Ecosystem Efforts: America Forward
Driving Social Innovation: Cross-Sector Coalition Expanding Access and Opportunity
America Forward recognizes the power of bringing together proximate leaders and leveraging collective advocacy to shape federal policies and drive resources toward innovative, effective solutions to our nation’s most pressing social challenges. The America Forward Coalition includes over 100 social innovation organizations operating in all 50 states and over 15,000 communities nationwide. For more than 15 years, we’ve worked together to share insights from communities and advocate for public policies that promote fairness and focus on meaningful outcomes for students, workers, families, and communities. Our efforts have secured nearly $2 billion in federal funding for scalable, evidence-based reforms and advanced critical policies to improve education, expand economic mobility, and strengthen our democracy. Additionally, this year, the America Forward Advocacy Institute offered seven training sessions for our Coalition organizations, helping members become better, bolder advocates. These sessions supported America Forward Coalition members in building their policy and advocacy capacity. Our trainings focused on elevating proximate voices in advocacy and leveraging communications for the 2024 election.
In 2024, the America Forward Coalition led an advocacy campaign to ensure our nation’s workforce development system invests in innovative, equitable, effective approaches. In April, the U.S. House of Representatives passed A Stronger Workforce for America Act, a comprehensive and bipartisan reauthorization of the central federal workforce legislation, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). The Act incorporated many America Forward priorities, including fundamental reforms to shift the system’s focus to equitable improvement over compliance, to improve transparency, to support evidence-based strategies, and to cut red tape for workforce system providers and participants. At the administrative level, the Department of Labor embarked on a new effort to strengthen the workforce data ecosystem in response to advocacy by a group of national stakeholders co-led by America Forward.
America Forward also stood at the forefront of efforts to transform how the federal government supports social innovation. Our Coalition led successful efforts to reinvigorate and relaunch the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA) $100 million pay-for-success fund at the Treasury Department, building on our collective efforts to create the program in 2018. We published an in-depth white paper, Unlocking Innovation, recommending ways to build on the $10+ billion that federal evidence funds have invested in research, improvement, and scale-up of evidence-based practices led by social entrepreneurs – including creating more diverse pathways for participation. We championed the creation of a new workforce evidence fund as proposed by Senator Michael Bennet’s Better Jobs Act, and shaped the U.S. Department of Education’s implementation of the new Postsecondary Student Success Grants program.
On the education front this year, America Forward partnered with Pinterest, the Schultz Family Foundation, and AmeriCorps to launch the Youth Mental Health Corps (YMHC) in eleven states around the country. Building on America Forward’s long-standing advocacy for support of national service, the YMHC creates a service corps of young adults to work in schools and community centers, provide support to students, and address the urgent youth mental health crisis. At the same time, the newly launched YMHC creates pathways for Corps members into behavioral health careers in underserved communities. YMHC showcases how innovative, cross-sector collaboration can address urgent needs and promote long-term growth.
Finally, leading an advocacy coalition during an election year gave America Forward a unique opportunity to lift up our key education, workforce, and other policy priorities with office seekers. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, America Forward released Imagine What’s Possible, a comprehensive set of policy recommendations for the next Administration and Congress. This document reflects the expertise of the proximate leaders and groundbreaking organizations that make up the America Forward Coalition, many of whom are also part of our New Profit Portfolio. It puts forward bold federal policy recommendations in the areas of economic mobility, social innovation, education, democracy, and community-building. These policies are essential to supporting students, workers, families, and communities. Serving as examples of the M.I.C.™ in action, the breakthrough ideas outlined in Imagine What’s Possible reflect a collective vision for systemic change, uniting diverse stakeholders around a shared commitment to moving all of America forward.
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America Forward is the nonpartisan policy initiative of New Profit. Our work remains strictly nonpartisan. We engage with policymakers and candidates from all political parties to ensure our advocacy efforts are inclusive and representative of diverse populations.