P/PV Resource Center | Practitioners

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Sector Skills Academy 2010 Marano Fellows Announced

P/PV and the Aspen Institute's Workforce Strategies Initiative are pleased to announce the selection of the Sector Skills Academy's sixth class of Marano Fellows. The Academy is designed to support the next generation of innovative leaders in sectoral workforce development. For more information, please visit www.sectorskillsacademy.org; to view a list of the 2010 Fellows, click here.

		Now Available: Updated After-School Resource Guide

P/PV has recently updated the online resource guide that accompanies Putting It All Together: Guiding Principles for Quality After-School Programs Serving Preteens, a report commissioned by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health. Click here to view new research and tools designed to strengthen after-school programs, particularly those serving preteens.

Mentoring Former Prisoners: A Guide for Reentry Programs
This manual draws on the experience of the 11 sites involved in P/PV's Ready4Work prisoner reentry demonstration, as well as established best practices, to provide guidelines for practitioners interested in developing mentoring programs to support former prisoners and enhance the effectiveness of other reentry services.
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Navigating the Child Support System: Lessons from the Fathers at Work Initiative
Navigating the Child Support System provides a basic introduction to child support enforcement and shares tips, tools and cautions for workforce organizations that aim to help noncustodial fathers understand and manage their obligations. It is based on the experiences of sites that participated in the Fathers at Work initiative.
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Using Data for Success: Five Activities for Workforce Managers to Use with Frontline Staff
Commissioned by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and based on input from its grantees and other practitioners, Using Data for Success is designed to help workforce development organizations use data to improve their performance and the well-being of their clients.
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Mentoring Formerly Incarcerated Adults: Insights from the Ready4Work Reentry Initiative
This report explores mentoring as a tool for supporting the successful reentry of formerly incarcerated people, providing insights about how mentoring, or supportive relationships more broadly, can fit into comprehensive reentry efforts.
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How Community-Based Organizations Can Learn about the Needs and Strengths of Disconnected Young People: Hudson Guild of New York City's Youth Survey Effort
In Fall 2007, Hudson Guild embarked on a study to assess the needs of youth in their community who were disconnected or at risk of becoming disconnected. This brief provides the survey they conducted in its entirety and a companion decision-making tool that can be utilized by other organizations interested in undertaking a similar effort.
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Going to Work with a Criminal Record: Lessons from the Fathers at Work Initiative
Based on the experience of organizations taking part in the Fathers at Work initiative, Going to Work with a Criminal Record offers fundamental lessons on connecting people with criminal records to appropriate jobs and employers, as well as tools to organize these efforts.
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What Matters, What Works: Advancing Achievement After School
This brief highlights findings from Advancing Achievement; it informs those who seek to fund, design, and implement effective after-school programs.
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After-School Toolkit: Tips, Techniques and Templates for Improving Program Quality
The Toolkit provides a practical, hands-on guide for implementing high-quality literacy programming and supplies program managers with tools and techniques employed in the CORAL initiative.
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Young Fathers Video and Workshop Guide
This two-disc package features the award-winning Young Fathers documentary and includes discussion guides and lesson plans that are appropriate for a range of different settings and audiences.
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Working with Employers: Skills and Strategies for Job Development Success - Participant Workbook
This workbook provides job development staff participating in the Working with Employers curriculum with all the tools, worksheets and exercises they need for successful completion of the course.
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Working with Employers: Skills and Strategies for Job Development Success - Facilitator Guide
Whatever their job titles—job developer, employment specialist, business services representative—staff who balance the competing demands of both job seeker and employer customers face a challenging task. Working with Employers offers ten skill development modules that can strengthen the effectiveness of frontline staffs job placement activities.
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Here to Stay: Tips and Tools to Hire, Retain and Advance Hourly-Wage Workers
Based on the practices of businesses that value their hourly-wage workers, Here to Stay offers cost-effective actions from hiring the right people to developing their talents for the company's benefit.
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Quality Time After School In Brief
This issue of P/PV In Brief focuses on key findings—and their implications for policymakers and funders—from Quality Time After School: What Instructors Can Do to Enhance Learning.
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Quality Time After School: What Instructors Can Do to Enhance Learning
Quality Time After School identifies characteristics of after-school activities that are linked to youth engagement and learning. To read the accompanying executive summary, click here.
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Quality Time After School Executive Summary
This executive summary provides an overview of key findings from Quality Time After School: What Instructors Can Do to Enhance Learning.
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Locally Grown: Key Strategies for Expanding Workforce Services
This report profiles three workforce organizations across the country and explores the strategies they used to grow their programs locally.
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Good Stories Aren't Enough: Becoming Outcomes-Driven in Workforce Development
This report highlights the practical strategies of six organizations seeking to use outcome data to improve program performance.
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netWORKS: A Guide to Expanding the Employment Networks of Low-Income People
netWORKS offers practical ideas and step-by-step guidance on how organizations can incorporate networking into their programs, including detailed instructions for classroom activities, assignments and events.
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A Portrait of Preteens in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties: What We Know About 9- to 13-Year Olds
This report presents a profile of the preteen population in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in California and provides recommendations to increase awareness about the issues and needs facing these youth.
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Getting Connected: Strategies for Expanding the Employment Networks of Low-Income People
This report examines eight programs across the country that focus on increasing the size and quality of low-income people's networks as part of a broader strategy to help people get and retain jobs.
