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“Currently, [Census] data is not loading properly:” DOL’s YouthBuild FY ’21

Needs assessment experts and data nerds know that factfinder.census.gov, the old primary portal into Census data, is dead, while the new census data portal, data.census.gov, is only somewhat alive. Last year, I started a post about the ways that data.census.gov is broken, but I abandoned it because it was too boring, even for me; last year, data.census.gov was hellaciously slow, often taking 10 seconds for a query (a needs assessment may require dozens or hundreds of queries), and many internal links simply didn’t work. Some of that seems to have been fixed: back then, for example, trying to find specific sub-data sets, like educational attainment, for a given zip code, didn’t work. I sent some feedback to the Census contact person, who was very helpful, and eventually most of the problems disappeared.

But not all, it seems; this year’s DOL YouthBuild NOFA includes a humorous instruction regarding data requirements: pages 84 – 86 offer a 20-step algorithm for acquiring poverty data. That the algorithm has 20 steps and three pages is obviously bizarre: instruction 17 notes, “A table will come up showing the Total Population, the Number in Poverty, and the Poverty Rate. Currently, the data is not loading properly and at first only the overall U.S. data will load and you will not be able to scroll any further to the right to see anything else.” Oh? “Currently, the data is not loading properly:” that seems as if it could be the theme of the new Census interface.

About 10 years ago, there was a popular link-sharing site called Digg, and it introduced a now-notorious redesign that users hated, and those users consequently abandoned it en masse, leading to the rise of Reddit, a now-popular link-sharing site. If Digg had been more careful, it probably would have maintained its previous site design for those who wanted it, while introducing its new site design as a default, but not mandatory, experience. And then Digg would likely have iterated on the new design, figuring out what works. Reddit has somewhat learned this lesson; it now has two interfaces, one primarily living at old.reddit.com, which is maintained for people highly familiar with “the old Reddit,” and a newer one that is available by default at reddit.com. This bifurcation strategy allows a smooth transition between interfaces. The Census didn’t follow this strategy, and instead killed the old interface before the new one was really ready. Thus, bugs, like the bugs I’ve noticed, and bugs like those the Dept. of Labor noticed and mentioned specifically in YouthBuild NOFA. The more general lesson is fairly clear: be wary of big user interface changes. If you need Census data, though, you’ll have to use the interface, as is, since it’s the only one available.

For some reason—perhaps latent masochism?—Isaac continues to use MS Office 365 Outlook (not the free version) as an email client, instead of Apple’s Mail.app, or Thunderbird, and he tells me that every time he opens Outlook, he gets an invitation to try “the new Outlook” interface. So far, he’s resisted, but he also points out that most change is positive: when S + A started in 1993, there was effectively no commercial Internet, and the only way to get Census data was to go to Census Office, if you were near a big enough city, city hall, or a large library, where it was possible to thumb through the impenetrable Census books and maps. After a year or two in business, some vendor got the idea of putting the 1990 Census data on CDs (remember those), for quite a high price. Even though S + A was struggling to control costs, he bought the CDs, since they were better than hours in a Census Office or library. But then he had to buy, and install, CD drives in the Pentium PCs (remember those) we used. A couple of years later, he stumbled into a Census data portal set up by a random university, which worked! So, he tossed the CDs. When the 2000 Census came out, the feds essentially copied the university’s interface, creating factfinder.gov, and all was well until data.census.gov came alone. It’ll probably be better than the old interface, at some point.

Complaining is easy and making things better is hard. In the Internet era, both complainers and makers have been empowered, and I appreciate the difference between the two. People who have fundamental responsibility for a product, service, or organization, including the responsibility for making hard decisions that aren’t going to be popular with everyone, have a different perspective than those who can just complain and move on. So I don’t want to be a drive-by complainer, as so many are on “social” media, which seems poisonous to institutional formation and coherence. But, despite those caveats, the instruction from DOL regarding the Census being broken is perversely funny.

