Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper analyzes systems change associated with the implementation of the Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) Program, a training initiative that supports participants in pursuing career pathways to in-demand healthcare occupations and seeks to change how local educational and workforce systems support low-income individuals. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded grants to 32 organizations, including 5 tribal and 27 non-tribal training programs in high-demand healthcare professions targeted to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other low-income individuals.

Partnerships among community based organizations, community colleges and other training providers, human service and workforce agencies, and employers are a key feature of the career pathway model for low-skilled adults. There is little evaluation research, however, to inform the field on how these networks and partnerships work in support of workforce initiatives. This paper provides one of the first efforts to evaluate organizational networks that support such efforts. The analysis is based primarily on survey data collected from 514 partner and stakeholder organizations involved in the 27 non-tribal HPOG programs, in addition to survey data from the programs and 116 employers these programs targeted for hiring participants, as well as nationally-representative data on labor markets and site visit data. The paper uses a number of methods, including formal network analysis, to describe the HPOG programs’ network structures and report on systems change from the perspective of partner and stakeholder organizations. The findings highlight the roles that these organizations played in HPOG programming, describe their perceptions of HPOG programming and systems change resulting from the HPOG initiative, and discuss collaboration efforts on a wide set of measures. The findings are presented in the HPOG Systems Change Analysis report, available summer 2015.