A board convenes on the third floor of a government building off Shannon Place in Southeast Washington to determine which career pathways receive funding, which job training providers are approved, and whether the city’s workforce development program is truly benefiting the people it is meant to assist. The WIC, or DC Workforce Investment Council, is not featured in the evening news. However, the choices made in that room have an impact on training programs, American Job Centers, and the lives of locals attempting to gain stability in a challenging job market.
The private sector is intentionally given more weight in the council’s structure. Business executives make up the majority of its board, with representatives from nonprofit organizations, organized labor, and district government representatives joining them. This arrangement is not coincidental. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act incorporates the notion that workforce development should be employer-driven, meaning that hiring managers should have a significant influence over employee training. Although it occasionally raises the question of whose interests end up taking center stage when priorities clash, it is a reasonable premise.
Each of the four committees that make up the WIC board has a specific area of focus. High-level fiscal and policy decisions are made by the Executive Committee. Younger residents, who frequently fall between the cracks in workforce systems designed with adult job seekers in mind, are the focus of the Youth Committee’s programming. The more technical tasks, such as keeping an eye on performance indicators, assessing the Demand Occupation List, and determining which training providers qualify for public funding, are handled by the Economic and Workforce Alignment Committee. The Policy, Compliance, and Implementation Committee, on the other hand, closely monitors the actual operations of programs, such as the American Job Centers dispersed throughout the District.
The amount of governance architecture in a system that the majority of residents never directly interact with is difficult to ignore. The WIOA state plan is updated, committees convene, the board reviews, and somewhere along the line, an American Job Center resident learns if there is a funded training slot available in the field they are attempting to enter. Even though the person seated across from a career counselor cannot see it, there is a real connection between that moment and the boardroom.
The WIC workforce story has a different but related aspect that is worth considering. The I Matter Project, a five-year project supported by USDA’s WIC Workforce Development Initiative, focuses on the employees of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, a different WIC that provides nutrition services to low-income families nationwide. The project poses a straightforward question that is seldom addressed directly: what do WIC employees truly need to perform their jobs effectively? Through advisory boards and learning labs, the initiative wants WIC employees themselves to shape the solutions for staffing models, pay structures, and skill development. That is still unusual enough to be noteworthy.
The governance structure of the Workforce Investment Council and the drive to assist program delivery personnel both highlight the same fundamental conflict in American workforce policy. System design is a significant institutional endeavor. There is a discernible lack of commitment to supporting the individuals in charge of them. It’s safe to say that striking the correct balance is still a work in progress.