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The DOL FY ’18 YouthBuild FOA is out and a dinosaur program is again relevant

The Department of Labor (DOL) just issued the FY ’18 YouthBuild FOA. YouthBuild, which has been around for about 25 years,* is relevant for the first time in about ten years. We’ve written around 30 funded YouthBuild proposals, including, in 1994, the very first funded YouthBuild proposal in Southern California; we’ve also written many posts about YouthBuild.

Since the Great Recession of 2008, YouthBuild has seemed like an anachronism—with the collapse of the housing and real estate markets, there have been legions of unemployed construction workers, so what was the point in training yet more? Still, hundreds of YouthBuild grantees persisted, as did thousands of other workforce development agencies. And we’ve continued to write YouthBuild proposals, although we’ve had to stretch our skills to create plausible outcomes for newly minted construction workers in a world that didn’t need them. It helped that in FY 2014, as as we wrote about in the post linked to above, DOL removed the need to include Labor Market Information (LMI) data, since at that time it was about impossible to demonstrate that construction jobs actually existed in most parts of the US.

Flash forward to 2018, and it’s hard not to notice the construction boom. Cranes dominate most skylines and there’s new life for manufacturers in the Midwest rust belt. Even Detroit, which has been in economic decline since the Nixon administration, is reportedly coming out of its slumber.**

The national unemployment rate dropped to 3.9% in April, something else that hasn’t been seen for decades. As grant writers, however, we know that there’s a disconnect between this widely reported statistic and reality, given the huge number of working age youth and young adults who are not in the job market—many due to conditions of disability—and thus not counted in the conventional unemployment rate. The new challenge in writing a YouthBuild proposal is cobbling together unemployment data to support project need. But DOL is helping out with the following curious direction from this year’s FOA regarding unemployment data requirements:

The national unemployment rate for youth ages 16 – 24 against which DOL will evaluate applicants is: 13.8 percent (using 1-year American Community Survey (ACS) estimates as of 2016).

This year, YouthBuild applicants must use two-year old unemployment data, though current data would paint a much brighter picture. For most low-income urban and rural communities, and especially urban communities of color, we won’t have much trouble demonstrating youth unemployment well above this odd threshold. This is done through the magic of manipulating target area census tracks/zip codes, as needed, to create an especially bleak youth unemployment picture.

We don’t know if DOL intentionally made it easier to demonstrate need to encourage more YouthBuild applicants or if it’s just bureaucratic randomness.


* More or less as long as Seliger + Associates

** Randomly, Detroit and Compton are the only big cities with mostly residents of color I can think of in which we’ve never had a client. To correct this, I’ll offer a 20% discount on a YouthBuild application to any client in Detroit or Compton that comes along.

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First HRSA, Now DOL: Simpler Forms and Reasonable Templates in the FY ’16 YouthBuild FOA

A few weeks ago we noticed that “HRSA made it harder for NAP applicants to shoot themselves in the foot;” now it appears that DOL is getting in the game. In this year’s YouthBuild SGA, DOL includes a form called “WORKSHEET_weighted_average.xlsx,” which models what previous YouthBuild SGAs have only instructed applicants to do regarding unemployment rates. Years ago applicants could do pretty much whatever they wanted regarding unemployment rates, using any data sources, but over time DOL has gotten more and more specific, presumably so that they’re comparing homogeneous numbers.

Today, calculating weighted average unemployment rates isn’t hard, exactly, but we’d bet that DOL got all kinds of interesting, incompatible responses to these instructions, from the 2015 YouthBuild FOA:

The applicant must provide weighted average unemployment rate (rounded to one decimal place) of the combined cities or towns identified as part of the target community(ies) compared to the national unemployment rate as of the latest available comparable data. This data is broken into two youth age subsets: 16 – 19 and 20 – 24. Applicants will have to average the unemployment rate for these two age groups by adding the populations together and then dividing by the total population.