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Job Development Essentials: A Guide for Job Developers, Second Edition
This second edition of the best-selling Job Development Essentials offers a stronger emphasis on engaging employers, providing expanded services to the business community, and involving businesspeople as resources and advocates for organizations.
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Getting It Right: Strategies for After-School Success
This report synthesizes the last 10 years of findings from P/PV's and other researchers work to distill lessons for creating and managing after-school programs that stand the best chance producing specific, policy-relevant outcomes.
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Building from the Ground Up: Creating Effective Programs to Mentor Children of Prisoners (The Amachi Model)
This guide draws on P/PV's experience with Amachi programs around the country to distill lessons for planning, developing and managing mentoring-children-of-prisoners programs.
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Unrealized Gains: How Workforce Organizations Can Put Money in the Pockets of Low-Wage Workers
Filled with tools and resources, Unrealized Gains is an essential guide for organizations seeking to promote economic security among participants.
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Employment Retention Essentials
Employment Retention Essentials is a practical, user-friendly resource for workforce development professionals offering concrete tools for keeping people working, including tips on how to involve employers, build relationships and stay in contact with participants.
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By Design: Engaging Employers in Workforce Development Organizations
How can workforce development practitioners effectively engage employers? This report describes the strategies used by three leading organizations.
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Fixing a Flat at 65 MPH: Restructuring Services to Improve Program Performance in Workforce Development
An important primer on organizational change, this report zeroes in on the unique issues faced by nonprofits seeking to restructure services.
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Walking the Plain Talk: A Guide for Trainers
P/PV produced this "Training of Trainers" manual for The Annie E. Casey Foundation to help prepare "Walkers and Talkers" and "Home Health Parties" to implement the Plain Talk model. Plain Talk is a neighborhood-based program designed to improve adults' communication with teens about responsible sexual behavior.
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Community Change for Youth Development: Ten Lessons from the CCYD Initiative
This report summarizes basic lessons from the Community Change for Youth Development (CCYD) initiative, which was designed to develop and institute a framework of "core concepts" to guide youth programming for the nonschool hours.
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Supporting Youth Employment: A Guide for Community Groups
A resource for parents, youth workers, educators and young people, this guide highlights successful youth programs and provides tools for taking action.
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Measuring the Quality of Mentor-Youth Relationships: A Tool for Mentoring Programs
This evaluation guide helps program coordinators to answer the question of, "Does my program work?" by gauging the effectiveness of both individual relationships and the program as a whole through a simple 20-question survey given to youth.
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The Plain Talk Implementation Guide
This guide offers detailed information about Plain Talk's program components. It looks at the strategy behind the Plain Talk Initiative, while summarizing cross-site evaluation data.
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Making the Most of Volunteers
Making the Most of Volunteers summarizes P/PV's work over the years with organizations that use volunteers and shares strategies to maximize volunteer value while minimizing damage.
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Hard Work on Soft Skills: Creating a "Culture of Work" in Workforce Development
How can workforce development professionals help participants improve soft skills? This video gives practitioners a firsthand look at effective strategies and approaches.
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Same Race and Cross Race Matching
This technical assistance packet provides practical tips on how to tailor matching, training, and support processes to increase the chances that cross-race matches survive.
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The Best of Both: Community Colleges and Community-Based Organizations Partner to Better Serve Low-Income Workers and Employers
The Best of Both examines several of partnerships between community colleges and community-based nonprofits in an effort to understand how they should be structured, the potential pitfalls they face and what each side should expect from the other.
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Hard Work on Soft Skills: Creating a "Culture of Work" in Workforce Development
Hard Work on Soft Skills describes the efforts of four very different workforce development organizations with sophisticated strategies that suffuse soft skills development throughout their programs by integrating them with their hard skills training.
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Supporting Mentors
This packet helps programs develop and implement strategies that support mentors, help them build trusting relationships with their mentees and, ultimately, contribute to positive outcomes for youth.
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Building Relationships: A Guide for New Mentors
Building Relationships is a technical assistance packet filled with the voices of youth and mentors talking about their relationships, and provides advice on how to be an effective mentor.
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Training New Mentors
This packet focuses on training new mentors and includes suggested activities for two workshops that, together,will help new mentors gain a better understanding of their role and what they can do to ensure a successful relationship with the youth.
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Recruiting Mentors: A Guide to Finding Volunteers
Drawing on effective practices used by volunteer-based organizations and on research findings about mentoring, this technical assistance packet describes recruitment strategies that programs can adapt to meet their particular circumstances.
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Mentoring Sexual Minority Youth
Mentoring Sexual Minority Youth is a technical assistance packet for mentoring programs that may serve lesbian and gay youth and provides steps and training that programs can implement to make these youth feel safe and welcome.
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Surviving, and Maybe Thriving, on Vouchers
Surviving, and Maybe Thriving, on Vouchers offers workforce development practitioners critical lessons about how they can adapt to a new environment with Individual Training Accounts, drawn from the experiences of organizations in jurisdictions that are already relying on these vouchers.
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WORKPlus: Developing Skills for Entry-Level Workers
WORKPlus is a workshop-based training approach designed to help young people—and others new to the workforce—use their early work experiences to acquire transferable skills for future job success. It also contains materials that provide supervisors with the skills they need to guide and support entry-level workers.
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