Employment Services

Work and the ability to find or transition to good jobs is one of most important aspects of a family’s financial security. The employment services offered at the centers are the main platform on which most of the CWFs are based, and might include basic job readiness soft-skills training, hard skills training, and/or career advancement. The employment component of the CWFs often serves as an entry point through which clients participate in financial coaching and public benefits access.

Financial Education and Coaching

While each local LISC site varies in its implementation of financial education and coaching, the core model is similar across sites. CWFs offer three kinds of services to all clients: 1) group-based financial education, which provides general information on a range of topics, such as budgeting, and developing savings plans; 2) one-on-one financial counseling, which focuses on solving specific problems or crises, such as high debt or eviction prevention; and 3) one-on-one financial coaching, which is the primary focus of long-term financial intervention and will be described in more detail below. CWF staff also connect clients to mainstream financial service providers and free tax preparation services.

Economic stability is something that families strive to achieve over the course of a lifetime of working and saving money and LISC believes financial coaching is the best technique to help clients reach their financial goals. As noted by Michael Collins in a 2007 study for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the goal of the coach is to help clients achieve long-term economic stability by changing financial behavior over time. The financial coaches are versatile enough to help clients fix an immediate problem, but that is not the primary goal of the coach. Rather, the coach’s role is to help the client create a vision of financial stability, to develop goals that are critical to realizing that vision, and to hold the client accountable for achieving those goals. The coach’s ongoing encouragement and support helps to make it easier for clients to stay on a consistent asset building course that leads to economic stability.

Public Benefits Access

In most cases CWF clients are employed, but their wages and benefits are insufficient to meet their daily needs. Public benefits play a key role in helping working families pay for their everyday living expenses. While individuals may want to access public benefits, the system itself is cumbersome and complicated, making it difficult for working people to access the benefits for which they qualify. Having a place that helps people understand what they qualify for, complete the application correctly, and is open during non-business hours is important in order for working people to receive the benefits for which they qualify. A recent study from SEEDCO, shows that people receiving public benefits as a supplement to their working income are 30 percent more likely to stay employed. This underscores the importance of integrating public benefits access with employment services and, further, financial education and coaching.

Bundling of Services

One-stop centers have been a staple of the publicly funded workforce system for many years. They offer a variety of services and allow individuals to choose for themselves what they want to receive and clients are not expected to use more than one service. The Centers for Working Families takes the one-stop concept and takes it one step further. The premise is that clients who receive more than one service are more likely to achieve economic stability. The bundling of services is very deliberate and happens through the design of the program, staff interactions and data collection so that the majority of clients receive not only employment counseling but financial education and coaching as well as public benefits access.

Client Outcome Tracking

In order to determine the success of CWF clients a data tracking system is utilized that measures the types and quantity of service a client received and how successful is a client in achieving economic stability outcomes such as employment tenure and credit score improvements. Since many economic stability outcomes are achieved over time, CWFs value working with clients over a longer period of time and thus the data tracking is conducted in a way where service provision and outcomes are followed over a period of years and progress can be measured.