What Over 50 Years And Over 200 Partners Has Taught Us
In collaboration with local government and educational agencies, workforce boards, community-based organizations, employer associations, and private foundations, New Ways to Work prepares youth for the future. By clarifying key issues and opportunities, New Ways builds powerful partnerships to improve employment, education, and well-being outcomes for young adults.
New Ways to Work has spent the past five-and-a-half decades working with policy makers, local leaders and youth practitioners to improve their practice, and to define better ways to connect organizations and leverage resources to prepare youth and young adults for the future.
New Ways to Work is committed to creating the opportunities that youth and young adults deserve.
What We Do & What We Know Is True
Our experience over the past five and half decades has allowed us to test new ideas, refine approaches and demonstrate what we now know to be true about what young people (and the institutions that serve them) need to be successful:
- All young people need access to comprehensive and connected services across a set of institutions and organizations over time.
- Programs, schools and public service agencies can’t do it alone. They need partners to provide the range of opportunities, services and support young people need to succeed – in the classroom, the workplace and in life.
- We need to better utilize all public and private resources through intentionally connected and comprehensive, locally-driven systems.
- Early and sequenced exposure to the workplace provides a solid foundation for today’s youth and young adults, and is critical to meeting the demands of our nation’s shifting economy.
- Local intermediaries and functional collaboratives are the key to sustaining the connections among schools, workplaces, community and government partners that result in improved outcomes for young people.
- Effective training and facilitated strategic processes that engage and support leadership, practitioners and policy-makers in designing and operating effective local youth-serving systems are key to ongoing success.
The Services New Ways to Work Provides
Explore our current services and recent related projects.
New Ways to Work Past and Current Work, Initiatives, and Partnerships
Community Systems Building
New Ways is currently engaged in the Bay Area Transition Age Youth Workforce Initiative to increase the number of foster, probation and homeless youth in workforce services, and enhancing the CA Opportunity Youth Network (COYN) through grants from Walter S. Johnson Foundation and Tipping Point.
Career Development and Education Initiatives
New Ways is working with several community organizations, including Per Scholas, Year Up, and Bridges from School to Work to enhance and implement youth employment initiatives. Past work includes: Diploma Plus, and Communities , Schools for Career Success in California, and
more.
Quality Work-based Learning Initiatives & Toolkit Development
New Ways has developed toolkits for the State of California School-to-Work Council, Kansas City Public Schools, The New York City Department of Education, and the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development Department.
Youth Workforce Development Initiatives
New Ways is the founder of CA Youth Ecology Corps, and current partnerships include Amity Foundation, National Apartment Association – Education Institute, and Shakespeare LA. Past partnerships include The California Youth Council Institute. New Ways was the lead facilitator for several community initiatives including: Youth at the Crossroads, Foster Youth Transition to Employment, the Foster Youth Transition Action Team Initiative, Improving Transition Outcomes for Youth with Disabilities, the San Francisco Mayor’s Transitional Youth Task Force facilitation.
Leadership
New Ways is led by Executive Direct or Robert Sainz who has a proven history of advocating for
vulnerable populations having recently concluded a 30-year public sector career. He is joined by a team of experienced and highly qualified consultants.