We know how to model this in Excel, but we shouldn’t have had to: DOL should’ve included a template long ago. Last year we wrote a post about how “Funders Could Provide Proposal Templates in Word,” and doing so would likely raise the quality of the average proposal submitted while simultaneously reducing the busy work of applicants. Funders aren’t incentivized to do this, save by the knowledge of what they’ll get if they don’t provide templates, and consequently they don’t.*

Still, there are downsides to the the DOL approach. Applicants must now collect and aggregate specific data points for all the zip codes they’re serving, rather than choosing a different geographical unit, like a city or county, that ordinary humans understand. Few people say, “I really love living in zip code 66666.” But they might say, “Austin is great!”

Those of us who’ve done data work on large numbers of zip codes know how irritating that can be. I’m thinking of a particular project I worked on a couple months ago that had dozens of zip codes in the target area, and I never could figure out how to really expedite the process via the Census’s powerful, yet maddeningly Byzantine, website. There was (and is) probably an efficient way of doing what I was doing, but I never figured it out. The Census website is hardly the first piece of software with fantastically sophisticated abilities that most users never learn because the learning curve itself is so steep.

Overall, though, the simple, included form in this year’s YouthBuild SGA will probably lead to better proposals. We’re a little sad to see it, though, because conforming to the form makes it harder for crafty grant writers like us to weave threads of cherry picked and obfuscated data into an elegant, but sometimes specious, needs assessment tapestry that is coin of our realm.


* Given the unstated role of signaling in proposals, which we write about at the link, funders might be incentivized to make the grant process harder, not easier.

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Batch/cohort versus continuous training: A problem with no solution

Job training programs, education programs, and related programs can work in two basic modes: batch/cohort (we’ll call it “batch” for this purpose) and continuous. Batch training happens the way most conventional schools function: the academic year starts at a particular time—usually in September—and if you don’t show up by September 5, you have to wait until the next break in the academic calendar (which is usually around January). No matter how bad you want to start school, you have to wait until the next time you’re allowed to start.

The alternative is a continuous program, in which a given participant starts whenever she’s ready to start. Two people might start in September, five in October, another in November, and three in December. The person who starts in November probably can’t work or learn effectively with the two who start in September, however, because the two who start in September are too far ahead of the one who starts in November.

Neither of these approaches is necessarily right, and two federal programs illustrate the difference: YouthBuild versus Training to Work 2-Adult Reentry, both of which are conveniently funded by the Department of Labor.*

YouthBuild wants batch processing: usually one class starts every year, and training takes about nine months to complete. Training to Work 2, like many prisoner reentry and Workforce Investment Act (WIA) programs, wants continuous training: if an ex-offender is released in October, it’s important for reintegration purposes to start that person in October.

Batch processing is hard because people who think they want to participate in October lose interest by the time January rolls around. Continuous processing is hard because people tend not to have the sense of solidarity that comes with working in concert with others towards a specific goal.

One problem with many Workforce Investment Act (WIA) programs, going back to WIA’s inception in the mid-80s, is that they’re drop-in, drop-out programs; no one develops a sense of team. Following intake and assessment at a WIA American Jobs Center (AJC), the client is usually referred to to a vocational training vendor. The training usually is starts immediately but may not be continuous, and the trainee may not be part of a training batch.

It may seem to the trainee that they’re actually not building towards anything concrete, as she lacks a cohort to share training outcomes with. Cohort issues are powerful: Even with semesters at a university, for example, many people still find the university experience alienating, especially coming from relatively small high school communities. To some extent living in dorms provides community; so can sports, or the Greek system (despite the problems with the Greek system).

The military puts every recruit through basic training in a batch, in large part to build some sense of team identity or “unit cohesion,” as this often referred to in the military. The cliché goes that guys on the ground don’t charge the enemy for their country or glory or the girl back home; they charge for the guys around them. Building a cooperative unit out of individuals is inherently hard and the many federal job training efforts don’t always work to build cooperative units. Repeated interactions build knowledge and to some extent happiness. It also builds cooperation, as numerous iterations of prisoners dilemma, divide-the-money, and similar game-theory games.

