The Importance of Partnerships in Implementing a Job Quality Strategy

The Importance of Partnerships in Implementing a Job Quality Strategy

An interview with Andrea Levy, Senior Program Manager at California Farmlink, and Janet Brugger, Business Navigator, Colorado Enterprise Fund

Lauren Starks, Director of Good Companies/Good Jobs at the Economic Opportunities Program, recently sat down with two Shared Success grantees—Andrea Levy, Senior Program Manager at California Farmlink, and  Janet Brugger, Business Navigator, Colorado Enterprise Fund—to discuss how they’ve worked with various public and private partners to recruit small businesses and provide technical assistance with an eye toward providing quality jobs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full podcast interview here. 

Lauren Starks: Thank you, Andrea and Janet, for joining our series of conversations on elevating job quality among small businesses. Today, we’ll be discussing how partnerships help expand opportunities for small businesses to build job quality into their work. Can you tell us more about your missions and how partnerships fit into that work? Janet, let’s start with you.

Janet Brugger: CEF’s mission is to serve as many people and small businesses as we can to provide loans that they can’t get anywhere else. We help them access the capital that they need in order to go into business or enter the next phase of their business. Partnerships are very valuable, especially with job quality. Often, agencies don’t know about our services, so we work in partnership with them to educate them on our services, especially on job quality for their constituency.

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That is a great insight – how you bring in small businesses that are interested in advancing job quality, but may not know where to start. Andrea, how does California FarmLink approach partnerships in your work?

Andrea Levy: California FarmLink works in several overarching areas: capital through loans, land access, and business education and technical assistance for farmers, ranchers, and fishers. Our partnerships are incredibly important in the community. We have a network of organizations doing this type of work in California, specifically because the farming community is so large there, but it’s also a very big state.

There are organizations doing similar work to us and also working with the same communities and some have overlapping clients, but sometimes people find us through different outlets, so one of the great things about partnerships is referrals. I also think a really important part is having open channels of communication, so we’re all partnering and understanding what the farmers and ranchers need from us, so we all align on what we want to offer, and how we’re talking about it through shared language. The other benefit of partnerships is getting access to different resources. We host workshops and classes, and other organizations host other workshops in areas that we don’t work in, so our clients like to make sure that they’re attending a diversity of educational workshops.

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I think you’re really lifting up something that I know a lot of organizations are thinking through, which is the intentionality of these partnerships and how they expand capacity, but also allow you to go deep and tailor the needs to communities, to the workers, to the businesses they’re serving. Janet, I know CEF works with a lot of community-based organizations. Would you share what that looks like?

JB: We work with many community-based organizations, and I have connections with a lot of those organizations from my previous experience. I approach them by asking them what they need, and I attend many of their events. Many times I lead workshops and bring in the job quality piece. Several organizations have expressed interest in partnering with us because they do not provide that one-to-one counseling and information. For example, we work with organizations such as the Colorado Springs Black Chamber of Commerce and VBOC (the Veterans Business Outreach Center). We’re having a conversation now with the Pikes Peak Workforce Center. Those are the populations that we want to reach, but they don’t know about us. When I speak about job quality at different events, they’re very interested. 

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We’re also hearing a lot about technical assistance needs in our work through Shared Success. Can you share more on technical assistance, especially how you develop resources and how you think about leveraging partners to offer curricula and workshops?

AL: Specifically for Shared Success, California FarmLink created a brand new program based on a previous program that is a 10-week course called the Resilerator. The new program is called the Employment Resilirator, which is focused on job quality. Building that course took us almost a year, and we brought in a lot of partners: we have consultants who have worked in this space who are farmers who built the curriculum; we work with the University of California Cooperative Agricultural Extension which provides the employment satisfaction survey; and then we have organizations that our farmers have alluded to in the past like Kitchen Table Advisors, Center for Land-Based Learning, Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA), and a plethora of other organizations that may not have necessarily started to do job quality until this point. In our area, I think folks are doing job quality work in very indirect ways, and this project has given us an opportunity to really focus on job quality. Now, farmers and ranchers and service providers are getting and sharing information. Additionally, some of our bigger partners are other farmers—our clients—and in addition to inviting them to take our class, we invite farmers to teach and consult because they hold this knowledge as well, doing the work on the ground. Those relationships take years to build trust.

JB: Similarly for us at Colorado Enterprise Fund, bringing in partners to help us develop the curriculum and deliver workshops is really important because they have the experience and knowledge that we may not have. They are the experts in their field, so they bring their knowledge and expertise to the workshops for our job quality participants. Lately, we’ve had some very beneficial workshops, such as with the Small Business Development Center (SBDC). I speak at many of their events, such as their women’s accelerator program. It’s a mutually valuable partnership where our clients receive beneficial information from both organizations.

Thank you for such a thoughtful conversation.