent pool growing or changing in the future?
(Strong relationship) How does your recruitment strategy define diversity goals?
Workplace equity scorecard
As we worked to build better workplace practices around racial equity, we found that the most impactful starting place was a self audit. Below we have included our favorite racial equity scorecard audits with a number of options that can be added or replaced to fit your organization.
Here are the models we found the most successful
Checklist for a mentally healthy workplace
Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE)
Options for a workplace racial equity checklist…
EARNS Checklist for a mentally healthy workplace (1 of 2)
EARNS Checklist for a mentally healthy workplace (2 of 2)
Awareness
Promote strategies to help employees increase their mental health and wellbeing.
Offer employees stress management training to develop relaxation, mindfulness, and resiliency skills.
Create a work environment that uses natural light, plants, etc., and provide a versatile, flexible range
of spaces.Foster communication skills and emotional intelligence among managers and supervisors.
Train managers and supervisors to recognize and respond to warning signs.
Inform employees of available resources such as free relaxation APPs or the company Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
Develop and implement anti-bullying policies.
Sponsor awareness-building and anti-stigma campaigns.
Accommodations
Allow sick leave for reasons related to mental health, and flexible use of vacation time.
Offer additional unpaid or administrative leave for treatment or recovery and/or leaves of absence. Allow use of brief, flexible leave (a few hours at a time) for therapy and other related appointments.
Provide breaks according to individual needs rather than a fixed schedule, more frequent breaks, and/or greater flexibility in scheduling breaks.
Permit beverages and/or food at workstations, if necessary, to mitigate the side effects of medications.
Welcome on-site job coaches.
Assistance
Provide mentoring, coaching, and peer support to your employees.
Make flexible work arrangements such as flex scheduling and telecommuting available to all employees, as a form of proactive accommodation.
Offer stress management training.
Provide access to mental wellness screening and treatment options.
Offer fitness programs to improve employees’ physical health, which in turn promotes positive mental health.
Access
Assess your health plan’s coverage for mental health treatment, including inpatient treatment options and medication coverage.
Give employees easy access to mental health support and care, e.g., an Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
Encourage mental health and stress management through a comprehensive wellness and health promotions program.
Provide case management services to facilitate timely return to work for those who have experienced absences due to mental health concerns.
Comply with the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act.
Worker Voice
Why does worker voice matter?
Lifting up intentional opportunities for youth perspectives and engagement to guide and improve workforce outcomes is key to a healthy workplace and engaged workforce. Making space for worker voice is a key tool for young adult and BIPOC employees to create buy-in, share power, and develop a healthy workplace culture. Prioritizing worker voice is also a mutually beneficial practice that creates real value for employers as they gain access to the real thoughts and feelings workers have about the current state of the workplace and how it could be improved.
Here are three ways employers can seek out and incorporate young adults’ feedback:
Normalize collecting feedback as a part of day-to-day operations. Solicit thoughts from each team member — including staff who are just beginning their careers — and ensure feedback is collected at designated intervals
during projects.
Recognize young workers for theircontributions. Publicly acknowledge and reward good ideas or helpful suggestions.
Position leadership and management to provide feedback to workers early in their careers. This empowers young workers to speak out when issues arise and provides them with coaching and mentoring that will benefit their careers in the long term.
Over the course of this project, we’ve developed a few entry points for a conversation about worker voice to begin. They are as follows…
To what extent are employers soliciting worker input?
How are they using/implementing the feedback from workers?
What other channels, both formal and informal, might employers utilize to accentuate worker voice?
How are employers adjusting invitations for worker input to counter the power imbalance that might hinder it?
Here are some questions to get conversations about worker voice started with employer partners
(Early relationship) Are managers and
supervisors encouraged to have an open-door policy for employees?
(Progressing relationship) Is flexible scheduling available to accommodate someone with competing priorities? How do you solicit input from workers regarding their roles and company practices and policies?
(Strong relationship) What practices or
policies have you changed because of listening
to your employees?