In WIA-land, however almost all programs work on a continuous-entry, continuous-exit model in which any individual is on his (usually) own. Most WIA vendors are in the meantime operating off-the-shelf training programs. These programs can be better-run or worse-run, but they do get people started quickly. In this sense they aren’t doing as much cherry-picking as batch programs, which require more patience. But because they require more patience, they may get better outcomes due to selection biases.

When YouthBuild was first released, HUD (which ran YouthBuild at the time) didn’t require batch training. But HUD changed the second YouthBuild NOFA to reflect the very first YouthBuild proposal we’d ever written (I was about 10 at the time, so my contribution was limited), because Isaac had been involved in job training proposal writing for years and knew that batch training would be easier for YouthBuild trainees and grantees. HUD read our proposal—we wrote some of the fist funded YouthBuild grants—and realized that our approach was a winner. We like to think we had an important contribution to the way in which YouthBuild operates its training, though almost no one knows this.

We can’t tell you the right approach for your program. But we can tell you that you should be thinking about the trade-offs involved in either approach, and you should be closely reading RFPs so you can divine whether the funder already prefers one approach or the other.


* And Training to Work is on our mind because the Training to Work 3 – Adult Reentry FOA was just released.

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A Report from the Front: Close Reading This Year’s DOL YouthBuild Solicitation for Grant Applications (SGA)

We wrote the very first funded YouthBuild grant for a Southern California client in 1994 and have written funded YouthBuild proposals for virtually every funding round since, which means that we have an unusually nuanced perspective on changes over time.* We’ve noticed two big changes and one minor change in this year’s SGA: market labor market information (LMI) data is out, green construction skills training is out, and the SGA is less structured.

Why?

First, LMI data has been a prominent feature of every YouthBuild SGA since the program was transferred from HUD to DOL about ten years ago. Applicants were supposed to demonstrate that construction skills were in high demand in their area, usually using phantom data, since the LMI data provided by states—the only source for such info—lags the real market by at least a couple years.

Those of you who have been alive and reading any news in the period from 2009 – 2013 know that Bad Things happened to the housing market. Household formation dropped like my Manhattan off a rooftop bar,** housing prices plummeted, and developers stopped building new housing or rehabilitating existing housing. Some went bankrupt. Today’s labor market data probably indicates that there is little support for the need for more construction workers. Requiring data that won’t support need anywhere makes YouthBuild as a program look stupid, and as all political observers know the ideal way to avoid information that makes you look stupid is to pretend it doesn’t exist.

LMI data has always been dubious because no one has a crystal ball; macro data doesn’t tell you much. Forward projections rarely work, and as Nassim Taleb points out (in colorful language) in The Black Swan, no one knows what’s going to happen in markets, labor or otherwise. It’s inherently not possible to know.

Jobs are growing at the low end (in healthcare, service, etc.) and, to a lesser but real extent, the very high end (technology, engineering). But no one can really take a large number of low-income high school dropouts and get them ready to work for Facebook or build the next WhatsApp. Entry-level jobs in fast food or caring for old folks, however, don’t demand a lot of training.

Secondly, green construction training is missing. Training for so called “green jobs” and “green construction skills” first appeared in YouthBuild SGAs about five or six years ago, more or less corresponding with the start of the Obama administration and the Stimulus Bill. As best we can tell, nobody’s talking about green jobs after the A123 Battery debacle and the like, and “green jobs” were never well-defined; “green practices” make more sense, but they really mean energy efficiency, which has been around since the energy shocks of the mid 1970s: double or triple-paned windows, high-efficiency appliances, and perhaps most importantly multi-family housing.

