This report includes 23 practices to embed racial equity into your organization by developing, recognizing, and promoting frontline employees of color. Employers and practitioners can use this resource to structure and implement equitable policies for advancement to strengthen their business.

This resource provides guidance on language to help organizations more effectively communicate about racial economic equity. This document includes definitions of important terms and concepts for understanding racial economic equity, the racial wealth divide, and racial wealth equity as well as design guidelines on visually depicting diverse communities. This guide has relevance for a range of organizations interested in communicating about the important link between racial equity and job quality for those who want to advance racial equity.

Building a race equity culture can support organizations’ capacity to reduce racial disparities within their organizations and through their external strategies. This resource is designed to support practitioners to strengthen internal organizational culture as it relates to race equity. This publication can support a range of organizations to prioritize racial equity, embed equitable practices, and monitor outcomes.

The Employee Ownership Toolkit is a step-by-step guide for transitioning a company to cooperative ownership. The experience of South Mountain Company is described in detail, helping bridge the gap between theory and practice. Definitions of certain technical terms, particularly concerning finance, are also provided.

This webpage offers guidance on how to protect the health and safety of domestic workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Included are resources specifically for different domestic work occupations, such as housecleaners, nannies, and caregivers. There is guidance on how to speak with employers about returning to work and sample agreements between workers and employers to ensure safety in the workplace. These resources are geared towards domestic workers, but can also be used by worker advocates, workforce professionals, and employers to support worker safety–and can be applied to public health emergencies beyond COVID-19.

Before the pandemic, food and drinking establishments were an important part of the business fabric in communities across the country, and these businesses employed over 12 million people. But as food businesses lost customers during the crisis, millions of restaurant workers lost work. Food and drinking establishments have been an important source of employment for women and people of color, who are over-represented in the industry’s lower paid occupations.

In this conversation we talk about ideas for business practices, public policies, and partnerships, including an innovative public/private effort that’s addressing the interests that workers, small business owners, and communities all share in a thriving restaurant sector.

The pandemic placed the economy into a sickening tailspin. Did it also catalyze advantageous changes that expand opportunity and equity? Companies can share economic success through various models. Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), worker cooperatives, profit sharing, and forms of equity participation all present different opportunities to share that success. Employee-owned firms have also shown strong resilience through economic downturns and often use management approaches that lead to higher-quality jobs. How can these strategies help shape economic rebuilding? How can they address the inequalities and inequities that have divided our society and help us build a more resilient economy?

In this event, Eduardo Porter discusses his book, American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, in which he examines “how racial animus has stunted the development of nearly every institution crucial for a healthy society, including organized labor, public education, and the social safety net.” This book talk with the Eduardo discusses how we arrived here and the lessons history holds for finding a better way forward.

For many workers, jobs with low-wages and limited benefits left them uniquely vulnerable during the pandemic. This webinar features leaders from organizations that have worked with vulnerable workers to discuss how they are adjusting to new needs and challenges. This conversation features opening remarks from Dan Porterfield, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, and a focus on strategies for strengthening supervision of frontline workers. Quality supervision is a key element of a quality job, and supervisors can play key roles in supporting frontline workers. We heard about two organizations’ work with companies on supervision of frontline workers and how that work changed in the context of COVID-19.

Workforce development has long recognized the importance of a quality job to a person’s life and has well-developed tools and strategies for preparing people to succeed in quality jobs. But what role can workforce leaders play on the demand side of the labor market equation to improve the odds that a quality job will be there for a qualified worker?

This conversation explores how workforce development leaders can encourage improved job quality in their communities, hearing from innovators from different types of organizations and engaged in very different local labor markets. We consider the role workforce organizations play with respect to influencing public systems, incentivizing changed business practice, empowering worker constituencies, and leveraging their own organizational practices.