$50 million for innovation

by: Rachel Berger

Fri Jul 23, 2010 at 12:26:18 PM EDT

The Social Innovation Fund, a White House initiative launched last year to invest $50 million dollars in innovative solutions to social challenges, announced its first round of grants this week. Not surprisingly, given the state of unemployment in the US, the biggest grant recipients were organizations that tackled joblessness through job training and workforce development. Good news for New Yorkers: the Mayors Fund to Advance New York City got $5.7 million dollars.

Unfortunately for the SIF (and for the country), a fascinating and lengthy article in the NYTimes on Monday explored the impact that training programs have on joblessness and the results were pretty grim. Federally funded “workforce development” programs are mostly short term classes that teach the basics of spreadsheets, word processors, and resume development. The federal government invests over $4 billion dollars from different sources, including the stimulus package in workforce development. But, even before the Great Recession, a study conducted by the Labor Department concluded that this type of training had “small or nonexistent” impact. Kal v’homer (as they say in yeshiva) in our current economy.