As Edward Glaeser points out in Triumph of the City, multi-family housing is by far the greenest way to live by all sorts of metrics. I’m living in New York on the 22nd floor of an apartment building; because New York’s density means that public transportation works, I don’t own a car. No one lives a greener lifestyle than me (I enjoy patting myself on the back).

To tie points one and two together, I’ll note that Isaac lives in Downtown Santa Monica, where many new multifamily buildings are going up. He got to talking to a foreman on one of the projects, and the foreman said that the buildings aren’t even really built on-site anymore: components come in larger and larger pieces, and then they’re assembled like Tinker Toys. The real greening of those building isn’t happening on-site; it’s happening in distant factories. And these buildings just don’t require as many people to build because so much is done off-site.

In much of the U.S., the real need for housing choice and affordable housing starts at the regulatory level, not the worker level. Matt Yglesias’s The Rent is Too Damn High observes that, in many places, permitting and local development rules hold back affordable housing because they restrict supply in the face of growing demand. New York and Seattle need to be able to create new housing before they need more construction workers. The Federal government has limited control over local land-use practices.

Finally, the SGA’s narrative section is less structured than it used to be. This is mostly a grant wave. Any program narrative can be more structured or less structured. The more structured program narratives will say things like “2. Program Design” then “a. Education and Occupational Skills Training” and then “Factor one: The evidence that the type of academic instruction offered…” Less structured program narratives will say things like, “What’re you going to do once you get all those damn kids in a room?” and let the applicant bloviate as long or as short as the applicant wishes.

We tend to like the latter version better, both because it’s more fun to write and because the resulting proposal tends to be more fun to read. Funders, however, can’t resist meddling and directing, so they tend to like to tell applicants what to do.


* If I live long enough maybe I’ll write the very last YouthBuild funded grant application.

** It was an accident.

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FY ’15 YouthBuild SGA Issued by the DOL As Predicted—But With A Twist

Faithful readers will know that we recently predicted that the Department of Labor (DOL) would soon issue the FY ’15 YouthBuild SGA. The SGA was in fact published February 18. I still don’t know why DOL feels like it has to keep upcoming SGAs secret, unless it’s to make sure that their own staffers don’t have to meet deadlines, but at least they provided about 60 days to respond: the deadline is April 22. $73 million is up for grabs.

While the SGA publication was not much of a surprise, there is an interesting nugget (or “nougat,” as we like to call unusual aspects of RFPs*) in this one with respect to the slice and dice of available funds:

The Department intends to use up to 30 percent of the total available funding for this competition for the award of grants to eligible applicants that have not previously received a DOL YouthBuild grant or have not substantially completed performance on their initial DOL-funded grant award. [. . .] The remainder of [the] funds will be used to award grants to eligible applicants that have been previously funded by the DOL YouthBuild program and have demonstrated success in the program.

There are actually two pots of YouthBuild funds: $51,100,00 or $21,900,000, depending on the type of applicant. This is either good or bad news, based on how you like to handicap your agency’s likelihood of being funded.

Since we’re grant writers, not fortune tellers or racetrack touts, Seliger + Associates does not think much of this sort of handicapping. Our advice when asked this question—which generally happens several times a week—is simple: “If your agency is eligible and you want to run the grant program, apply. You can’t win the Lotto without buying it ticket.”

The above funding split mean that pretty much any otherwise eligible nonprofit or public agency can apply this year,** which is great.


* One other oddity: the SGA says nothing about green jobs, which the DOL has been hammering into applicants’s heads for the last half decade.

** If you read the above SGA quote carefully, you’ll note that the ineligible agencies are the previous YouthBuild grantees that screwed up their grants, somehow, at least in the eyes of the DOL.

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Job Training Grants are the Church of What’s Happening Now: State of the Union and CA Career Pathways

Although I gave up watching State of the Union speeches about 20 years ago—they’re always boring and bombastic—this year’s rendition included a hearty endorsement of federal job training efforts. President Obama observed that, with more than 30 existing discretionary federal job training programs, the subject is bit confusing, and he detailed Uncle Joe Biden to study the matter with an aim toward simplifying things.

