To mark the three-year anniversary of the American Rescue Plan Act being signed into law, Lincoln Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird says the City will continue to invest in workforce development, including childcare training.
As part of the City’s Grow the Great Life Week, city officials spoke on Wednesday about how investments in job training and credentialing are helping Lincoln residents gain access to meaningful, financially secure careers and enabling local employers to hire with skilled labor.
“Our deployment of American Rescue Plan funding is growing Lincoln’s workforce and helping job seekers at all ages and stages of their careers,” Gaylor Baird says. “To date, these workforce investments have served more than 700 Lincoln residents, empowering them to learn new skills or to strengthen existing ones in high-demand career fields like childcare, health sciences, IT, manufacturing, and welding.
As a result of this investment in their training, Gaylor Baird says over 300 individuals have received a credential and 78 have reported an increase in their wages. She says the City will extend a workforce grant contract with Community Action for another two years to increase the number of trained and credentialed childcare workers.
Gaylor Baird also announced that the City will redirect $75,000 in the City’s ARPA funds allocated for workforce assistance to support ECHO Collective, which connects and empowers local refugee and immigrant women. The grant provides funding to enable another cohort of refugee and immigrant women to attend an intensive, four-month business education course.
The newly expanded and relocated American Job Center, supported by $1.5 million of the City’s ARPA funding, has been instrumental in providing vital resources and training opportunities to job seekers according says American Job Center Workforce Administrator Dylan Wren said.
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