NINE STAR AND ITS PARTNERS
Partnerships with State and Workforce Development Agencies

Nine Star led the effort to establish a Job Center in an area of Anchorage with a high level of unemployment. It was the first organization to rent space in an abandoned mall in the heart of the Muldoon community. This was a new venture for Nine Star, but partners such as the Anchorage Municipal Workforce Investment Office, Alaska Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, Division of Employment Security, and the Division of Public Assistance soon joined the effort. These partners were ready when the federal Workforce Investment Act was passed, and they evolved into the Anchorage/Mat-Su Workforce Investment Board’s Operators Consortium.

The Operators Consortium manages the Job Centers and supports partnerships across many locations in the Anchorage/Mat-Su region. The Consortium includes such other major partners as the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, Senior Community Service Employment Program, the Anchorage Literacy Project, and the Human Resources Company. Nine Star, ALP, and HRC jointly staff several grant-funded initiatives, including EL Civics and Northwest LINCS. EL Civics combines English literacy education with curriculum that encourages learners to become fully participating citizens, community members, and civic leaders. The program covers the basics of citizenship: the roles of citizens, immigration procedures, and American history and culture. (For a brief article on EL Civics, go to http://www-tcall.tamu.edu/newsletr/win02/win02a.htm.) LINCS is a web-based resource supported by the National Institute for Literacy to provide a communications network for those involved in adult and family literacy. Nine Star serves as the LINCS state specialist for Alaska and, with its partners, helped gather information for the site.

In addition to services such as vocational rehabilitation, welfare-to-work training, and family support in addressing child abuse issues, Nine Star, HRC, and their partners offer adult basic education, GED preparation, English literacy instruction, assessment, and academic counseling services at the Job Center. Staff note that their close relationships with partners allow them to understand how and when to refer clients. When making referrals, staff often walk clients directly to a specific staff member in another organization; they say they lose fewer clients that way.

Job Centers are located in several neighborhoods and communities around the Anchorage/Mat-Su region. Each offers a wide range of adult education, job search, counseling, and support services. The Job Centers focus primarily on employment services, and, in collaboration with Nine Star or HRC, offer English literacy, adult basic education, or GED instruction. Nine Star and HRC provide instructors, generally AmeriCorps or VISTA participants and other volunteers, and the Job Centers make classroom space available. Nine Star and its partners serve approximately 255 adults a year in Job Centers in the Anchorage/Mat-Su region.

To facilitate cross-agency collaboration, the partners sponsor a Job Centers Academy. The Academy is held four times a year to train staff from every agency to understand all of the available services. Local adult education providers and state agencies are invited to do presentations about their programs and services. Staff who have been trained at the Academy are better prepared to assess clients’ needs and know how to refer them to services. This Job Centers Academy program is so successful that the partners have won an Alaska Department of Labor grant to expand the program statewide.

As a result of its position in the Job Centers and its partnerships with the Alaska Commission on Aging and senior citizen centers, Nine Star has taken a leadership role in the Mature Alaskans Seeking Skills Training Program (MASST). MASST helps low-income clients over age 55 to build skills and find employment. Classes, a computer lab, assessment, and training help participants develop marketable skills (the MASST participant manual is available at http://labor.state.ak.us/masst/MASSTforms/ParticipantManual2008.pdf). The program also places participants in jobs or volunteer positions at nonprofit or public service agencies. MASST clients staff the reception desk at the Job Center in Muldoon, for example.

The Anchorage Senior Employment Program typically serves 65-80 clients a year, and the program’s success has resulted in waiting lists. Recently, the program placed as many people in a single month as are expected to be placed in a year, according to David Alexander, Nine Star’s director. Partner agencies, including the Palmer Senior Center and HRC, operate a similar program in the Mat-Su region, also with great success. In some years, the Mat-Su program has a 100 percent placement rate, according to Jeri Beall, the senior employment program coordinator.

Nine Star has a long history of collaboration with the Division of Public Assistance (DPA). Under contract to DPA, Nine Star provides case management services for more than 1,000 families receiving public assistance. For the DPA, contracting with Nine Star has produced better results, and the agency now sends the majority of its outsourced casework to Nine Star and its partners.

Nine Star also joined with DPA on a U.S. Department of Labor grant requiring that 70 percent of case management services be directed toward long-term clients on public assistance. To meet the grant requirements and address the most pressing community needs, Nine Star and DPA agreed that Nine Star would assist all long-term clients needing English literacy services. Nine Star administrators and staff decided to specialize in a hard-to-serve segment of Anchorage’s immigrant population, the Hmong. To understand the group’s needs and problems and to establish credibility within the Hmong community, Nine Star staff began attending community banquets and church events.

To serve this population effectively, Nine Star created the special position of junior case manager. The junior case managers, hired by Nine Star but trained by DPA, speak the Hmong language, understand the culture, work directly with clients on job searches, and provide referrals to job training and English literacy instruction, all under the oversight of senior case managers at DPA. This division of responsibility allowed Nine Star to hire case managers quickly; DPA’s hiring process is lengthy and complicated. Nine Star staff are now considered specialists in working with Southeast Asian clients. Stephanie Hoyt, field services manager for the Department of Health and Social Services, says that because of the collaboration with Nine Star, now their “clients can get what they need.” She adds, “Nonprofits have the flexibility to provide services in a way that state bureaucracies never can.”

One result of the partnership between Nine Star and DPA has been a change in the way DPA works with adult education providers and outside case managers. In the past, DPA would assign new clients to any available case manager in DPA, and Nine Star staff might have to coordinate with up to 60 DPA staff members. Now, one DPA team handles all Nine Star cases, a more efficient and effective arrangement for helping clients. As the DPA field services manager described this evolving relationship, “Familiarity breeds cooperation.”