Of all the work we’ve done across each Pillar of the Generation Work program, capturing the voice of young workers has proven to be the most difficult but impactful. The perspective and insights of young adults must be sought out and actively listened to if we want to create better opportunities for BIPOC young adult workers. We recognized this early and to that end, we worked with our partner KERTIS to capture a series of Worker Voice inspired, on camera, interviews designed to showcase how our young adult partners were thinking about and working through the Generation Work model. The content created from these interviews can serve a number of purposes for hiring and non profit partners working with young adults to create more racially equitable workplaces, as well as other Generation Work partners across the nation. Some of the places where we’ve used or plan to use the content to create greater impact on BIPOC young adult workforce attraction and retention are as follows:
To showcase how the Generation Work project can facilitate the design & implementation of new worker voice led strategies & tactics.
To highlight the impact that the Generation Work project has on young adults, hiring, and non profit partners, as they work in coalition.
As audio/video learning tools that support the work and learnings of our partners.
To better help other local and national partners who might be taking on this work, we have developed a ‘how to’ kit to create and capture thoughtful, impactful, and co-creative young adult, worker voice interviews.
How to build a Young Adult - Workers Voice Interview Project…
Step 1
Identify key, young adult voices in your network or employee pool
Prioritize BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ+ voices where possible
Charisma is more important than articulation
More voices are better than The Best voices
Step 2
Logistics & set up
Each interview could take 2 hours of scheduling, 1 hour of set up, and 1 hour to complete (4 hrs total at most).
Choose a well lit, quiet space regardless of the sophistication of equipment you will use to capture the interview.
Spend at the very least one hour explaining the interview to your interviewee (what you’ll ask, how you will use the content created).
Step 3
Structuring your interview
To prepare for your interview, decide upon a very clear theme (e.g. Worker Voice or Racial equity,etc.) for your interview.
Next, write down the overall research question you want to answer through your interview. You won’t ask this question in the interview. It is only for you.
Finally, write up to 10 questions (5 questions are usually an hour of content) that, if answered completely, would add up to a full answer to your broader research question.
Bonus: Tips & Tricks for interviewing
Don’t jump right into the interview. Get everything set up and recording (make sure you’re recording!), then engage your interviewee in very normal conversation (e.g. what did you have for breakfast? Did you watch the game last night? How did you get here today?). This will calm your interviewee and help them feel at ease.
Don’t be afraid to joke around during the interview. You are allowed to be charming, this isn’t a professional documentary, it’s a person to person conversation on camera.
Remember, this isn’t live. You can have the interviewee answer the question again if they stumble.
General Tools and Resources
Trusted sources utilized in Generation Work projects nationwide include:
Our non-profit partners utilized a trauma informed care response to all issues pertaining to young adult training in their programs. We have found that this mind set is a crucial first step for all our partners. There are a number of tools & resources online that you might refer to when attempting to bring this crucial tool to your team. We have provided a short introduction and how we think about trauma informed care here.
Currently, there is no universal definition of trauma. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) defines it as: “Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”
Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) is an approach in the human service field that assumes that an individual is more likely than not to have a history of trauma. Trauma-Informed Care recognizes the presence of trauma symptoms and acknowledges the role trauma may play in an individual’s life- including service staff.
For our purposes, Trauma-Informed Care is a very important process of evaluation and behavior change for organizations and businesses who are working to hire youth who come from a diversity of backgrounds and who may have experienced severe trauma at home or in the workplace previously. One of our primary goals is to work with employers to adopt TIC practices into their existing onboarding, hiring, retention, and training programs. The adoption of this framework can create much more positive outcomes for youth employers. For example, relationships between employers and youth service providers or relationships between young adults and employers.
A crucial piece of work developed by Generation Work partners is a process through which hiring partners might be brought into the work of creating more racially equitable workforces that support positive youth development, and prioritize worker voice as a primary source for change. Including hiring partners in this work requires the creation of strong and trusting relationships with non-profit partners who hold the best practices around how to achieve more equitable workplaces and outcomes for young workers. Strong relationships allow us to have tough, productive conversations with employers about where their organizations are on new topics like positive youth development or sensitive topics like worker voice and racial equity.
