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STRIVE helps underserved job-seekers overcome employment barriers

This nonprofit is changing the lives of young workers through comprehensive career-development courses focusing on soft skills.
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Solving the skills gap problem involves finding local solutions. New York nonprofit STRIVE has been doing just that since the 1980s and is now in more than 20 cities across the country. STRIVE focuses on underserved communities, working with local employers to find out the skills they need in their open jobs.

Image – Strive New York

The nonprofit sets up a very specific training program to arm job-seekers with those skills, creating a strong talent pipeline that helps the workers, businesses and the community thrive.

STRIVE’s Career Pathway program begins with a four-week job CORE readiness workshop including classes in interpersonal skills, problem-solving, workplace ethics, resume writing and career planning. After that, participants move on the skills training phase, which results in industry-recognized credentials in growth industries such as healthcare, construction and food service. The final phase is working with the local businesses to help get the job-seeker hired.

Some have taken the training that STRIVE is providing and turned around their lives. One graduate who had spent nearly ten years in prison used what he learned in the STRIVE Fresh Start program to open his own business.

The nonprofit’s newest program, Future Leaders, is aimed at people 24 years old and under with arrest records and living in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods. Having an arrest record makes it more difficult to find work. STRIVE teaches its CORE workshop and, as in the other programs, trains and places participants in local jobs.

RELATED STORY: The U.S. has 6.7 million job openings. Why aren’t they being filled?

STRIVE’s goal is to build strong communities by helping residents obtain meaningful work. It believes that a job brings dignity, hope and a brighter future. STRIVE’s services are free to the jobseekers and more than 70,000 people have graduated from the program nationwide. Watch the following video to learn more about how STRIVE works with employers to source qualified job applicants.

Join the Conversation: Tell us what you think about STRIVE’s work to change the lives of individuals from underserved communities on our Facebook page.

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.