Ruth Bauer is the president of InsideTrack, a student success coaching nonprofit that has served over 3.6 million learners since 2001.
California faces a mounting caregiving crisis — one driven by a rapidly aging population, growing demand for long-term care and a shrinking workforce. Over the next decade, the state is set to experience a 59% spike in adults 65 and older, while the number of working-age adults stays nearly unchanged.
This will result in a record-high dependency ratio and introduce steep challenges to care workers, many of whom lack formal training in essential caregiving skills. As a result, the state is partnering with the Center for Caregiver Advancement to offer training programs at no cost to equip care workers with the skills needed to provide high-quality in-home care. The solution increases their earning potential while also alleviating many of the caregiving pressures.
It’s exactly the type of strategic partnership — one aimed at upskilling workers in service of solving a significant problem — that landed the nonprofit in an exciting new R&D innovation incubator called the “Coaching Lab.” It’s designed to test, evaluate and scale emerging practices that help more students complete their education and more workers thrive in their careers. The goal is to serve as a proving ground for funders, higher education leaders, workforce boards and training providers to see in action emerging services and approaches that deliver measurable results and can be replicated across communities.
Ideally, the lab will bridge the gap between innovation and evidence — providing the resources, expertise and infrastructure needed to pilot these initiatives.
At a time when learners and workers face mounting barriers to stability and economic progress, we have to innovate under pressure by experimenting, adapting quickly and finding ways to deliver greater impact with limited resources. Our aspiration is to evaluate promising approaches in real-world settings and accelerate the spread of solutions that work.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing our sector is that too many proven practices with the power to change lives stall out because they lack either the evidence or the funding to scale. But we’ve seen firsthand how coaching can help young adults persist and thrive. The lab aims to build on that kind of proven impact by creating an engine to test, refine, and grow solutions — elevating what works so that philanthropy, nonprofits, and policymakers can make data-driven decisions.
The launch comes as colleges face declining enrollment and financial uncertainty. It’s a time of rising demand for proven strategies to boost student persistence and workforce success — paired with growing uncertainty around both public and philanthropic investments in higher education and training.
According to a recent survey from the Lumina Foundation and Gallup, more than 40 percent of college students have considered stopping out within the past year. Meanwhile, workforce boards and training providers face mounting pressure to demonstrate measurable impact while serving populations experiencing growing economic hardship. Everyone is being asked to do more with less as federal and state funding tightens alongside growing demand for a reskilled workforce. We need solutions and we need them now.
Among some of the other initiatives included in the first round of the lab are a partnership between Cuyahoga County and the Ohio National Guard, funded by Maycomb Capital, which pairs scholarship benefits with up to four years of one-on-one success coaching to help Ohio National Guard members complete a certificate or degree. The problem it solves? In Ohio, just 24 percent of Army and Air National Guard members have an associate degree or higher.
Another initiative in the lab, backed by the Schultz Family Foundation and Pinterest, establishes the Youth Mental Health Corps to support youth mental health in schools while also giving more than 500 young adult on-ramps into behavioral health careers. The problem it solves? One hundred and twenty-two million Americans live in communities that lack mental health services.
The lab also includes an initiative in Kentucky aimed at helping adult learners earn degrees and credentials that lead to strong career opportunities, and an initiative from the workforce development board of Ventura County to expand career pathways via coaching.
Like other R&D incubators, the lab will help colleges, states, workforce boards, and nonprofits pilot strategies that improve persistence and completion and test and scale new approaches to worker success. At the end of the day, it’s about translating innovation into meaningful outcomes for learners, workers and communities.