CWFA is Giving Away $15K

to CareerPathways Providers

Friday, April 22, 2022

Key Takeaways

 

About the CWFA $15K Raffle

Chicagoland CareerPathways is excited to partner with the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance (CWFA) on our second CareerPathways partner funding opportunity of the year! Through this opportunity, three CareerPathways providers will be randomly selected to receive a $5,000 unrestricted grant (for a total of $15,000 in grants for CareerPathways partners), and three additional CareerPathways providers will be randomly selected to present their work to an audience of funders at a CWFA-CareerPathways Funder Showcase.

For those who would like to learn more, CareerPathways is hosting an information session with more details, space for questions, and walkthroughs of the submission process on Monday, May 16, 2022. Click here to register.

Organizations will be randomly selected on Monday, June 6, 2022 and notified of selection within 24 hours. Selected organizations will have until Friday, June 10, 2022 to respond. If they do not respond within this time frame, a new organization will be randomly selected in their stead on Monday, June 13, 2022.

We hope that this raffle process is fun, easy, and helps support the great work that our partners are doing! We’re so excited to share this with you.

Where does this opportunity come from?

The Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance (CWFA) is a close partner of Chicagoland CareerPathways and a key supporter of an improved career training ecosystem throughout Chicagoland. The Progressive Pathways to Post-Secondary Success (“Pro Path”) Fund, in addition to being the current home of Chicagoland CareerPathways, is a group of funders aiming to support education and workforce development systems in the region. This funding opportunity is one way of supporting these systems: by building the capacity for your organization to do the great work that you are already doing, CWFA follows the mission of the Pro Path Fund to support the system helping young people and adult job-seekers navigate their career pathways.

CWFA also knows the difficulty that the typical RFP process can represent for many organizations. The goal of this opportunity is to make it as easy as possible for you to engage with CWFA and potentially obtain helpful, unrestricted funding. This is why CWFA and CareerPathways have decided to make this opportunity a raffle, rather than an application. There are no lengthy questions to answer or major preparations to make. All you need to do is make sure your program entries are active and complete, and you can submit your organization for consideration!

This opportunity also builds upon past success CWFA and CareerPathways have seen in hosting Funder Showcases. In these Showcases, a handful of career training providers listed in Chicagoland CareerPathways are invited to present their work to an audience of funders with relationships with CWFA who may be looking to support organizations like yours. By combining a direct funding opportunity and relationship building opportunities with other funders, we hope to increase the capacity of CareerPathways partners beyond the scope of this single opportunity.

What are the awards for raffle winners?

This raffle has two parts. The first selects three organizations from all submissions to each receive a $5,000 unrestricted grant (totaling $15,000 across grantees). These organizations will then be removed from the pool for the second drawing.

This second raffle is only open to those organizations which have at least one 2-star or one 3-star program entry in the CareerPathways system. (For more about this internal-facing star system, read the section How can I improve my odds of winning?) Three organizations will be selected from this submission pool to participate in a Funder Showcase in the third quarter of 2022.

This Funder Showcase will give each of the three selected organizations an opportunity to present their work to an audience of funders who may be interested in supporting programs like theirs. These funders may be focused on education, workforce development, or other priorities related to equitable economic growth. More details on the logistics of this Funder Showcase will be shared at the time of selection.

How do I know if I’m eligible for this opportunity?

My organization has an existing profile in the CareerPathways system.

All providers with existing CareerPathways accounts who log into the Provider Portal will see a button in the top-left of the page labeled “CWFA $15K Raffle”. Clicking this button will pull up a smaller window that will alert you as to your eligibility, and guide you through how you can obtain eligibility (or improve your odds of winning). All eligible organizations will meet the following criteria:

• The organization has at least 1 active program entry on the CareerPathways site. (You can see the status of each of your entries on the Provider Portal homepage. In the section labeled “Your Programs”, take a look at the table column labeled “Entry status”.)
• All of the organization’ active program entries have at least 1 star. (Read more about this internal-facing star system in the section How can I improve my odds of winning?)
• The organization has designated a funding contact in the Provider Portal. (You can edit this by clicking the button labeled “edit provider information” on the Portal homepage.)

That’s it! Once you meet those requirements, you’ll be able to submit your organization to the raffle. For more on how to submit your organization, see How does the submission process work?

My organization does not have an existing profile in the CareerPathways system.

If you have not yet joined the Chicagoland CareerPathways community, welcome! We can’t wait to connect with you. In order to create a profile in our system, fill out an application with some starting information. Once our team reads over an approves your initial application, you will receive a login to our Provider Portal. There, you can fill out your CareerPathways program entry, submit it for publication to the CareerPathways directory, and follow the steps outlined above to submit your organization to the CWFA $15K Raffle.

How can I improve my odds of being seleted?

About the star rating system

Improving your odds of winning the grant raffle or Showcase raffle relies on a new internal-facing system of entry ratings. Because this system is internal-facing, neither job-seekers nor funders are able to view the ratings, and it does not change the way in which your program entries display to either group.

These ratings don’t determine how “good” your programs are. We know that no one metric could ever convey the quality of the work that you do. Rather, these ratings determine how filled-out your program entry is. In other words, it measures how much information you have shared with us, with job-seekers, and with funders. It does not measure how “good” or “impressive” that information is, only that you have shared it.

The goal of using this rating system is for the CareerPathways team to see how much information we have on the programs in our system. That’s it! We don’t use this in any way other than evaluating the depth of our catalog, and we don’t plan to use it in any other way.

The chart below outlines the Star Rating System and how each program entry is rated.

Star Rating	Description
0 stars	Program entry is incomplete, or program entry is not active.
1 star	All required parts of program entry are complete including eligibility requirements, upcoming program cycles (or rolling admissions details), and at least one quality indicator.
2 stars	All of the above, and has listed prioritized populations, participant supports, and at least two total quality indicators.
3 stars	All of the above, and has added details about the way the program serves prioritized populations, details about the delivery of participant supports, and more than two total quality indicators.

How does my star rating impact my odds?

Every organization that is eligible for submission has between one and three submissions. Increasing your organization’s submissions increases your odds of being selected in the raffle. The number of submissions your organization has depends on the star ratings of your program entries, as outlined in the table below.

Number of Submissions	Description
0 submissions	Organization is not eligible for submission (see section How do I know if I’m eligible for this opportunity?)
1 submission	Organization is eligible for submission and all active program entries are rated 1 star.
2 submissions	Organization is eligible for submission and has at least one active program rated 2 stars.
3 submissions	Organization is eligible for submission and has at least one active program rated 3 stars.

How does the submission process work?

Submitting your organization to the raffle is simple. Log into the Provider Portal and click the button in the top-left corner labeled “CWFA $15K Raffle”. From there, the Portal will guide you through the submission process.

If you are not yet eligible for submission, the Portal will notify you and guide you through the steps you need to take to become eligible.

If you are eligible for submission, the Portal will tell you how many submissions you have, guide you through the steps you need to improve your odds of winning, and give you the chance to submit your organization to the raffle when you’re ready.

Once you’ve hit submit, your work is done! We will notify you if your organization is selected during either round of the raffle.

If you have any questions along the way, reach out to Becca Senatore, Directory Manager at [email protected].

I’m a funder. How can I partner with CareerPathways?

CareerPathways is always open to opportunities to connect interested funders with programs they are excited about. Click here to learn about the resources we offer our funder partners. If you have questions or would like to partner with us, reach out to Becca Senatore, Directory Manager, at [email protected]. We look forward to connecting with you!

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