Better Careers

Connecting Californians to good jobs with family-sustaining wages and advancement opportunities

Everyone should have the access and opportunity to earn a family-sustaining wage and advance in their career. Yet too many workforce efforts in our state fail to connect jobseekers and workers paid low wages to good jobs that provide higher pay, benefits, and clear career paths.

Better Careers believes that Californians whose talent and labor have been undervalued can and should thrive in our ever-changing economy. The initiative aims to build a more equitable and inclusive workforce system by investing in efforts to prepare and connect low-income workers and jobseekers to quality jobs, improve workforce development services – and support what already works, and remove racial and gender barriers to economic opportunity.

Better Careers’ values

These values guide the Better Careers team’s decisions and grantmaking. They reflect the initiative’s approach to making the workforce system in California, which serves more than one million workers in the state each year, more equitable and effective for low-wage workers and jobseekers whose talent and labor have been undervalued.

Fix work, not the worker

Too much within workforce development – the broad network of nonprofit, public sector, and for-profit organizations providing job training and access – focuses on individual attainment of skills and conveys that the exceptional achievement of the few in escaping systemic poverty somehow means that labor markets are not broken.

Love, not charity

Workforce development services can be a source of repair for the damage caused by years of often racially motivated divestment. Doing so means moving away from a bootstrap mentality, recognizing the fundamental value and agency of the people being served, and making meeting their needs – holistically – the rule not the exception.

Name the harm and take care not to do more of it

The U.S. was built on unpaid labor and continues to rely on underpaid labor, disproportionately that of women and people of color. At the same time, workforce development interventions have, at times, supported and exacerbated racial and gender segregation in work. Efforts to address this must start with recognizing it. 

Share power

We believe decisions are better and more just when those they impact have the power to inform, if not make, them. As grantmakers, this means involving more community members in our funding decisions. It also means supporting those who work in workforce development to deeply listen to and partner with those they serve.

Stories of progress, not tallies of placements

The incentives within the workforce development system can bias toward quick placements into low-quality jobs. We must do a better job of telling the story of what real progress looks like for people who have been failed by multiple systems.