Toward the end of 2020, Ann-Jannette Molinari, now 50, was barely scraping by. The Vancouver, Washington, mother was caring for her teenage daughter and her 80-year-old mother who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She was working part-time at Costco, making $20 an hour with no opportunity to work overtime—or even a full 40-hour week. In fact, her hours were being cut from 30 to 25.
Feeling defeated, Molinari went to WorkSource SW Washington, a nonprofit overseen by the local workforce board, to see if she could find a better opportunity. She told her caseworker she wanted to work for a trucking company. Over the next several weeks, with her caseworker’s guidance, Molinari took a month-long course to prepare for her commercial drivers license test, passed the test, and then began the job search.
She ultimately landed a position at United Salad Co., where she’s making $26 an hour and working full-time with the opportunity to earn overtime pay.
To help her get through the training period, WorkSource SW Washington paid the approximately $6,500 tuition for the course. It also gave her about $1K to take the test, an additional $1K a month while she looked for full-time work, and new work clothing.
Molinari says the help arrived at just the right time in her life.
Her caseworker “planted a seed of hope in me,” she says. “I had a hope that things were going to get better, and I didn’t have that before. I didn’t know what I was going to do. … She helped put me on a path to guaranteed success as long as I applied myself and I did the work.”
The Big Idea: Molinari is one of more than 4K people in Washington who have participated in the Economic Security for All (EcSA) program. EcSA is essentially a poverty reduction program that combines financial assistance and support services with career coaching to help low-income people improve their economic standing. The program aims to address the many different barriers that people face to getting better jobs, an issue that most of the country struggles to address.
It started as a creative use of a small portion of the funds the state receives through the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act—one of about two dozen states that are experimenting in some way. And it’s one of the leading examples of a state moving beyond check-the-box employment to addressing broader issues of poverty and skill development that keep people underemployed, according to research done by Harvard University.
By many measures, EcSA has been a success so far. What started as a modest program funded by WIOA has turned into a multimillion-dollar state-funded program. Nearly 90% of participants who complete the program attain their self-sufficiency goal, according to a December legislative report. And the majority start out the program making less than $10K per year, while the median income after exiting the program is almost $50K.
Measuring Poverty: Advocates say flexibility and time are two key reasons for EcSA’s success. While WIOA funds provide support for people with household incomes of up to 200% of the federal poverty line, EcSA now uses the University of Washington’s Self-Sufficiency Standard, which calculates living wages based on location, earned income, and unearned income. Given the high cost of living in some areas, like Seattle, EcSA enrolls some people making above the 200% threshold.
Miriam Halliday, CEO of Workforce Southwest Washington, which oversees the nonprofit that helped Molinari, says the program is different from many other workforce programs she’s seen. The state’s 12 workforce boards partner with the state’s Employment Security Department and more than 160 local community service providers.
“What we’ve been able to do with EcSA is different in that you can actually carry a participant year after year and continue to invest in them if they’re showing some sort of mark of improvement,” Halliday says. “Those that are in training, and it can be expensive training, go for a longer duration, like a two-year degree or three-year certificate program, and then go into employment.”
Removing Silos
In 2019, then-Gov. Jay Inslee used WIOA Governor’s Reserve Funds to launch EcSA in four pilot regions of Washington. The program was designed with input from a poverty reduction work group that talked directly with people living below 200% of the federal poverty line and asked them what they thought were the key issues with existing poverty reduction programs.
“What they heard is that basically everything is too siloed and too hard to navigate,” says John Traugott, executive director of the Washington Workforce Association. Traugott has been involved with EcSA since the beginning.
In response, staff at the local workforce boards help participants navigate the various services available to them. They can also use funds to directly pay participants to help with whatever financial stressors they are facing.
This is one reason EcSA stood out to the authors of a recent report from Harvard University’s Project on Workforce and the National Governors Association, which examined the creative ways states use WIOA funding.
“One piece that stood out to me is that it was cross-agency,” says Kerry McKittrick, co-director of the Harvard Project on Workforce and one of the report’s authors. “It was an effort to break down the silos between workforce and education and other social services so that people could have the full support they need.”
Career Coaching: After addressing their immediate financial concerns, EcSA participants get customized career plans based on their personal circumstances, needs, and regional demand for workers. Each participant has their own self-sufficiency goal, with the majority reaching it by the time they exit the program.
Partnering with community colleges and other local training providers, EcSA helps participants enroll in programs to earn skills, certificates, and degrees. In southwest Washington, high-demand jobs include advanced manufacturing, nursing, and transportation logistics.
“There’s this vetted list of training opportunities across the state that we look at every year as a local board, and it’s pretty comprehensive,” Halliday says. “Basically the career counselor sits down with the individual and they go over their different options, and then they decide based on costs and timing and all the things which one they are interested in doing.”
Business partnerships have also been crucial to success, says Mark Mattke, CEO of the Spokane Workforce Council. Mattke meets with hundreds of businesses each year to talk about their needs and how the board can support their talent pipelines, including with people coming through EcSA.
“We need to be working with business to help them understand what their needs are, build a relationship, and then connect them to people who we’re working with that can go into these jobs,” Mattke says. “Working both sides of the street, on the resident side and then on the business side, is important. These funds help us do that.”
Hurdles Ahead
After seeing the success of the program in the four pilot regions through the WIOA Governor’s Reserve Funds, the state of Washington started funding the program itself in 2022. It was a major win in helping the program become sustainable, but the funding may not last. Gov. Bob Ferguson announced in February that the state faces a projected budget shortfall of $15B. As a result, EcSA may face significant cuts.
“That would be a pretty big hit to the progress we’ve been making,” Traugott says.
With more than 800K people living in poverty in the state, EcSA has just scratched the surface.
Other hurdles to long-term success include issues like skyrocketing housing costs and the lack of affordable childcare that EcSA cannot fully address on its own, according to Cami Feek, commissioner of the Employment Security Department.
“There’s a real shortage of housing and strained access in Washington state,” Feek says. “Childcare is also a really difficult issue that’s not unique to Washington. …The lack of affordable housing and available childcare presents a real issue to families that are really trying to support themselves.”