Call me cynical, but I have zero confidence that our VP can or will simplify job training programs. I wrote my first job training proposal 40 years ago, when I worked for Mayor Bradley shortly after arriving from the Great Frozen North. The proposal was for the fed’s first, and perhaps best, general purpose* job training program: the late Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program.

Unlike later federal efforts, CETA actually provided funding for public agencies and nonprofits to train and hire the unemployed. Although I never had a CETA job, I knew lots of people—most of them liberal arts grads like me—who got their career start with CETA. Since CETA was fairly successful, Congress, of course, got rid of it, replacing CETA with the Job Training and Partnership Act (JTPA) in 1982. JTPA was a definite step backwards, as it created a whole ecosystem of local and regional public/private boards around the country to pass out JTPA funds, which quickly became boondoggles. The idea of directly funding jobs was lost and replaced with the goal of “job development.”

Job development is like telling a teenager outside of a school dance that there are girls inside somewhere, while CETA provided the unemployed with a date with a “sure thing.” Big difference.

JTPA was such a fiasco that it was replaced with the even more convoluted and confusing Workforce Investment Act (WIA) in 1998. Despite its many flaws and limited virtues, WIA remains the primary federal job training funding vehicle. Given President Obama’s SOTU remarks and an ever-increasing pool of Americans who have dropped out of the workforce, WIA has been an obvious failure.

To get biblical, CETA begat JTPA, which begat WIA. There are also dozens of other federal job training programs. Almost every federal grant program that aims to help, among others, any at-risk child over the age of 12, young adults, women, ex-offenders and garden-variety adults, includes some aspect of job readiness and/or vocational skills training, either directly or by referral.

As a grant writer, I’m all for a plethora of job training programs. Why have 30 job training programs when 40 will do? A Wall Street Journal editorial this morning concludes that there are 47 federal job training programs, not 30, as President seems to think. My guess is that when Uncle Joe starts looking through the federal grant attic, he’ll find more than 47. The WSJ points out correctly that not a single job training program measures success by work workers hired. This is what makes job training grant proposals so much fun to write and why agencies should make every effort to get job training grants: there’s no way to evaluate success! And there’s less impetus to do so.

The states are also in the job training biz big time. For example, California just issued a RFP for an entirely new program, the California Career Pathways Trust, which has $247 million in precious state funds up for grabs. (California is also spending $60 billion on a so-called high speed rail system, so perhaps the Golden State is rolling in dough.)

Job training grants are ubiquitous and, no matter what Uncle Joe’s task force discovers or attempts to report, smart nonprofits, school districts and other public agencies will answer the challenge and apply for the huge grants that are and will be available in the job training trough in the coming months and years. As we’ve written about before, grant seeking organizations have to learn how to surf the grant waves. To quote Flip Wilson, job training grants are the church of what’s happening now.


* Federal jobs programs go all the way back to the Depression-era WPA, which focused on jobs, not training. By the time of the Great Society in 1965, the grant pendulum had swung to job training with the creation of Job Corps, which is still among the living. This is fairly amazing, since Job Corps spends about $79,000 per trainee to prepare 16 – 24 year olds for a minimum wage job. It is cheaper to send a kid to the University of Chicago than to Job Corps. If the “16 – 24” age sounds familiar, it’s because this is the same age range for our old pal YouthBuild. Actually, one can think of YouthBuild as Job Corps Lite, since it’s more or less the same program without a residential living component.

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Why Do the Feds Keep RFP Issuance Dates a Secret? The Upcoming FY ’14 GEAR UP and YouthBuild RFP Illustrate the Obvious

An oddity of the Federal grant making process is that projected RFP issuance dates are usually kept secret.* Two cases in point illustrate how this works: the FY ’14 Department of Education GEAR-UP and Department of Labor YouthBuild competitions.

