Advice On Job-Training Partnerships Between Charities and Community Colleges

Charity leaders and community-college officials who have collaborated on job-training programs for low-income people offer the following advice to nonprofit groups on how to make such partnerships work:

Find a champion at the college. “In the community-college system, you need an administrator that is willing to support you and take chances,” says Madeline Roman-Vargas, dean of the Humboldt Park Vocational Education Center of Wilbur Wright College, in Chicago.

Otherwise, says Miguel Palacio, associate director of Association House of Chicago, a social-services organization that collaborates with the Humboldt Park center on a program that trains bilingual licensed practical nurses, charity leaders can find themselves butting heads with uncooperative college officials: “You get the runaround, and you can’t figure out what they want.”

Mary Peña, executive director of Project Quest, a job-training program in San Antonio, suggests that charity leaders interested in working with community colleges start with institutions or departments that focus on work-force development or occupational training. Campus administrators there may be more willing than those in traditional academic departments to collaborate with charities on job training, she says.

Appeal to the college’s self-interest. “My strategy is to go to them with things I can bring to them rather than things I want from them,” Ms. Peña says. She might focus, for instance, on the ways her organization can prevent students from dropping out.

Involve the college’s faculty and staff members in decisions. “If we’re going to try something new, we have to do our part to ensure there’s buy-in all the way down,” from the chancellor’s office to faculty members to administrative staff, Ms. Peña says.

Ms. Roman-Vargas says that to persuade her colleagues to launch Carreras en Salud, the training program for practical nurses, she involved as many people from Chicago’s city-college system as possible, including several fellow deans, in the decisions, so that they felt they were part of the process. “If I had developed this with the community without their input, they would have torn it apart,” she says.

Being inclusive and communicating well is just as important for continuing programs, charity leaders say. Sharon LeGrande, who manages job-training programs at Northern Virginia Family Service, a social-services group in Oakton, Va., says her organization meets with officials from Northern Virginia Community College six weeks before the start of each 25-week session of Training Futures, a program run by the charity through which students receive academic credits from the college.

The meetings seek to clear up potential misunderstandings, particular around tricky areas such as add/drop deadlines and financial aid. “We get them invested in the program as much as we are,” she says of her peers at the college.

Send the charity’s staff members to the college, or vice versa. “It works well when the community-based organization’s staff are stationed at the community college” or the other way around, says Nan Poppe, president of the Extended Learning Campus at Portland Community College, in Oregon, and a past president of the National Council for Workforce Education, in Big Rapids, Mich.

Capital Idea, a job-training group in Austin, Tex., gets free use of classrooms and offices at Austin Community College, says the charity’s deputy executive director, Dazzie McKelvy. The nonprofit group’s counselors use the space to meet with students individually and in groups. The counselors also meet frequently with faculty members to follow students’ progress, she says.

Other organizations, including Association House of Chicago and Northern Virginia Family Service, bring faculty members to their facilities to teach some classes, such as English as a second language and academic-success skills.

Besides being convenient for students and charities, says Mr. Palacio, such arrangements allow faculty members to better understand the situations of low-income and immigrant students.