Consider using the motivational interviewing technique to shape each type of touchpoint you choose. The OAR’s model, adapted from handouts by David Rosengren and from Miller & Rollnick, Motivational Interviewing, 2nd Edition, 2002, offers an empathetic approach to beginning and growing relationships among partners. This model offers a set of basic interaction techniques including Open questions, Affirmative response, Reflective listening, and Summary reflections (OAR’S) for practitioners to mobilize in conversation toward building stable partnerships. Many of our Generation Work partners utilized this strategy in their initial and ongoing partner conversations to build strong relationships.
Relationships are built using a combination of the following touchpoints:
Verbal communication
Non-verbal communication
Internal networking and leads (career classes, events, mock interviews, coaching placements)
External networking and leads (job fairs/hiring events, job placement follow-up, networking events)
Positive Youth Development
Create a structured, supportive and safe environment. By creating workplaces where young adults can ask questions and take
responsibility for their training and work, employers foster a sense of belonging and commitment.
Ensure managers and young adults work together toward shared goals. This includes having managers set clear professional goals with their young employees and ensuring managers meet with them throughout the year to help them accomplish those goals.
Provide young workers with internal and external training
opportunities. Internally, employers can connect young people to on-the-job training and workshops that help them build important skills and gain valuable experience. External training opportunities from a third party or postsecondary institution help mold young people into valuable long-term employees.
Establish clear pathways and processes for promotion. Employers with transparent and well-defined policies for advancement create trust and motivation among their young employees.
Engaging on Positive Youth Development Topics begins by shifting employers away from purely consumer based approaches to attracting and hiring Young Adult talent. The Positive Youth Development framework calls for employers to be ongoing investors and cultivators of YA talent and experience. This approach allows and incentivizes employers to make space for intentional gatherings, discussions, and learnings from the perspective of young people about their actual lived experience, preference, and where they identify opportunities for professional growth and development.
We suggest the following strategies to help employers integrate professional development, incorporating positive youth development principles within their young adult workforce.
What is Positive Youth Development?
Adding to the strategies above, we’ve noted some questions Generation Work partners might ask employer partners to begin a conversation around Positive Youth Development.
Are employers aware of current workforce development practices used by my youth-serving agency?
How might business-facing staff translate these practices (e.g. pilot) to workplace settings?
What would it take to get an employer to hire and retain a young adult?
And here are some further questions that can be used to drive even more generative conversations with employers and hiring partners who are engaged with the Generation Work project.
(Early relationship) Do you have individual training plans for your employees? If yes, what do those typically look like?
(Progressing relationship) How does your company help employees continue to learn and grow?
(Strong relationship) What are your thoughts around young adult employees?
Strategies for creating a positive environment for youth development
At the core of the Generation Work project is the commitment to changing practices in our workplace to create positive impacts for our prospective BIPOC young adult workforce.
Below we have borrowed from the book, Community Programs to Promote Youth Development (2002) by the National Resource Council to provide some best practices adopted by our partners to create supportive environments for young adult workers. These best practices can be easily adopted by you and your organization to move from a desire for a positive environment for youth development toward a practice.
Physical and Psychological Safety | Safe and health-promoting facilities; and practices that increase safe peer group interaction and decrease unsafe or confrontational peer interactions.
Appropriate Structure | Limit setting; clear and consistent rules and expectations; firm-enough control; continuity and predictability; clear boundaries; and age-appropriate monitoring.
Supportive relationships | Warmth; closeness; connectedness; good communication; caring; support; guidance; secure attachment; and responsiveness.
Opportunities to belong | Opportunities for meaningful inclusion, regardless of one’s gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disabilities; social inclusion, social engagement, and integration; opportunities for sociocultural identity formation; and support for cultural and bi-cultural competence.
Positive social norms | Rules of behavior; expectations; injunctions; ways of doing things; values and morals; and obligations for service.
Support for efficacy & mattering | Youth-based; empowerment practices that support autonomy; making a real difference in one’s community; and being taken seriously. Practice that includes enabling, responsibility granting, and meaningful challenge. Practices that focus on improvement rather than on relative current performance levels.
Opportunities for skill building | Opportunities to learn physical, intellectual, psychological, emotional, and social skills; exposure to intentional learning experiences; opportunities to learn cultural literacies, media literacy, communication skills, and good habits of mind; preparation for adult employment; and opportunities to develop social and cultural capital.
Integration | Concordance; coordination; and synergy among family, school, and community.