Last week, former clients contacted us about both programs. Both clients are well-connected with the respective funders and strongly believe that the RFPs will be soon issued, likely by the end of the month. We believe them, as both were seeking fee quotes to write their GEAR-UP or YouthBuild proposal. The challenge both face, however, is that the Department of Labor and Department of Education typically only provide about a 30-day period between RFP publication and the deadline. So, if you’re an average nonprofit not connected to the funding source, you can easily be blindsided by a sudden RFP announcement.

I’ve never understood why the Feds do this. Hollywood studios announce film premieres weeks and sometimes months in advance to build buzz. You know that when Apple holds an event at the Moscone Center, new products will be launched. Unlike most humans, though, the Feds think it’s a good idea to keep the exact timing of new funding opportunities a secret. This is beyond stupid, but they have been this way since I looked at my first Federal Register about 40 years ago. I don’t expect anything to change soon.

When we learn about likely upcoming RFPs, we usually note them in our free weekly Email Grant Alerts and, for particularly interesting announcements, at this blog. The best advice I can give you comes from that intrepid reporter Ned “Scotty” Scott at the end of Howard Hawks’s great 1951 SF film, The Thing from Another World:** “Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!”


* There are many oddities; this is just one.

** This movie has it all: monster loving scientist who spouts lots of stentorian Dr. Frankenstein bon mots about the importance of science, a rakish and fearless hero, a hot babe in a pointy bra, weird SF music, a claustrophobic setting that’s a precursor to “Alien” and many other movies, and James Arness (yes, that James Arness) as “The Thing.”

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The unsolvable standardized data problem and the needs assessment monster

Needs assessments tend to come in two flavors: one basically instructs the applicant to “Describe the target area and its needs,” and the applicant chooses whatever data it can come up with. For most applicants that’ll be some combination of Census data, local Consolidated Plan, data gathered by the applicant in the course of providing services, news stories and articles, and whatever else they can scavenge. Some areas have well-known local data sources; Los Angles County, for example, is divided into eight Service Planning Areas (SPAs), and the County and United Way provide most data relevant to grant writers by SPA.

The upside to this system is that applicants can use whatever data makes the service area look worse (looking worse is better because it indicates greater need). The downside is that funders will get a heterogeneous mix of data that frequently can’t be compared from proposal to proposal. And since no one has the time or energy to audit or check the data, applicants can easily fudge the numbers.

High school dropout rates are a great example of the vagaries in data work: definitions of what constitutes a high school dropout vary from district to district, and many districts have strong financial incentives to avoid calling any particular student a “dropout.” The GED situation in the U.S. makes dropout statistics even harder to understand and compare; if a student drops out at age 16 and gets a GED at 18 is he a dropout or a high school graduate? The mobility of many high-school age students makes it harder still, as does the advent of charter schools, on-line instruction and the decline of the neighborhood school in favor of open enrollment policies. There is no universal way to measure this seemingly simple number.*

The alternative to the “do whatever” system is for the funder to say: You must use System X in manner Y. The funder gives the applicant a specific source and says, “Use this source to calculate the relevant information.” For example, the last round of YouthBuild funding required the precise Census topic and table name for employment statistics. Every applicant had to use “S2301 EMPLOYMENT STATUS” and “S1701 POVERTY STATUS IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS,” per page 38 of the SGA.

The SGA writers forgot, however, that not every piece of Census data is available (or accurate) for every jurisdiction. Since I’ve done too much data work for too many places, I’ve become very familiar with the “(X)” in American Factfinder2 tables—which indicates that the requested data is not available.

In the case of YouthBuild, the SGA also specifies that dropout data must be gathered using a site called Edweek. But dropout data can’t really be standardized for the reasons that I only began to describe in the third paragraph of this post (I stopped to make sure that you don’t kill yourself from boredom, which would leave a gory mess for someone else to clean up). As local jurisdictions experiment with charter schools and online education, the data in sources like Edweek is only going to become more confusing—and less accurate.

