Five innovations were selected for the 2022 Reconstruct Challenge.
The national prize competition, hosted by Render in collaboration with Access Ventures and the UofL Health Equity Innovation Hub, is focusing on eliminating barriers to employment in the Louisville region in its second iteration. A total of $750,000 will be awarded through the challenge.
The five winners will each receive $100,000 from Access Ventures to implement their solutions in the Louisville and Southern Indiana region over the next 12-18 months. These organizations were showcased on Thursday at an event sponsored by Access Ventures and Metro United Way.
After this period, one of the five innovations will have the opportunity to receive an additional $250,000 to further scale.
“The Reconstruct Challenge is a tool that helps us think differently about the way we approach big community problems like barriers to employment," said Bryce Butler, managing director, Access Ventures, in a news release. "There isn't a silver bullet out there — these kinds of challenges require creativity to move the needle. These selected innovators represent new approaches to various aspects of the employment challenge, and we're looking forward to measuring their impact in our community over the next several years."
The winners are:
- Honest Jobs: (Denver, Colorado) Honest Jobs is the nation’s leading fair-chance employment platform, helping people with criminal records find better jobs faster.
- Leap Fund: (Brooklyn, New York) Leap Fund has built benefits cliff coaching program, which includes predicting individualized cliffs, and employers tools, to better understand the scope of a problem, and actually help employees avoid benefits cliffs altogether.
- Dollar For: (Vancouver, Washington) Dollar For eliminates medical debt by advocating for patients and enforcing hospital charity care policies.
- finEQUITY: (Brooklyn, New York) finEQUITY advances the financial futures of those impacted by long-term incarceration. It offers no-cost financial tools, such as credit building opportunities, to justice-impacted community members in order to ease access to employment, affordable housing, utilities, phone plans and more.
- FMS: (Louisville) Facilities Management Services employs 600 custodians in Metro Louisville. The biggest challenge applicants face to work at FMS is lack of accessible, affordable transportation. Working Your Way to Wheels is a multi-stakeholder strategy that aims to assist custodial workers with owning and maintaining their own vehicle.
Scott Koloms, president and CEO of FMS, told me that a similar program, Working Your Way Home, was designed to enable home ownership, and over the last year and a half, the company has been able to make eight of its employees homeowners. FMS plans to offer that program to another 15 or so employees in the next year.
"That program inspired the program that ended up winning this award here that's called Working Your Way to Wheels," he said. "Our goal is to allow for 50 of our employees to have car ownership by the end of next year."
The "secret sauce" to making that happen is through partnerships, Koloms continued. FMS, which will use the grant dollars to offer matching funds for a down payment on a vehicle, is working with local insurance providers, lenders and financial literacy coaches, among other partners. A few of those partnerships are still forming, but he named Louisville Metro Government's Office of Financial Empowerment and Jefferson Community and Technical College.
FMS, a janitorial service company, employs 750 people between Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky, and Evansville and New Albany, Indiana. Koloms said the long-term vision is to open the Working Your Way to Wheels program to all of its employees before helping other employers start up their own programs.
"The idea is that we're going to do this so well that we're going to package it, with all of the partners on board, and offer it to other small and mid-sized businesses in the area so they can implement the same program because they are facing the same hiring challenges," he said.
Amanda Sendero, vice president of people at Honest Jobs, told me when someone gets released from incarceration, it takes them an average of 200 days to find a job. Honest Jobs, a job hosting platform similar to Indeed, is working to reduce that timeline by creating a place for employers to post jobs that are open to people with criminal records.
The company has about 1,000 employers using the platform already and 30,000 job seekers. It processes an average of 3,000 applications each month.
Melissa Dickerson, Honest Jobs' chief of staff, said the $100,000 will enable the company to expand its services to Louisville with a local hire.
"That local person will be dedicated to finding employers who are fair chance, to connecting with business to organizations and businesses in the community, and helping us to just provide more opportunities for employment for people with criminal records," she said. "We did it in Denver, we'd like to do it in other places. So Louisville is our next focus area and having this grant allowed us to come here and really blow it out of the water."
Over 50 organizations submitted for this iteration of the Reconstruct Challenge and each proposal was reviewed by an evaluation panel, composed of national and local stakeholders, the release continued. The top 12 finalists were then interviewed by a selection committee who chose the five grant recipients based on four qualities: impactful, scalable, enduring and feasible.
The innovations will launch next month in Louisville and Southern Indiana.
