Displaced workers are a critical and growing concern in our rapidly changing economy; the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic challenges have exacerbated these issues. PROPEL Center researchers are developing a proactive knowledge- and field-building agenda to discover and significantly expand the availability of effective supports for displaced workers. ...
The PROPEL Center at AIR partnered with Year Up United, a national workforce development organization dedicated to expanding access to economic opportunity for young adults, to co-develop assessment tools that can more systematically identify students’ workplace readiness skills and needs.
Per Scholas has a proven track record of lifting the earnings of individual workers over the long-term. Per Scholas is a no-cost occupational skills training program that has prepared and matched more than 15,000 graduates for information technology (IT) and other tech careers with leading employers nationwide. AIR and Per ...
City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) and its Centers of Excellence model provide a unique and promising opportunity to blend the strategies of effective community college workforce training and best-in-class, stand-alone sectoral programs to help millions of Americans gain the skills needed to access livable wage jobs. PROPEL Center researchers are seeking ...
Abdullah Ferdous's primary responsibilities at AIR include managing and implementing technical assistance projects related to assessment, evaluation, and capacity building. He supports Ministries of Educations with designing and implementing national literacy and numeracy assessments and strengthening their systems through capacity-building activities.Dr. Ferdous also serves on the Global Reading Network Steering ...
Jack Jordan's primary responsibilities include leading the analytics support for the Convergence HQIC contract including designing the process to deliver data to stakeholders in dashboards, perform analysis to find leverage points, and use that data to advise Convergence HQIC improvement advisors on strategy. Jordan also supports contracts to deliver partially ...
The pandemic affected nearly all sectors of society, including some of the areas where AIR focuses its work—education, workforce development, and health. On the two-year anniversary of this historic moment, we asked our experts to reflect on the pandemic’s unexpected consequences, adaptations that may outlast the pandemic itself, and any ...
Karen Pittman is a founding partner of Knowledge to Power Catalysts, a new consulting firm established to increase the rate at which leaders transform knowledge into power to change the odds that all children and youth will thrive. She is the co-founder and former president and CEO of the Forum ...
Rashawn Ray is vice president and executive director of the AIR Opportunity Fund, a 10-year, $225M initiative focused on addressing persistent disparities in education, workforce development, public safety, and community health. The Fund partners with communities and organizations to create evidence-informed, locally driven solutions that expand opportunity and improve lives. ...
Sudhanshu (Ashu) Handa is a professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an economist working on poverty, health, and human development in sub-Saharan Africa. He is the co-principal investigator of The Transfer Project, which seeks to understand the broad effects of government-sponsored cash transfer ...