If a YouthBuild proposal loses a few need points because of unavailable or unreliable data sources, or data sources that miss particular jurisdictions (as Edweek does) it probably won’t be funded, since an applicant needs almost a perfect score to get a YouthBuild grant. We should know, as we’ve written at least two dozen funded YouthBuild proposals over the years.

Standardized metrics from funders aren’t always good, and some people will get screwed if their projects don’t fit into a simple jurisdiction or if their jurisdiction doesn’t collect data in the same way as another jurisdiction.

As often happens at the juncture between the grant world and the real world, there isn’t an ideal way around this problem. From the perspective of funders, uniform data requirements give an illusion of fairness and equality. From the perspective of applicants trapped by particular reporting requirements, there may not be a good way to resolve the problem.

Applicants can try contacting the program officer, but that’s usually a waste of time: the program officer will just repeat the language of the RFP back to the applicant and tell the applicant to use its best judgment.

The optimal way to deal with the problem is probably to explain the situation in the proposal and offer alternative data. That might not work. Sometimes applicants just get screwed, and not in the way most people like to get screwed, and there’s little to be done about it.


* About 15 years ago, Isaac actually talked to the demographer who worked at the Department of Education on dropout data. This was in the pre-Internet days, and he just happened to get the guy who works on this stuff after multiple phone transfers. He explained why true, comprehensive dropout data is impossible to gather nationally, and some of his explanations have made it to this blog post.

No one ever talks to people who do stuff like this, and when they find an interested party they’re often eager to chat about the details of their work.

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Youth CareerConnect Program: The Department of Labor Provides An Early Holiday Present

The holidays come early year with this tasty new* program from the elves at the Department of Labor (DOL) Employment and Training Administration (ETA): the Youth CareerConnect Program.** There’s $100,000,000 up for grabs, with 25 to 40 grants to be awarded—in other words, serious money. Sequestration hasn’t been a horror story for nonprofit and public agencies—the federal trough is full and there’s always for one more nonprofit snout.

Read the RFP. You’ll realize you’ve seen this movie before—but just because the plot is stale doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see yet another version of boy meets girl. Youth CareerConnect funds small learning communities, career-focused curricula, employee partnerships, high school diplomas or equivalents, industry-recognized credentials, work readiness, low-income participants (including females and minorities), and (wait for it), wraparound supportive services. It’s like YouthBuild but without the construction training, or like prisoner reentry without prisoners, or community colleges without the community college.

The services may elicit a yawn but the money won’t. If your agency runs YouthBuild or almost any other training or supportive services for at-risk youth or young adults, this is a wonderful grant opportunity that could be run by almost any youth services nonprofit. Remember, though, that you should get going before your Thanksgivukkah turkey and latkes put you to sleep, because the deadline is January 27. All I can say to my pals at DOL ETA, is Gobbletov!

EDIT: As I noted in “Are You Experienced? Face Forward—Serving Juvenile Offenders SGA: A New Department of Labor Program That Mirrors YouthBuild,” it’s almost always a good idea to apply for the first funding round of a new program. The reasons are too many and varied to repeat here, but the original post is worth reading carefully for anyone debating about whether their agency should apply.

In addition, it’s worth noting that page 16 of the Youth CareerConnect SGA forbids community colleges from applying. That’s curious, because community colleges are probably the most plausible candidates for running YCC programs. They’re probably excluded because community colleges are the only eligible applicants for the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) Grant Program, which is essentially the same thing as YCC, except that it has even more money available. DOL just wants to spread the wealth to other organizations.


* It’s “new” in the sense that the title is new and the hundred million has been freshly allocated, but anyone who has ever provided job training services should recognize the melody, beat, and lyrics.

** I particularly like the way DOL has run Career and Connect together to form an allusion of speed and urgency with CareerConnect.