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History of Funding

Past awards are available to view here: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/skillstraining/SCC-Overview-and-Abstracts-rev.pdf

Additional Information

This grant program builds on the learnings from the four rounds of Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grants, which focused on capacity building at community colleges and large-scale systems change within community college consortia. TAACCCT evaluations provided many relevant insights into the investments and partnerships necessary to drive systems change to address the skills development and retraining needs of adult workers and learners, and these provide a foundation for the Strengthening Community Colleges grant program. This second round of Strengthening Community Colleges Training Grants builds on TAACCCT learnings and the first round of SCC investments, with a new focus on advancing equity by identifying and addressing equity gaps that directly or indirectly impact labor market outcomes for underrepresented and marginalized populations and communities. SCC2 aligns with the Biden-Harris Administration's vision to build community college capacity for in-demand skills training through strategic partnerships between industry, education, and the workforce system.

Ultimately, these grants should build the capacity of community colleges to equitably increase access to employment through educational and economic opportunity, by focusing on specific industry sectors and career pathways that will lead to skill development, rapid reskilling, and employment in quality jobs. These efforts will yield sustainable systems-level changes in education and training through collaboration between community colleges, employers and the public workforce development system that align education and training, work experiences, and industry-recognized credentials that lead to career growth.

SCC2 grants will focus on advancing equitable employment throughout the grant program, specifically equity gaps in opportunities for credentials, and equity in employment outcomes for the participants served by the community colleges, and may also include increasing the capacity of the colleges to make sustainable shifts in how they support equitable employment.

To ensure that SCC2 projects accomplish the goals stated above in Section I.A., the Department will fund applications that address, in their proposals, the following SCC Core Elements.

1. Core Element 1: Advancing Equity In determining a project design for this Announcement, applicants will need to ask themselves, What are the critical equity gaps that we want to target that impact both employment and the education that supports employment opportunities – and why? What practices, policies, and leadership changes are needed to increase our capacity to support equitable employment? What does the available evidence say about interventions that are likely to be successful for advancing equity?" Pursuant to Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, the term equity” means the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.”
2. Core Element 2: Accelerated Career Pathways In determining a project design for this Announcement, applicants will also need to ask themselves, Given our local context, which career pathway(s), and which enhancement strategies to accelerate movement along those career pathways, offer the best opportunities to address the identified equity gaps for improved employment outcomes? What does the available evidence say about the strategies that will more likely lead to successful outcomes?" Career pathway programs offer a clear sequence of education coursework and/or training credentials aligned with employer-validated work readiness standards and competencies, and integrate academic and occupational skills training. A career pathway system is the cohesive combination of partnerships, resources and funding, policies, data, and shared accountability measures that support the development, quality, scaling, and dynamic sustainability of career pathways and programs for youth and adults. To realize the potential of career pathways, stakeholders must work simultaneously and iteratively on both the programmatic and systems levels.
3. Core Element 3: Results-Driven Project Design In determining a project design for this Announcement, applicants will need to ask themselves, How can we design and implement a work plan to support results-driven outcomes and report findings?" A results-driven project design connects the needs that a project intends to address, its theory of change based on available evidence, and its proposed evidence-informed activities to a framework that explicitly lays out the logical connections for how the project will deliver the intended outcomes, including the required performance outcomes and additional outcomes of interest. By requiring that applicants follow a results-driven process for designing and managing their grant-funded projects, this FOA seeks to ensure that applicants and their project partners identify the data they will need to validate the project's design. This approach gives successful applicants a process to more systemically assess their progress and performance, and the opportunity to learn from and improve their projects over time based on data that their projects generate over the life of their grant periods.
4. Core Element 4: Sustainable Systems Change In determining a project design for this Announcement, applicants will need to ask themselves, How can we ensure that the systems changes we make are institutionalized and sustained over the long term? What does the available evidence say about the strategies that will more likely lead to sustainable systems change?” Systems change with respect to workforce development refers to efforts and initiatives that go beyond providing direct services to individual jobseekers and aim to transform how organizations effectively support employers and the workforce” (Bernstein & Martin-Caughey 2017, p. 1, Appendix E). A key lesson from TAACCCT is that embedding collaboration as a core element of an initiative” can help community colleges implement their systems change and capacity-building efforts (Eyster et al. 2020, p. xiii, Appendix B). Primary stakeholders in this collaboration include industry and employers, the public workforce development system, other institutions of higher education, unions, labor-management organizations, community-based organizations, and the departments and offices internal to community colleges.

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